Trump, Ozymandias, and the Hubris of Ambition

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in his 1817 poem, Ozymandias, the ancient king who called himself in the poem, the ” king of kings.” I was thinking about that poem as I watched the news that an AR-15-wielding, fellow MAGA Repugnican had shot at the convicted felon and wannabe-dictator Donald Trump at one of his hate rallies. Do you know the name of the person the shooter actually killed? Or the two people seriously wounded? Of course not, Trump made the media coverage all about him and his scratch and the sycophantic media followed suit. Anyone else is mere collateral damage to Trump.*

Not that I would condone such violence (and am rabidly anti-gun, especially against the assault weapons PoiLIEvre and our Canadian CONservatives want to be allowed to spread here so we become more USA-like in our mass shootings…), but from reading social media posts since the event, I suspect that many who watched the event silently cursed the poor aim of the shooter. Imagine, if you can, an election without him and his firehose of lies, insults, attacks, and disinformation. Imagine a return to honest, civil discourse.

Trump was so deeply affected by the attempted assassination that he was filmed playing on his Mar-a-Lardo golf course the next day. Not condoning the families of the victim, of course. Playing golf. It does make one question the authenticity of the event.

MAGA cultists, as expected, went full-conspiracy ballistic over the shooting, raging on social media spreading a myriad of conspiracies, disinformation, lies blaming it on Biden, Democrats, the non-MAGA media, Congress, Antifa, the Deep State, the unbelievers in their own party, aliens, and witches. Well, maybe not yet for the latter two suspects, but we expect the low-IQ MT Greene and Lauren Boebert to make such claims, if they haven’t already.

Everyone and everything was blamed by MAGA trolls except the violence they themselves have condoned, encouraged, and enacted under Trump (the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and the mob’s attempted assassination of Mike Pence, for example). And, of course, others responded with alternate conspiracies, claiming the event was staged, as Wired noted:

Two of the platform’s trending topics after the shooting were “staged” and “false flag,” both of which centered on the baseless conspiracy that Trump’s own campaign team orchestrated the attack to make the former president look like a hero. Similar conspiracies spread on all major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
“This is the most staged thing I’ve seen in a long time,” one X user wrote in a post viewed 1.6 million times. “He knows he’s going to lose the election, so he fakes this shit and shouts to the crowd to fight.”

But it is clear that MAGA Repugnicans are using this as their “Reichstag Fire” moment to create an environment of fear, rage, and retribution (just as promised in Trump’s Project 2025). The shooting may not have been staged, but the immediate MAGA ragefest and gaslighting that followed it almost instantly sure looked suspiciously prepared, as if they had hoped for just such a moment to unleash their vitriol.**

In the days following the shooting, David Frum wrote in The Atlantic:

The 2024 election was already shaping up as a symbolic contest between an elderly and weakening liberalism too frail and uncertain to protect itself and an authoritarian, reactionary movement ready to burst every barrier and trash every institution. To date, Trump has led only a minority of U.S. voters, but that minority’s passion and audacity have offset what it lacks in numbers. After the shooting, Trump and his backers hope to use the iconography of a bloody ear and face, raised fist, and call to “Fight!” to summon waverers to their cause of installing Trump as an anti-constitutional ruler, exempted from ordinary law by his allies on the Supreme Court.

And on Governing.com, Alan Greenblatt wrote,

Social media and cable coverage, however, immediately made it clear that the deadly attempt on Trump’s life would not be a shared occasion for grief and outrage, but rather an excuse for people to be angered along familiar and much-practiced lines. While elected officials mostly sang from the same book, others dissolved into the usual partisan disharmonies, with people on either side ascribing the worst possible motives to their opponents…
A majority of Americans no longer believe that elections can solve the nation’s most pressing problems, at least according to a survey released last month by the University of Chicago. For many, politics now is not a way to resolve differences, but to amplify them.

If anyone these days personifies the arrogant Ozymandias, it is the narcissistic serial liar and serial adulterer Trump. He stamps his name on everything, from tawdry, overpriced spray-painted running shoes ($399 USD plus shipping, handling, and a mandatory donation to pay his legal fees…), to made-in-China hats and cheap, low-quality bibles, to profitless airlines, wine, vodka, universities, mattresses, magazine, travel agencies, and steak. Most of which have failed spectacularly. But he continues to brand his real estate and golf courses, as if splashing his name about makes up for his abysmal failures as a business operator and everyone will conveniently forget his past and ongoing hustles and cons. Or that he has been convicted of crimes such as defamation, sexual assault, and tax fraud, with more indictments and trials coming.

What hubris. Most people, I trust, expect that in ten or twenty years his name will be nothing more than a stain on history. In fifty or a hundred years, he will be like John Wilkes Booth: a footnote in the textbooks about the enemies of democracy, but with the added note about his attempted insurrection to overthrow the elected government.

In the poem, the author looks from the remains of the statue and those carved self-aggrandizing words, to see a wasteland, not the legacy of a once-great king. There are no monuments to his greatness; just the broken statue with its head —  the “shattered visage” — lying separate. Shelley uses the terms “boundless and bare” and “lone and level” to describe the landscape around the fragments.

It reminded me a lot of Trump’s “empire”— a wasteland of flops, failures, bankruptcies, closures, scams, grifts, lawsuits, and fraud. But unlike the poet, the MAGA cultists don’t see the reality: they see their own, pseudo-religious mythology of a saviour and a success. Trump’s many, many, many ongoing grifts, cons, scams, lies, deceptions, and business failures are forgotten in their obsessive hero worship. MAGA cultists worship him, even though they cannot identify a single redeeming characteristic in his personality.***

Ozymandias
By Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Notes:

* The person who died was Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old former fire chief who used his body as a shield to protect both his wife and daughter from the bullets. At the time of this writing, Trump has not written or said a single word about the man killed, nor contacted the families to express his pseudo-sympathy. Are you surprised? Me, either. My condolences to the families. Even MAGA cultists don’t deserve this. Maybe Trump was too busy golfing the day after to show his respect.

** If you don’t know the reference to the Reichstag Fire, then you are sadly uninformed about history and politics and need remedial education before you vote. This is too important not to understand the implications. MAGA cultists will attempt to leverage this event into their dictatorship in November. Please read about it to properly understand how authoritarians and fascists use events — often of their own making — to create popular support by pretending they and the nation are under attack.

*** Melania, Trump’s trophy wife, recently proudly announced on social media she was paying Hervé Pierre Braillard to be her “personal stylist” at the exorbitant rate of $18,000 a month, not from her or Trump’s own money, but from the donations of MAGA cultists to the Save America PAC, “one of several committees financially aiding the Republican frontrunner’s reelection bid.” In 2023, media reported Braillard had received  “$108,000 as a ‘consultant’… Fox News reported in February that Mr Pierre was paid at least $132,000 by the PAC last year, also supposedly for “strategy consulting.” which is apparently what picking out what dress to wear is now called. In other words: she. too, is scamming the donors and the electorate by using their donations for personal pleasure. This scam, however, has been known for years, but Trump continues to allow it to happen because he can. And, after all, f*ck the donors. Let them eat cake.

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