High-Wire Trump Somersaults Again

The escape artist Harry Houdini made his fortune freeing himself from seemingly insuperable physical constraints before large audiences who paid to watch and wonder. In 1900, suspecting his act was fake, German police apprehended Houdini and forced him to perform an escape routine naked in front of 300 policemen after restraining him with “thumbscrews, finger locks, and five different hand and elbow irons.”¹ Within six minutes, Houdini had escaped the shackles — and the German police forever after by folding the episode into his advertising.

Today, a comparable escape artist has emerged in our midst in the pleasing contours of one Donald J. Trump.² Proof of his spectacular skills confronts us every single sad day: he’s president again. And what an extraordinary allez-oop he performed to get there! Before our very eyes, he wriggled out of the thousand-fingered grasp of numerous federal courts, snatched himself from the yawning jaws of prison, and scooted himself right back into the legal and financial stronghold of his dreams, the U.S. presidency, for a second term. But his real magic was in inducing us to do it for him. Knowing what the man was about, we conveyed him out of harm’s way right into the White House by voting for him. Again. Such is the power of the charms at Donald Trump’s command.

As we know from Trump’s disparagement of fallen veterans, he considers those who let social mores guide their behavior to be suckers.

Rather than breaking physical bonds that bind an individual as Houdini did and for which Trump’s unique anatomy might not serve, Trump has made his fame and fortune breaking ties that bind communities: social bonds, promises, contracts, conventions, protocol, allegiances, and common expectations not to mention good faith and his own word. As we know from his disparagement of fallen veterans, he considers those who let social mores guide their behavior to be suckers.

While unspoken bonds bind fellow citizens in a common social contract to establish a pacific and mutually prosperous community, we must not fault Trump by thinking he betrays that contract. He does not. He recognizes no fellow citizen. He has no peer. He stands alone, apart and above the others. All rules and obligations that crimp the style of others simply do not apply to him. Not being a party to their contract, he can hardly betray those who honor it or violate that contract.

And yet, plump, comfortable Trump is not indifferent to, but profits immensely from, the civil principles that guide the behavior of lower, slower human creatures. Those moral intangibles encumber what would have been his competition, while he roams freely to pluck unconstrained the fruits that hang exposed to his fleshy fingers. Nor does it stop there. He uses his booty to mock and extort obeisance from the bereft wanting their harvest back. Even as he scorns it, Trump is much obliged to democratic society. 

What a sorry story we would be reading if DJT did not reside among a population noted for its civility. One can only speculate how far Trump would have risen had he been reared among the society of savages Thomas Hobbes so compellingly described.³ That’s something we would like to know. That’s something we wouldn’t mind watching, Trump trying to rise above a tumult like that. As a matter fact, we wouldn’t mind seeing Trump cocooned Houdini-like in multiple straitjackets and suspended by the feet in a tank of liquid nitrogen and watch him get out of that one.

But, alas, Trump does live in a democratic society, ours as a matter of fact, which he is at pains to take apart. One can’t help but wonder what Trump would do with the carcass if he succeeded. We hope never to find out. But, lucky for us, he does not intend to dismember it completely. The steadfast taxpayer of democracy’s lower depths is to remain intact and continue to express allegiance through the regular and punctual remittance of taxes to the federal treasury, that is to say, to Trump himself. 

Everything Trump does is in his official capacity as president. How lucky. That means he’s immune from everything. The Supreme Court said so.

By getting himself elected president a second time, Trump achieved the position his stature requires: Ruling over a nation of law-abiding citizens whose laws do not apply to him. He always knew they didn’t, but the Supreme Court said so, too. They said everything he did in his official capacity as president is immune from criminal prosecution. And everything Trump does is in his official capacity as president. How lucky. That means he’s immune from everything. Breathing, for example, is a core official function, because it keeps him alive to carry out his other official functions: tweeting, flying to his golf resorts, jouncing along in his golf carts, shoving his little tees in the grass, smacking his golf balls to shoot off just anywhere they happen to go, pressing his knees together and holding himself pretty still to guide his delicate putts over his velvety green to pretty near that little hole: all really important official presidential functions because when he’s doing all that he’s actually focusing on what really matters: how to ambush, collect, and disappear enemies of state. And they happen to be everywhere. It takes a lot of thinking.

And seriously, what’s Trump there for but to keep the nation safe? The American people mandated him to do it because they know he’s the only one who can. The biggest surprise was to find the government itself was trying to block him from doing his job, which meant he had to get rid of them, too. They were saying he can’t deport state enemies because — get this — it’s against the law. They’re accusing him of violating free speech and due process and his oath of office⁴ and the Constitution and habeas corpus, whatever that is. They’d love it if they could get people thinking that. The big joke is they thought he wouldn’t be able to handle all the legal junk they’re slinging at him. But he can. He knows what the hell he’s doing. All he’s got to do is interpret all those rules and laws and rights and the Constitution, too, in a way no one ever thought of before,⁵ except the Supreme Court, that is. They do it all the time. And Trump would, too. Breaking out of Houdini’s milk can⁶ was nothing compared to Trump squirming through all this crap. And he’s winning, and he’s going to keep winning. And it’s getting easier every day, because every single day he’s disappearing a few more of them. 

Trump’s getting ready for his greatest stunt: getting himself elected for a third term. Lots of people want that, Trump told reporters in March, the third month of his term. Lots of people.

Now that he’s got his tights on, Trump’s getting ready for his greatest stunt: getting himself elected for a third term. Lots of people want that, Trump told reporters in March. Lots of people.

Some people say it’s illegal, maybe unconstitutional, Trump hinted. But there were “methods which you could do it,” which meant it’s okay. He wasn’t going to turn that somersault right away, of course. “Far too early to think about it,” he said. But he wants us thinking about it. It’s part of his method: throw down, not a gauntlet, but a smelly shoe and give us a good long time to get used to the stink. Once we do and our guard drops, Trump kicks that shoe right into our faces, pleased as all get-out to watch as we recoil, speechless, holding our bloodied noses.

That’s Trump magic. But can he pull it off again? Will he find a loophole in the Constitution to wriggle his fat through? Trump has always worked with a net and that net is the U.S. spectator, ahem, us. As long as he can keep us on the sidelines, craning our necks, watching, wondering, and waiting to see how he will pull this one off, he will. 

Some day in the not so distant future, it would be well if a courageous savant wised Trump up to the fact that Houdini was the greatest because he didn’t work with a net and gently encouraged Trump to try that. Just once.

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1. The stakes were high. Emperor Wilhelm II charged his police to “silence onstage criticism of the empire’s institutions and ideology,” spoof shows such as Houdini’s escape act included. Houdini understood the gravity of his arrest. He had been present when spiritualist Anna Rothe had been tried and convicted of fraud. She spent more than a year in prison. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/houdini-slander-trial/ ↩︎
2. Some maintain the “J” stands for Jesus. ↩︎
3. A frequently quoted remark of Thomas Hobbes describes man’s existence in a stateless society: “. . . there is continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”  ↩︎
4. Donald Trump was so excited during his second inauguration that he forgot to place his hand on the Bible his wife held out for him — completely invalidating her existence because that was the only reason she was there — inviting one and all to question whether Trump’s omission invalidated his oath as well. Even if we in the lower echelons figure, well, no, that didn’t invalidate anything, Trump knows full well it did and knows it doesn’t matter, either, because no one, but no one, took the trouble to point out that his hand was nowhere near that silly Bible. ↩︎
5. Loopholes are neat things to find in legal texts, and they’re everywhere. Any time he finds one, Trump stuffs himself right in and scoots through to wherever it takes him. He’s been crisscrossing American legal subterraneans all his life that way. Now he’s about to break new ground: finding the loophole that will make him president a third time legally and constitutionally. He knows it can be done because Loose Cannon Bannon said so. ↩︎
6. One of Harry Houdini’s amazing tricks involved escaping from a sealed milk can filled with water before he suffocated. Which he always did. Escape, that is. A scholarly note must be added that experts in the dairy industry have remarked that according to their best estimates Donald J. Trump wouldn’t even fit in a milk can. ↩︎