After 40 months and two weeks Donald Trump succeeded in being driven by car to the Capitol. The last time he attempted to get there was 6 January 2021. The mob was rampaging, ransacking offices and chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!” Trump was “irate”, according to the account of Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House aide, because he was not among the mob. “The president said something to the effect of, ‘I’m the effing president, take me up to the Capitol now.’” Hutchinson stands by her story of being told he had tried to grab the steering wheel and lunged at his driver.
If the US supreme court had not intervened to postpone Trump’s January 6 trial it would likely be proceeding today or perhaps even have already reached a verdict on his conspiracy, according to the indictment of the United States of America v Donald J Trump, “to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the federal government”.
But on Thursday, in this universe, under the shadow of the insurrectionist banners displayed by Samuel Alito, the associate justice, and Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, a key player in Trump’s January 6 scheme, Trump arrived as a conquering hero before the Republicans of the Congress, key members of whom were his confederates in his plot while others on that day raced to safe rooms, yet all now desperately rallying for party unity around their nominee against the rule of law.
Trump’s conviction a week earlier on 34 felonies in New York for business fraud to deceive the voters in the 2016 election excited Republican hysteria to embrace him to a frantic level. Johnson assembled the Republican members into an impromptu J6 Choir, after the imprisoned members of the Capitol mob whose violent crimes Trump has pledged to pardon, to serenade the beaming felon with a rendition of Happy Birthday, Mr President.
Lindsey Graham unsteadily took his Marilyn Monroe turn. He tweeted on X: “Happy Birthday to @realDonaldTrump. Your golf game has never been stronger, and America needs you now more than ever. Your best present will come in November when the American people elect you as our next President and Commander in Chief.” Then prodded by the Trump Stasi that he had neglected a crucial word, he sent a revised tweet: “Happy Birthday to President @realDonaldTrump.”
Unlike Graham, Monroe got it right from the start, and JFK was in fact the president. Unlike Monroe, a Georgia grand jury recommended Graham’s criminal indictment as a co-conspirator in Trump’s election fraud in the state, though he escaped when the prosecutor decided not to charge him. He’s been freed to genuflect another day.
One after another the Republicans came to bend the knee and offer tribute to their overlord. “No real Republican with any credibility in the party is still blaming him for January 6,” said JD Vance, a senator from Ohio, desperately seeking the vice-presidential nod. Vance, whose career has advanced by assuming multiple identities, now worships at the shrine of the one and only cult of personality.
Of course, inevitably and naturally, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, stood cheering behind Trump, despite the testimony in Trump’s trial of David Pecker, the publisher of the National Enquirer, about the deal he made with Trump not only for the “catch-and-kill” payoffs but also to print scurrilous falsehoods about his opponents, pointedly Cruz, whose father was smeared as an associate of JFK’s assassin. Trump once went out of his way to demean Cruz’s wife as unattractive. And there was Cruz furiously clapping as if his life depended on it and if he stopped he would be taken to the Lubyanka prison basement.
The Old Crow, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, performed a literally incredible act of willful amnesia, forgetting and forgiving everything. In a tone of barely restrained anger after January 6, he had called for Trump’s prosecution for his responsibility for the attack on the Capitol. Trump called him a “dumb son of a bitch”, a “stone cold loser”, and his wife, Elaine Chao, a member of Trump’s cabinet as Secretary of Transportation, who quit in protest on January 6, his “China loving wife, Coco Chow!”
Now, walking out of his meeting with Trump, McConnell eked out a rigid semblance of a smile, as he said: “We shook hands a few times. He got a lot of standing ovations. It was an entirely positive meeting. I can’t think of anything to tell you out of it that was negative.” He did not even recall Trump disparaging Milwaukee, the host city for the Republican National Convention, as “horrible”. Thus spake the institutionalist, the adult in the room.
Loss of memory about Trump, down to his coldly calculated refusal to acknowledge the Covid crisis because it would affect the stock market in the election year and his utter incompetence in handling the pandemic, is essential to his current poll standing. It is a form of mass aphasia masked as nostalgia that is at the core of Republican politics. Trump nostalgia is the political equivalent of long Covid, with similar symptoms of lack of mental focus and fatigue. McConnell, for his part, emerged from his meeting with Trump to act as though he had instantly suffered short-term memory loss about Trump’s weird meandering and perverse maundering in the room. He may reason that the greater Trump’s buffoonery, the more space for him to be the true hidden power, his immovable illusion.
In the entire history of the Congress, there has never been such a scene of wholesale self-abasement, humiliation and degradation. The Congress has been the site of countless indignities since its beginning. In the early 19th century there was a deadly duel. There was a shocking caning by a South Carolina congressman of the abolitionist senator Charles Sumner in 1856 on the floor of the Senate as he sat at his desk. There were other scuffles before the civil war. Even the Confederacy, while it existed, made no effort to build a cult of personality around Jefferson Davis.
This recent disgraceful and shameful episode glaringly stands as the diametric opposite example from the Republican congressional leaders who 50 years ago decided in the Watergate scandal that they must pressure Richard Nixon to resign. Until now, there has never been a more dishonorable spectacle than of members prostrating themselves before the cult of a criminal who has attempted to overthrow democracy and subvert the constitution – and who promises to complete his “retribution”.
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Since Trump’s conviction he has been obsessed with retribution and revenge, with crime and punishment. He intersperses his vindictive projections about the injuries he will inflict on his enemies with paranoid projections about the fate that awaits him. “Look, when this election is over, based on what they’ve done, I would have every right to go after them,” Trump told Dr Phil on his Fox News show.
At the same time, Trump wondered aloud at a Nevada rally about whether he would choose to be electrocuted on a sinking electric boat or eaten by a shark. Trump’s Thanatos fantasies are a Freudian field day. He ruminates about his impending death by the most violent and bloody means. Which will it be?
Contemplating his death by electrocution, he has substituted an electric boat for the electric chair, Old Sparky, which was in use to execute prisoners at Sing Sing prison in New York until 1963, and whose most famous victims were Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They were condemned as espionage agents stealing nuclear secrets for the Russians, and railroaded to the chair by the prosecutor, Roy Cohn, who became Trump’s lawyer and tutor in malice.
Now, Trump has been indicted for “felony violations of our national security laws”, including unlawful possession of nuclear secrets, and “participating in a conspiracy to obstruct justice”. The case may be bottled up by a Trump-appointed judge, Aileen Cannon, but Trump surely knows that the sentence for espionage in the past was a death sentence. Perhaps the Rosenbergs are the Rosebud of his electrocution-inspired night sweats. Through the ghost of Roy Cohn, he has entered a new phantasmagorical scene in Angels in America, Tony Kushner’s play in which Cohn, dying of Aids, is visited by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. In Trump’s nightmare, he’s the one walking the lonely mile to Old Sparky, except it’s an electric boat.
Imagining his death by sharks, Trump has returned to his long recurrent terror. “He is obsessed with sharks. Terrified of sharks,” Stormy Daniels told an interviewer. When she entered his hotel suite for their tryst, he had the television set tuned to a series called Shark Week. “He was like, ‘I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.’ He was like riveted. It’s so strange.” Now, the sharks are circling him. If he needs a bigger boat he must hope it will not be electric.
Before the Republicans in the Congress, Trump momentarily set aside his fear of death, perhaps in order not to dampen their adulation. The warm atmosphere instead stirred his sexual fantasies. In the meeting he spoke about his objects of desire, his previously undisclosed lust for Nancy Pelosi and abiding longing for Taylor Swift.
Basking in the idolization of the House Republicans, Trump, according to some people present, suddenly blurted, “Nancy Pelosi’s daughter is a whacko, her daughter told me if things were different Nancy and I would be perfect together, there’s an age difference though.” Then he reportedly expressed his wish for Taylor Swift to come to his side: “Why would she endorse this dope?” Trump wondered about his presumption that the liberal Swift would support Biden as she did in 2020.
His daydream about Pelosi was quickly smacked down by her daughter Christine Pelosi, who tweeted, “Speaking for all 4 Pelosi daughters – this is a LIE. His deceitful, deranged obsession with our mother is yet another reason Donald Trump is unwell, unhinged and unfit to step foot anywhere near her – or the White House.”
Pelosi’s relationship to Trump is one of unrelenting contempt and domination. He is the one dominated. At a meeting with Pelosi and other congressional leaders in October 2019 in the White House Cabinet Room, he had what she described as “a meltdown”, and she stood, pointed her finger at him, and the Democrats walked out. Trump tweeted back at her, “Nervous Nancy’s unhinged meltdown!”
After Trump delivered his State of the Union address months later, she stood at the podium ripping it into pieces and proclaiming she felt “liberated”. On January 6, during the mob attack, sequestered in her office, when she was told Trump wanted to come to the Capitol, she said, “If he comes, I’m going to punch him out. I’ve been waiting for this. For trespassing on the Capitol grounds, I’m going to punch him out. And I’m going to go to jail, and I’m going to be happy.”
But, as Stormy Daniels testified, Trump likes a stern hand; she has said he asked her to spank him with a rolled copy of Forbes magazine with his picture on it. Apart from the kinky spanking, she described his sexual technique as “textbook generic”. Now, he fantasizes about a romance with Pelosi, an older woman – “perfect together”.
His fantasy for a younger woman has fixated on Swift. Here he is his younger self, the leering creep whispering in the ear of Jeffrey Epstein as he points out this one or that one in a roomful of women dancing. Here he is, the proprietor of the Miss Teen USA and Miss Universe Pageant, walking in on naked contestants in the dressing room. “Well, I’ll tell you the funniest is that I’ll go backstage before a show,” Trump told Howard Stern on his radio show in 2005, “and everyone’s getting dressed and ready and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere. And I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it … You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. ‘Is everybody OK?’ And you see these incredible-looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that.”
Here was the earliest statement of his seductive technique he elaborated in the Access Hollywood tape that precipitated his “catch-and-kill” payoffs: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
“I think she’s beautiful – very beautiful!” Trump says about Swift. “I find her very beautiful. I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump,” he told a reporter. He wondered if Swift was “legitimately liberal” or it’s “just an act”. Worried she would choose Biden over him, he has sworn to wage a “holy war” against her. He is, he says about the most popular pop singer in the world, “more popular”. He anticipates rejection and plots revenge.
The giddy Republicans in the room, listening to the unfiltered sexual reveries of the adjudicated rapist in their midst, said nothing. They burst into song: “Happy Birthday, Mr President!”
***
The tableau of the authoritarian leader surrounded by his fawning followers had a distinctly foreign flavor, reminiscent of Soviet totalitarian art. The Republican members staged themselves like the commissars of the Politburo, smiling faces upturned to the Leader, in unison sustaining “stormy applause”, as the Soviet newspapers always interjected in transcripts of Stalin’s speeches.
“He was extremely gracious by the way. There was no score settling,” said Josh Hawley, a senator from Missouri, who had signaled his support to the mob on January 6 with a raised fist and later in the day was filmed running for cover inside the building.
It is fitting that the most apt commentary on the nature of the Republican meeting at the Capitol was written by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in his Memoirs about life in the bizarre court of Joseph Stalin: “Stalin found it interesting to watch the people around him get themselves into embarrassing and even disgraceful situations,” wrote Khrushchev. “Once Stalin made me dance the gopak before some top Party officers. I had to squat down on my haunches and kick out my heels. Later, I told Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan ‘when Stalin says dance, wise man dances.’”
After Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev became the first secretary of the Communist party and premier of the Soviet Union. At the 20th Party Congress, on 25 February 1956, he exposed and denounced Stalin’s crimes, which he attributed to a cult of personality. “Comrades, the cult of the individual acquired such monstrous size chiefly because Stalin himself, using all conceivable methods, supported the glorification of his own person,” Khrushchev stated to the stunned presidium.
He spoke of “the most dissolute flattery, an example of making a man into a godhead, of transforming him into an infallible sage, ‘the greatest leader’, ‘sublime strategist of all times and nations’. Finally no other words could be found with which to lift Stalin up to the heavens. We need not give here examples of the loathsome adulation …”
Khrushchev asked his fellow communists, “How could it be?” He blamed “those who are blinded and hopelessly hypnotized by the cult of the individual” for covering up Stalin’s crimes. “Comrades,” he announced, “in order not to repeat errors of the past, the central committee has declared itself resolutely against the cult of the individual. Comrades, we must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all …”
Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln: A Self-Made Man, Wrestling With His Angel and All the Powers of Earth. He is a Guardian US columnist
