This short story is a modern tale of un-dead horror. I won’t spoil exactly what type of monster is involved, but readers will probably be able to guess. There’s a clever twist on some classic mythology that enables three high school kids to do battle with an ancient evil.
There are elements of dark comedy as well as horror. And despite its brevity, Abbott gives us more than enough info to care about the characters, and even weaves in a sort of redemptive arc for one of them.
The text is supplemented with excellent illustrations by Kate Whitmore that provide a face to go with the name for several characters.
This is darker and gorier than Abbott’s other short story, Harvest, but both of them are very good in their own ways. There are plenty of references to classic horror stories and films in this one that fans of the genre will surely appreciate. All in all, a great short story for the Halloween season.
Let me start by saying I’m pretty tired of World War II films. There have been a lot of good ones, but there have been so many that at a certain point, I became exhausted with the period. It feels sometimes like the movie industry is barely aware of other times in history.
It’s understandable, of course; the period is full of drama, tragedy and fascinating stories. And the Nazis, with their horrific atrocities, cruel ideology, sinister iconography, and reputation for machine-like efficiency, are the perfect villains.
But all the same, I’ve seen so many movies about WWII that it takes a lot to convince me another one will contain something I haven’t seen before.
Jojo Rabbit is a film about a ten-year-old German boy named Johannes Betzler. Johannes is a fanatical believer in the Nazi party, even as the tide of war is turning against them. He is an enthusiastic member of the Hitler Youth, and his joy at learning how to fight for the Fatherland is only momentarily dampened when two older boys taunt him for his refusal to kill a rabbit in order to prove his devotion, which earns him the mocking nickname “Jojo Rabbit.”
He is consoled at this moment by his imaginary friend, to whom he often turns for encouragement: his ten-year-old mind’s idealized version of Adolf Hitler.
Imaginary Hitler is played primarily as a goofy, comical slapstick character, egging on Jojo’s fantasies of fighting glorious battles in a jovial, often nonsensical way. He seems like a lovable if rather silly father figure–something which Jojo craves since his own father is away in the war.
Unfortunately, taking his imaginary friend’s advice leads Jojo to an accident with a grenade, from which he needs a lengthy rehabilitation period. During this time, his mother Rosie more or less demands that the Hitler Youth leader now demoted to office work find odd jobs for her son while she is out working.
Jojo is assigned menial tasks such as distributing propaganda posters. One day, on coming home, he hears a noise from the bedroom that belonged to his now-deceased older sister and goes to investigate. He discovers a hidden panel in the wall, where there is a small nook concealing a teenaged Jewish girl named Elsa.
Jojo is terrified, and Elsa commands him not to tell his mother that he knows about her, threatening him with his own Hitler Youth dagger. Jojo retreats to his bedroom, to discuss with imaginary Hitler what to do about this existential threat.
Jojo, of course, believes completely in every anti-Semitic trope Nazi propaganda ever employed. And of course he would–it’s all he’s ever heard in his whole young life. However, since Elsa is older and stronger than he is, and since revealing that his mother is sheltering her would get her into trouble as well, Jojo is left with only one choice: to negotiate.
The result is a series of cautious interviews with Elsa, during which Jojo asks her various questions in an effort to learn the secrets of the people he so fears. Elsa at first is annoyed by his absurd, bigoted questions, and gives facetious answers, but slowly, the two form an almost sibling-like relationship.
Meanwhile, Jojo’s mother tries to manage things as best she can. In one touching scene, she and Jojo argue during dinner–she is gladdened by news of the Allies’ advance, Jojo is outraged at her disloyalty to the Reich. Jojo says he wishes his father were there, and, incensed, Rosie puts on his father’s Wehrmacht jacket, smears soot on her face like a beard, and gives a stern-but-loving impression of her husband.
This scene was fantastic. If you want a taste, you can see the beginning of it here. Prior to this, I’ve only seen Scarlett Johansson in action movies and one dreadful period drama. I was really impressed by her performance in this film, and this scene was the best example.
As the situation deteriorates further for Germany, things become more and more desperate. The film’s comedy mixes with horrific tragedy. The horrors of war, and of the Nazi government in particular, are not sugarcoated despite many of the film’s lighter elements. There is death and destruction and more than one heroic sacrifice. And at the end of the horror, Jojo and Elsa are faced with a very different world than either of them grew up in.
I’ve skipped over quite a lot in this review–there are some extremely interesting supporting characters in this film, such as the Hitler Youth leader Captain Klenzendorf and Jojo’s friend Yorki. Every performance in the film is terrific, but it would take quite a while to describe exactly why.
Normally, I would try to give them all their due, but this is another one of “those” reviews, where I need to go on at length and build up my case, so I’m not going to give you an analysis of every character on top of that. I’m sorry to do this to you twice in one week, but I just had to post this on the 75th anniversary of V-E Day.
What’s up with that? (If you’re expecting me to answer this straightforwardly like a normal person; I’m very sorry. You must be new here.)
Let’s start with the most basic question: what kind of film is it? It’s usually listed as a comedy-drama. Sometimes words like “war” or “dark comedy” or “satire” get thrown in as well.
So what’s the comedy part? Well, as I said, imaginary Hitler does a lot of silly, goofy, slapstick stuff. Many of Jojo’s lines are humorous, in the way they depict a naive child trying to seem mature and wise despite having been brainwashed with propaganda all his life. And the supporting characters do some comical things–such as Captain Klenzendorf’s ludicrously flamboyant redesign of the German uniform.
What’s the drama part? Well… it’s World War II. People get killed. Including–I’ll try not to spoil too much–good people. People we like, who don’t deserve it. This ain’t Hogan’s Heroes–the stakes feel real.
This definitely qualifies it as “dark comedy,” in the sense that the humor revolves around very non-humorous subjects. And most dark comedies are also usually satires.
For example, take the 2017 film, The Death of Stalin. It’s a slapstick comedy about the political struggle in the Soviet Union during the power vacuum created by… well, you’re smart; you can probably work out what event they were dealing with.
The point of mixing grim subjects like state-sanctioned murder and blatant propaganda with vulgar comedy in Death of Stalin is to underscore how fundamentally absurd the Soviet government was. The situation was bleak, but also laughable in the sheer illogical madness the lunatics in charge had created in their relentless pursuit of power.
There is something similar going on at times in Jojo Rabbit–maybe most obviously in the scene where the gestapo raids Jojo’s house, in which, despite the deadly seriousness of the situation, there is a bit of comic business where everyone must greet everyone else with a “Heil Hitler!”
But there’s more to the story here. After all, slapstick satires of Nazi Germany and its leadership are not exactly ground-breaking. For example, Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictatoror The Three Stooges’ You Nazty Spy! (both released in 1940) covered that concept pretty well.
The key lies in the opening credits, when we see footage of cheering crowds saluting the real Adolf Hitler, set to a German version of The Beatles’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” This segues to a scene of young children frolicking at the Hitler Youth camp. It looks almost pleasant; kids having a good time at summer camp–except for the extremely unsettling presence of swastika banners and SS lightning bolts.
I remember seeing a documentary once about Hitler’s rise to power, and the way his speeches and events attracted throngs of cheering supporters. From what I gather, during his ascent he really did have an almost rock star-like following, complete with groupies.
Hitler-as-lovable-imaginary-pal/celebrity… young children playing amid symbols that every modern audience instantly associates with death camps and bodies piled in ditches… what on Earth is this film saying? If it’s out to satirize Nazism, why make it look so benign; like some sort of fan club?
One of the most interesting aspects of crowd psychology is the observation that people in large groups are not as smart as any one of them is individually. The old saying about groupthink “none of us is as stupid as all of us” summarizes it well. Large groups of people are roughly as intelligent as children–naive, easily-swayed, and in search of a leader (parent) to guide them.
Understanding group psychology is critical to understanding Nazism and the other authoritarian movements of the early 20th century. Once you realize that while 1930s Germany may have been composed of many brilliant individual scientists, doctors, artists, designers, soldiers, thinkers, tradespeople, businesspersons etc., their collective psychology was about as easy to manipulate as a ten-year-old boy’s: anyone who seemed confident and strong and promised them grand adventures of glorious conquest while wearing cool, scary-looking uniforms could get plenty of buy-in from the people.
Obviously, that didn’t work on everyone. But it worked on enough people. Tragically.
We all know, now, that the Nazi upper-echelon was composed of people who were evil psychopaths. Armed with this knowledge, it is unsurprising that the policies they implemented were evil and insane. The student of history looks back and wonders, “Why didn’t the German people see what was happening?”
The answer is that the evil psychopaths were handed the levers of power with the consent of enough of the people. This is not because all of these people were as evil or insane as the men they ushered into power, but because they, in the child-like state induced by mob psychology, were all too eager to be deceived by the implausible ethno-nationalist fairy-tale they had been told.
The German philosopher Oswald Spengler said of Hitler, “We need a real hero, not a heroic tenor,” implying that Hitler was merely play-acting at being the kind of leader the country truly needed. Despite this, Spengler voted for him anyway–because he too, despite being a man of learning, was susceptible to ethno-nationalist flights of fancy. So it goes.
Put in patriarchal terms, Hitler was playing at the role of father to a nation that collectively wanted just such a figure. Hitler tried to present himself as following in the tradition of beloved strong leaders from Germany’s past, like Otto von Bismarck and especially Frederick the Great. But he wasn’t. Both Frederick and Bismarck were pragmatic administrators, not single-minded zealots willing to destroy their own nation in a doomed bid for martial glory.
I dislike allegorical interpretations as a rule, but I think it’s reasonable to read Jojo and the imaginary Hitler he creates to stand in for his absent father as a representation of the German national psyche at the time–believing in comforting lies rather than admitting the awful truth, until the appalling costs become too great and too personal to ignore.
My interpretation of the film is that it’s a dramatization of how a collective mental disease progresses. But collective anything is difficult to portray, and so young Jojo is the substitute for “the people”–a malleable mind representing herd psychology.
I said before the film was polarizing, and so you may well ask, did I love it or hate it?
Well, I loved it. I thought it was one of the best World War II films I’ve seen, because it offers an insight into just how such a horrific event could have happened. Usually Nazis in film are portrayed as nothing more than cardboard villains, but in this film, the truly sinister thing about Nazism is made apparent: the awful seductiveness of it. How it could so easily become normalized, especially among young people who knew nothing else.
But if you were expecting a true satirical comedy, I can see you would be disappointed. Even offended, perhaps. Because the objective of the film isn’t to satirize Nazism. It’s more of an examination of how Nazism took root, which is a very dark and uncomfortable subject, and it’s frankly not very much fun to think about, so they sprinkled in some jokes. Otherwise it would just get too damn dispiriting.
And whatever else may be said about Jojo Rabbit, it isn’t dispiriting. It ends on a hopeful, if bittersweet, note. The fever has broken, the film implies, and the children have a chance to build a better future.
Ah, interminable wars waged by hegemonic powers in the Middle East! They’ve been the cause of unfathomable amounts of human suffering for centuries, but on the other hand, we’ve gotten some really good movies out of them. Lawrence of Arabia, The Beast of War, The English Patient… maybe it is home to the graveyard of empires, but it sure is good for showbiz.
All right, maybe I’m being a bit cynical and snarky here, and that’s something I try to avoid doing, but Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a war comedy-drama, so there’s inevitably a gallows humor quality to it.
The film follows journalist Kim Baker, (Tina Fey) who quits her desk job writing news scripts to cover the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan.She’s embedded with the Marines, and, after initially being perceived as a bumbling civilian, gradually wins the respect of the unit and its commander, as well as veteran reporter, Tanya Vanderpoel. (Margot Robbie.)
Slowly, Baker gains the trust of important officials in the Afghan government, and, with the help of her guide and translator Fahim, (Christopher Abbott) gains a better understanding of their culture. She also starts a romantic relationship with journalist Iain MacKelpie (Martin Freeman) after breaking up with her stateside boyfriend.
Ultimately, Baker is forced to use all her wits, contacts, and knowledge of Afghan politics in order to save not only her career, but her lover’s life. And she is forced to come face-to-face with the horrors of war, as she interviews a young soldier badly-wounded after an IED attack.
This poster looks more like the kind of film I expected.
I went into this film with low expectations. I like Tina Fey and Margot Robbie, but wasn’t expecting it to be anything more than “Liz Lemon goes to Afghanistan.” And that’s what it seems like at first.
But over the second half, nuances emerge. The characters show unexpected depth and nuance. As I said, I’ve always liked Fey’s comedy, but I gained new respect for her skill as a dramatic actress. As the CineMuseFilms review put it, “she nailed her part” by not playing it solely for laughs. Billy Bob Thornton is great as the commanding Marine officer, and Christopher Abbott’s performance is absolutely fantastic. His character’s friendship with Baker is one of the highlights of the film—frankly, I found it to be the real emotional core of the story, much more so than the romance thread.
There’s one dialogue between Fahim and Baker in which he warns her that she’s becoming addicted to the adrenaline rush of mortal danger. It’s a moment of real tension in their friendship, and a dramatic turning point in the film.
I mention it because addiction to the thrill of war was also the theme of the film The Hurt Locker, which is about a bomb disposal squad in Iraq. That film won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2010. Personally, I found Whiskey Tango Foxtrot to be a vastly superior war film compared to TheHurt Locker, and this more economical portrayal of the same basic theme is only one of many reasons why.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot has humor, but never at the expense of characterization. It shows both the horror and the heroism that every war entails. It ended up being a far more thought-provoking film than I was expecting. I’m now curious to read the book on which it was based, The Taliban Shuffle by Kim Barker.
A week or two ago, I saw a social media post from somebody (sadly I can’t find it now, otherwise I’d give credit) saying when they were a child, they thought the title was “Prince of Whales”, and they thought this made sense, because they had heard of the “Dolphin” of France, and assumed all royalty must command some form of sea life.
Then I thought about the post-apocalyptic video game Fallout 3, throughout which you hear the voice of a man named John Henry Eden, the acting President of the United States, giving patriotic speeches over the radio. At the end, it turns out Eden is just an advanced AI in a military bunker at Raven Rock.
Then I wondered how hard it would be for intelligence agencies (both in America and elsewhere) to build an AI that would comb social media searching for popular jokes and memes, and then re-post variants of them on a widely-seen account, carefully timed so as to distract people’s attention from real issues.
What a crazy idea, to make a comedy about the death of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. But there is something about the absurdity of the overly-bureaucratized communist mass-murder machine that lends itself to dark humor—the petty logistical concerns and office politics familiar to white-collar workers everywhere, combined with the matters of life and death that concern a government, particularly a totalitarian one.
The film definitely plays this weird juxtaposition to the hilt right from the opening scene, in which Stalin (Adrian McLoughlin) calls the manager of a concert broadcast live over the radio to demand a recording of it. When the manager learns there is no recording, he frantically tries to reassemble the orchestra to perform it again. The piano player, Maria Yudina (Olga Kurylenko) initially refuses, but ultimately gives in when bribed. After the performance is finished, she places an insulting note to the dictator inside the record sleeve.
Intercut with this are scenes of Lavrentiy Beria (Simon Russell Beale), the head of Stalin’s secret police, dispatching his men to seize people from their homes and torture them in secret prisons. Beria holds immense power in the government, and when Stalin dies—on reading the note Maria has written—Beria is the first into his office, hastily removing important documents before other members of the Central Committee, including Nikita Khrushchev (Steve Buscemi), arrive.
They are reluctant to pronounce him dead, and even the doctors hastily assembled to examine him are hesitant to give their assessment. When they finally do, the Committee proceeds with Georgy Malenkov nominally in charge, but with all of the Committee members, Khrushchev and Beria in particular, jockeying for power.
Stalin’s children, Svetlana (Andrea Riseborough) and Vasily (Rupert Friend), arrive for their father’s funeral. Vasily repeatedly launches into drunken rages, attacks guards and makes wild threats. Beria keeps Khrushchev busy dealing with these matters while he moves to consolidate his power by putting the city under the control of the secret police, increases his popularity by pausing arrests, and seizes control of the train system, preventing people from entering the city.
Beria also reveals that he has the note that Maria wrote to Stalin. She is an acquaintance of Khrushchev’s, and Beria uses this to threaten Khrushchev, implying that he will use the note to incriminate both of them should Khrushchev try to cross him.
In frustration, Khrushchev orders that trains to Moscow resume running, causing people to enter the city and be shot by Beria’s secret police. The Committee argues over whether Beria or his lower-level officers should be blamed for this.
Meanwhile, Marshal Georgy Zhukov arrives in Moscow, annoyed to find his army confined to barracks. Khrushchev secretly strikes a deal with Zhukov to help him remove Beria from power during Stalin’s funeral. Zhukov agrees, on the condition that Khrushchev has the support of the entire Committee, which Krushchev manages to secure by bluffing that he has Malenkov’s backing.
At a Committee meeting after the funeral, Khrushchev signals Zhukov and his men to storm the room and arrest Beria. After much badgering from Khrushchev, Malenkov reluctantly signs off on the summary trial and execution of Beria.
The film ends with Khrushchev watching Maria play at a concert while Leonid Brezhnev (Gerald Lepkowski) looks ominously over his shoulder.
It’s an odd movie, with scenes of slapstick comedy (the Committee members awkwardly transporting Stalin’s body from the floor to his bed) mixed with more subtle satire, as in the sequences depicting Committee meetings, and one unforgettable scene in which Khrushchev and Vyacheslav Molotov (Michael Palin) are speaking contemptuously of Molotov’s presumed-dead wife Polina, who was arrested as a traitor to the Party, only to change their tone mid-sentence to singing her praises as Beria appears with her in tow, having released her from prison to secure Molotov’s loyalty.
The humor throughout is very, very dark: for example, there is a running gag in the scenes in the secret police prisons where we repeatedly hear prisoners off-screen exclaiming “Long Live Comrade Stalin!” followed by a gunshot.
But in addition to the sometimes over-the-top satire, the plot is that of a very tight and coherent political thriller, as Khrushchev and Beria joust for power. I went in expecting it to paint all the Soviet elites as villains in equal measure—and they certainly all do some nasty things—but in my opinion the film pretty firmly sides with Khrushchev as the hero and Beria as the villain. The former is depicted as vulgar and a bit corrupt, but reasonably well-meaning. (He reminded me, in both looks and manner, of a Don Rickles character.) It’s impossible not to root for him over Beria, who, besides all his other crimes as head of the secret police, is a sexual predator of the most evil sort. It is altogether fitting and satisfying that the most graphically violent death in the film is Beria’s execution.
As you might expect, the film is very controversial, and was banned in Russia and former Soviet States. A member of the Russian Culture Ministry stated: “The film desecrates our historical symbols — the Soviet hymn, orders and medals, and Marshal Zhukov is portrayed as an idiot.”
I can’t speak to the hymn, the orders, or the medals, but I will say that while Zhukov is certainly a caricature (he’s played by Jason Isaacs, whose hammy acting works much better here than in Harry Potter), for me, he was one of the most sympathetic characters in the film, after Khrushchev and Maria.
I would like to see a historian specializing in Soviet history do a thorough examination of what is and isn’t accurate in this movie. This article mentions some inaccuracies—notably, that Beria’s downfall was more protracted than the hasty arrest and execution depicted in the film. But that’s the sort of change that can be excused for the sake of the drama. I don’t know much about the Soviet Union post-World War II, but on cursory scanning of Wikipedia entries about the people and events depicted, I was surprised (and quite often disturbed) to learn how much of it was accurate.
Of course, the mark of a really good work of historical fiction is that it’s not just about the time period depicted, but that it contains observations about human nature that are relevant to the present-day. This is why, for example, the historical dramas of Shakespeare are still read and performed today.
So does The Death of Stalin contain any interesting lessons beneath the caricatures of historical enemies of Western capitalism and farcical depictions of Soviet state ceremonies? It’s hard to say. Maybe there is something about the dehumanizing effect that power has upon both those who wield it and those upon whom they exercise it. But that has been pretty well picked-over by people like George Orwell. The absurdity of bureaucrats administering lethal force? Joseph Heller covered that. So I’m not sure this picture brings anything new to the table in that regard.
Would I recommend seeing it? I don’t know. If you’re a Soviet history buff, it might be interesting to see what they got right and what they got wrong. If you like your comedy extremely black, then it might be worth a watch. But if you prefer uplifting cinema, or if you don’t like violence, or if you are offended by swearing, or–above all else– if one of your relatives worked for the Soviet Secret Police, then you should probably skip it.
You’re going along in life, a typical, liberaltarian American millennial, enjoying a materially comfortable life with your friends, who are of every gender, religion, race, sexual orientation and ethnic background. It all seems quite nice.
And then you come to find out that, all of sudden, the Presidency has fallen into the hands of a nasty, misogynistic liar who despises you and all your friends, and who means to ruin the culture you grew up in, all on the pretext of “bringing back the coal jobs”.
“Well, now, that’s quite the caterpillar in my buttermilk,” you say. “What manner of devilry hath wrought this state of affairs?”
For a detailed explanation, see here. But the short answer is, it’s a thing called the Electoral College.
“That’s about the meanest trick I ever heard of,” you cry. “Can’t the Congress do something about this horrible chicanery?”
No, they can’t. Because the problem with the Electoral College is directly tied to the problem with Congress: apportionment of seats has caused both to favor one party. They have systematically designed the system to work for very specific voting blocs.
“Well, none of this sounds like it would stand up in a court of law,” you reply (rather exasperatedly). “I believe I’m going to fight this all the way!”
Good luck with that. Because the outfit running Congress has also stacked the Court in their favor, even violating the spirit of the Constitution to do so. So, even if you somehow get your case to the Supreme Court, don’t count on winning it.
“Has the world gone mad?” you ask in frustration. “I was raised to believe that liberal values had won out all across the developed world, and that racism, misogyny and robber barons were all relics of a bygone era.”
Yes–we were all told that. But as it turns out, liberalism only really controlled one branch of government–the so-called “fourth estate”. And that doesn’t get you as much you might think.
“It all sounds hopeless when you put it like that! They control all the levers of power; and all we have are our social media accounts and some safety pins. What can we do to dig ourselves out of this?”
“Yes,” you exclaim, filled at once with gallant liberal élan. “Let’s go for that!”
–but the problem with that is that to redraw the districts, you need to have political power, and to gain political power…
“…you need to redraw the districts,” you finish, in a defeated monotone, realizing the depth of our plight. “Then it really is impossible, isn’t it?”
No. It’s not impossible.
“Really?” Your ears perk up at this. “I thought you were just now trying to convince me that it was.”
No, no–we just need to think outside the box, that’s all. After all, what are Congressional districts? Are they, once drawn by a given party, henceforth and forevermore ordained to be in favor of that party even unto eternity?
“That’s a pretty highfalutin way of putting it,” you answer, a bit annoyed. “But even so, I can tell you that the answer’s ‘no’.”
Right! Congressional districts are just lines on a map. So just because they are drawn around a specific area…
“…doesn’t mean that the people living in that area have to stay there forever!” you say slowly.
Correct again! You are a sharp one, you know that?
(“Why, thank you,” you reply.)
Here, look at this map of the margins of victory by county in the 2016 Presidential election. Look at all those giant blue columns towering over everything.
Credit: Max Galka, Metrocosm.com
“Great Scott! Look at all those surplus blue votes in California!”
I know, right? So my thought is: what if we simply transferred some of those extra blue votes into the red areas?
“You mean… people living in liberal cities should move out into the hinterlands, and cancel out all the redistricting and apportionment shenanigans?”
You ask this cautiously, because you are understandably skeptical that such a crazy idea could ever work. After all, isn’t it awfully difficult for people living in the city to just pack up and move out into the countryside? How will they get jobs and housing?
Good question. Maybe just moving to smaller cities would do the trick, though. Even the cities in the heartland have some liberal enclaves. The local politicians there may be sympathetic to bringing in more liberals. That seems like a promising place to start.
“Look,” you say, striking a more realistic tone. “This all sounds great on paper, but do you really think it can happen? Can we really save America just by moving to different cities?”
Maybe. I’m not saying it’s guaranteed. And certain… interested parties are already passing laws to make it difficult to vote for people who have just moved to a new state. So, it’s by no means a sure thing.
But, at the same time… can you think of a better plan?
I want to try to think about this logically, using a series of statements and inferences.
There is reason to suspect that Wikileaks gets the information that they leak from Russian spies and/or sympathizers.
Let us suppose that this is true. If that is the case,what does the fact that Wikileaks released all this information suggest?
It would be reasonable to infer that Russian spies/sympathizers now have more access to government documents than they previously did.
How could that ever happen? What could possibly have changed recently to allow pro- Russian forces greater access to previously-secure areas of the government?
Absolutely nothing suggests itself.
Sorry. This really went nowhere. I’m at a total dead end.
Probably the best chapter in Donald Trump’s book The Art of the Dealwas about his renovation of the Wollman ice rink. Trump, operating as a private businessman, could get the job done much faster and cheaper than the city bureaucracy could. That was good.
Trump claimed he did it to be a nice guy. But I don’t think that was it. I think he did it because he knew he could get publicity, and that he could make his nemesis, then-New York City Mayor Ed Koch, look stupid. It was about getting attention and getting revenge, as it often is with Trump.
But that’s ok. Who cares what his reasons were? He did something good.
This gives me an idea for how the Democrats might be able to prevent the Trump Presidency from being a total disaster: trick him into thinking he is getting revenge on them by doing stuff that they want.
I’m not sure precisely how to do this. I think even Trump would see through it if Pelosi were to say “Oh, don’t you dare make sure all Americans have affordable healthcare, Donald. That sure would make me mad.” Or if Obama said “Boy, Donald; the egg would really be on my face if you appointed Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Then I’d just look silly.”
They will have to be more subtle about it. (Not too subtle, though. He wouldn’t pick up on it then.) But it’s worth considering.