Howard Roark, John Galt and Donald Trump

     "I admire its purity. A survivor, unclouded by conscience, morals or delusions of morality."
     So said Ash, the synthetic antagonist in Ridley Scott's classic scifi horror movie, Alien. When Ash, a twitchy android, is stovepiped orders from the corporation that owns the ship, he tries to kill Ripley when he sees her a threat to him achieving his goals. Parker rushes in to save the day and decapitates the renegade synthetic. But they need to know what his orders were so they temporarily resurrect him to get the 411.
     They ask him what his orders were and he confesses he'd gotten a message from Corporate telling him to save the alien on board that's already killed several crew members. They want the Nostromo to bring the alien back intact so they can study and eventually weaponize it. "All other priorities rescinded," the message ended. Meaning the entire crew, if necessary, was expendable. The alien was more valuable to the corporation than its own employees.
     When they revive Ash and get him to talk, Lambert asks him about the alien, "You admire it!" Ash responds,
     "I admire its purity. A survivor, unclouded by conscience, morals or delusions of morality."
     Whether or not Dan O'Bannon or Ronald Shusett, the series creators, were thinking of her, this is pure, distilled Ayn Rand talking. In the late 1920's, Rand had fled the Soviet Union and had settled in Los Angeles as a young woman looking to make a fresh start. This was right about the same time William Hickman had kidnapped, murdered, dismembered and disemboweled 12 year-old Marian Parker, the daughter of a prominent Los Angeles banker.
      When she'd gotten wind of what Hickman had done, she was instantly fascinated by this young man. While she hated the sin, she loved the sinner and even based a protagonist on Hickman in a novel that would never be published, Little Street. Hickman obviously wasn't very far from her thoughts when she described her protagonist as having "the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling... no organ for understanding, the necessity, meaning, or importance of other people."
       To her, Hickman had been warped and damaged by society yet somehow still turned himself into a magnificent example of self-absorbed self-creation, exactly the sort of right wing supermen she created in Howard Roark and John Galt in her cult classics The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Before he was hanged on October 19, 1928, Hickman once said that "I am like the state—what is good for me is right." Of course, Ayn Rand was listening and wrote that that was "the best and strongest expression of a real man's psychology I ever heard." One wouldn't be surprised to learn if Rand had written him love letters.
       And there you have it. To a mentally disturbed individual such as Rand, this warped, toxic view of ideal masculinity is one that today more than ever seems to feed off her unrestrained admiration of it. Witness one Donald John Trump.
       Rand died penniless in  March 1982, having survived as long as did on public assistance and our social safety net that she'd reviled for decades until needing it herself. By then, she would've lived long enough to have heard of Donald Trump, then a 35 year-old, dynamic, rising developer. We don't know if she'd noticed him or not. Yet, if she'd cared to study his history up to that time, she would have seen much to admire in him.
       She would have worshiped him for his sexual aggressiveness ("Grab 'em by the pussy..."), for his disdain for the common people and the laws that bind them. She would have been especially thrilled with his pure self interest and the blatant, sociopathic dishonesty that made him possible. In other words, "A survivor, unclouded by conscience, morals or delusions of morality." So plainly, Donald Trump didn't create the mold. But he perfected the type that came from it. In fact, if Rand were alive today, one could easily imagine her overlooking the fact that, unlike, Howard Roark, Trump was not a self-made man.
       Roark, an architect who, naturally, also would've been involved in real estate development, winds up blowing up what was, ironically, a social housing project that Rand and Trump would have reviled in real life, because it didn't meet his aesthetic ambitions. Roark is the ultimate Republican, someone so uptight and inflexible in his thinking, someone who prefers to go on his gut instinct that always supplants whatever reason remains to him, that he withdraws a bank commission when they wanted to make a slight alteration to his plans that he saw as perfect.
     This describes Donald Trump to a tee. Whether we're talking about his needless trade war with China and our allies, his recent decision to abandon our Kurdish allies in order to protect his property in Istanbul or his psychopathic obsession with the wall on the southern border, Trump will forever be remembered as an inflexible man who prefers to fire those few voices of reason trying to save him from his inner demons than to appear weak and decisive. He's changed his mind before. Witness his veto of a bipartisan Senate border security bill after saying he'd sign it when Fox News told him he wasn't doing it right. Witness his about-face on sensible gun control policies when Fox and Wayne LaPierre barked at him and reminded him who was boss.
      But more often not, Trump is completely motivated by self interest whether it be to personally enrich himself through the office of the presidency he illegitimately usurps or his own survival (Such as his shrill, childish behavior when impeachment proceedings began 15 days ago). Right wingers finally have their real life Howard Roark and John Galt.
      Roark's story in The Fountainhead begins with an act of terrorism with these words: "Howard Roark laughed. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. The lake lay far below him. A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water … The stone had the stillness of one brief moment in battle."
      And we're fully expected to admire this terrorist behavior over the course of a long novel that is really nothing more or less than a paean to self-interest. The opening of The Fountainhead can be construed as a prescient metaphor for what Donald Trump is doing to northeastern Syria, Washington DC's marble buildings and monuments, our once-cherished democratic institutions and his own political career.