What Sophocles Can Teach Us About Trump

     Hubris. Blindness. Arrogance. A chorus of knowing voices foretelling of catastrophe to come. Then the arrival of that catastrophe. 

     Sound like a Sophoclean play? It is, several of them. But to even cursory news consumers, it also perfectly describes the last year of the Trump administration, especially the last week.

     Oedipus the King now reads, like Orwell's 1984, Roth's The Plot Against America and Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, like a work of prophecy. Indeed, epic-sized criminal enterprises posing as presidential administrations (and we need no better avatar as such than the current one) seem to deliberately pattern themselves on prophetic works of fiction, to seek inspiration from their morals (or, in the Greek tragedians' case, no moral other than, "Here is what hubris looks like"), deliberately bring about prophesied catastrophe, then tell the horrified, ”Look upon my works, ye powerless, and despair!"

      Oedipus the King was written in the early 5th century BC during, and concerns itself with, a plague ravaging Thebes. A self-imposed regimen in my youth of the classics occasionally tickles my mind and informs me of whenever Trump touches upon these fatal weaknesses.

     In Sophocles' play, the citizens of Thebes beg their wise ruler Oedipus to rid the city of the plague that's ravaging the polis (Stop me if this is already sounding familiar). In his arrogance and hubris, Oedipus says he alone can conquer this plague and that he will do the ancient world's version of contact tracing and that he will find what we today would call "Patient Zero."

     Oedipus makes a serious effort to trace this protovector, which in and of itself disqualifies him to be among fiction's most notorious villains. He is no Othello, driven by jealousy or an Iago. He is a sadly deluded man who overestimated his own capability to eradicate the plague. His lack of self-awareness, shielded by his hubris, also makes for the play's ultimate irony:

     He himself is the vector he's been looking for. He carries within him the plague that is destroying his own nation state.

     Trump has had his own Greek chorus in the form of the media, his medical advisors and the American public. The Greek chorus in an ancient Greek tragedy is a convention that sings warnings of impending disaster to the protagonist (which, of course, go unheeded, hence assuring the tragedy) and the key that gives a well-turned Greek tragedy that extra fillip at the end, is that the moment of enlightenment comes simultaneously at the moment of downfall.

     Even though Oedipus was a failed ruler because he not only allowed the plague to spread throughout Thebes, he himself was the cause of its spread. But Oedipus, again, thought he could halt it and made an honest effort to do so.

     Donald Trump never did. Donald Trump, while he may have said on the campaign trail four years ago, "I alone can fix this!", was talking about trade deals (which have also been riddled with ruinous incompetence), not a pandemic, never truly believed he could halt the spread of the pandemic because he never intended to try.

     And now that he has COVID-19, he becomes unto Oedipus, minus the self-awareness, no revelation at the point of his own downfall. But lack of self-awareness and a disdain for facts (his taped conversations with Bob Woodwood proved he had the facts at hand) alone does not shield one from the comeuppance of nemesis or até (perhaps coincidentally, the Portuguese word for "until").

     Até is chaotic, unlike the concept of nemesis, which is cold, calculating and strikes with unerring accuracy. It is, as with the coronavirus, unpredictable and can take years or even a generation for it manifest. Trump contracting coronavirus through his sociopathic contempt for all human life, including his own closest aides and family members, was the calling card of até, which is essentially ominously saying to Trump or anyone else unfortunate enough to catch it, warning of its reprise months or years down the road, "Until we meet again..."

     It would never have occurred to Oedipus to stand on a balcony after breaking a quarantine and discharging himself from first-rate medical care to then breathe his heavy, polluted breath across the land, sucking wind, his wattles folded into its customary neck vagina, every small action occasioning a barely controlled rage such as tugging on his coat and thrusting his mask in his pocket, in a pathetic, transparent attempt to look strong.

     Oedipus, terrible king though he was, at least was blessed with self-awareness in his final moments. But sociopaths were unknown in Sophocles' time, perhaps because they didn't exist. They exist very much in our time. Trump has met the enemy and it was him. And all he sees in his reflection is a  tilting, sick, old fat man with no more self-awareness than he had the day he was born.