One needn't be Harold Bloom to appreciate Mark Leibovich's therapeutical, 5,000-word literary profile of Donald Trump. It cracks you upside the head with a preparatory photo.
We get it: Trump as the reptilian-eyed demon of democracy; Trump as the dark, shark-suited denizen of an underworld unleashed on a willing, sinful republic; in short, Trump as the antiChrist of American politics.
From there, Leibovich's psychological markup is thoughtful throughout (but ultimately quizzical).
While populism is often associated with grass-roots movements, Trump’s brand of it flows not from the ground up.... Rather, Trump’s is pure media populism, a cult of personality whose following has been built over decades…. In large measure, the core of Trump’s phenomenon is his celebrity itself, which, in today’s America, is in fact as populist as it gets.
This strikes, perhaps, at a deeper infirmity of American democracy. We've been entertaining ourselves not to death, but to distraction. While technological gadgetry of iPhones and iPads and flat-screen TVs and its ubiquitous offerings of politics-of-the-minute are the futuristic present, they have also thrown us back into a kind of medieval obscurantism. We — I use the word advisedly — we wouldn't know profundity if it descended from the clouds in radiant robes of clarity, for we're too busy bowing in feudal awe to the latest lords of media creation …
… whose cultural eminence alone impels mass stupefaction. That they have no political wisdom to offer is an insignificance. Any Mad Ludwig will do, as will any parvenu Trump. What do those of low-born blood with their noses stuck in an iPad full of real Beverly Hills housewives know of tariff wars or Gestapo roundups? Who among them even cares? This cult-of-personality celebrity crap is good and exquisitely entertaining stuff.
Back to Leibovich's psychological profile. It sought a consult from David Axelrod, who, writes Leibovich,
has likened campaigns to "an M.R.I. for the soul." If that’s the case, maybe the most fascinating question for Trump is not where this all ends up, but what his expedition reveals about Donald Trump’s soul, if it reveals anything at all.
That's where I part from New York Times Magazine's psychologist. I, my dear Leibovich, don't really give a damn about Donald Trump's soul. I understand his dark and perhaps unplumbable depths of personality were your charge, but my concern is sociological. What in God's name would possess millions of 21st-century Americans to exalt the deep shallowness of a Trump, or the high-studied witlessness of a Carson, or the grinning meanness of a Fiorina? What compels the rest of us to persist in pondering the GOP as a political party, when, in its unfolding reality, it is little more than a medieval mob?
I would have enjoyed 5,000 words on that. As noted, I suspect it is has something to do with frivolous distraction, but I also appreciate that it goes much deeper. Why the depth, and what of it? What drives millions to embrace superficiality and ignorance and rank malignity? Those are my questions.
And here we return to Harold Bloom, who so frequently cites Percy Shelley's profundity: that to grow, in Bloom's paraphrasing, we must "abandon easier for more difficult pleasures." Which is to say, deep learning — the antagonist of deep shallowness. How we all get there is the deepest question of all.