A Man is Not a Piece of Fruit

The Spectacle of the Decline and Fall of Donald Trump is as Pathetic as it is Welcome

Surely, you have noticed. You have watched the recent appearances of Donald Trump. No, there have not been that many. He is in hiding.

Because he knows it is over.

The man who made his political name deriding his opponents as “low energy” has gone flat. He slumps and drags and slurs his words. And the words themselves are the same old same old. He has no new patter. He has no fresh lines. His insults are being recycled. His stories meander more but always end up at the same place.

He was once something new in politics. He is now yesterday’s news, an old man with yesterday’s hair cut, yesterday’s clothes, and most definitely yesterday’s ideas. That is why the only future he has to offer is the past.

And he is mentally incompetent.

I’ve written here before that everything I know about Washington I learned from show business, from a decade as a director and producer and writer of theater and some television, not a great career, not a bad one, but one I would not have traded for anything. I met some great artists and got to work with them. I learned a lot. And so even today, more often than not I see the world through the lens of that experience.

So for me right now, Donald Trump, despite his wealth and trappings of power, is increasingly looking like Willy Loman, the beaten down main character in Arthur Miller’s classic “Death of a Salesman.” It’s not that they are the same. Willy made nothing of his life. Trump figured out how to con and steal his way to a life of comfort and prominence.

But, Willy in the play is at the end of his life. He is coming to grips with his failures. He is bitter. In a way, he went in search of the American dream and it eluded him. And in way, for all his wealth, Trump went in search of a dream of his own…of being accepted as a serious person by serious people…and it has eluded him. And he knows that he has no more answers. He is left, like Willy, with anger, lashing out but all the while staring oblivion squarely in the face.

There are Willy Loman lines that sound like Trump. “The only thing you’ve got in this world is what you can sell.” “The man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead.” But mostly, these days, for several reasons, the line that resonates the most with me about Trump is tied to my sense that he knows that in 98 days it is all going to be over, the con is nearly done, accountability is around the corner.

And I think he is feeling it. As Willy says ruefully, “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away. A man is not a piece of fruit.”