A Portrait in the Mirror of the Con Artist as a Young Child
All official American presidential portraits have been serious affairs, charged with the intention of conveying qualities of courage, leadership and authority. These men were depicted as stern and worthy of respect, admiration and trust. Americans needed to see them as embodying the archetype of the King: order, fertility and blessing; the geographical and spiritual center of the realm; intermediary between heaven and earth. If few of our leaders could even pretend to do that, they could at least (they were politicians, after all, not kings) present themselves as strong father figures in a traditionally patriarchal environment.
These images began to change after World War Two. Some PR man must have suggested that it might be advantageous if the boss (political or corporate) looked like he actually cared about his people. The first president to smile for his portrait was Dwight Eisenhower. As a grammar school student I stood with my classes to recite the pledge of Allegiance, stared at Ike’s benevolent likeness and maybe even listened to “Hail to the Chief”. John Kennedy, surprisingly, reverted to a more serious look, but since Lyndon Johnson, all presidents have smiled. Gerald Ford, first to display his teeth, apparently gave his successors permission to do so, and all have manifested toothy smiles, including Trumpus in his first term.
But in the past eight years, as all talk has become polarized, everyone has been throwing the “Hitler” word around. Political players commonly attack each other as Der Fuhrer’s latest appearance. Israelis and Palestinians do it, Russians and Ukrainians do it, and both Republicans and Democrats used the H-word during the past election. It’s a cheap and easy accusation, and, since few living persons have even indirect knowledge of the man or what he did, it can mean nearly anything one wants it to mean. To most of us he is the incarnation of pure, hopelessly unadulterated evil. Images, however, are polarized as well. It’s easy to overlook the fact that to his adoring followers, Hitler was the savior, almost literally the incarnation of Christ. Indeed, National Socialism replaced German Christianity as the dominant, all-encompassing belief system for twelve years, and mass admiration for the man died out very slowly in the postwar years.
With the release of the new, official Presidential portrait in January 2025,
its meaning depends of course on the perspective and the prejudices of the viewer. I don’t know what his true believers see in the image. Perhaps they see a determined cowboy / savior about to ride into town, clean up the viper’s nest in Washington, kick out the bad guys at the borders and put everyone back to work. Some may see Christ about to overturn the tables of the moneychangers or Jehovah dispensing divine justice, instructing Joshua to tear down the walls of the Philistines (the Arabic word for “Palestinians”) and kill every living being among them. The return of the King as warrior.
The pose is nearly identical to his 2024 mug shot.
Just as it also expresses his rage (and perhaps his pride) at being arrested and declared a felon, it’s also a clear message to liberals and progressives that he’s coming after them. Vengeance will be his. All of these meanings, positive or negative, can fit into our understanding of Hitler, whom Trumpus is proudly and deliberately impersonating. In doing so, he declares to the proponents of the “rules-based international order” (those liberals who provoked Russia into invading Ukraine and who enabled genocide in Palestine), to east coast readers of the New York Times and the New Yorker, “You called me Hitler – I’ll show you Hitler!”
But as Lloyd Bentsen schooled Dan Quayle in 1988 (“I knew Jack Kennedy…Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy!”), Trumpus is a poor imitation. We are talking about archetypes. As I write in Chapter One of my book,
The multiple archetypes that appear in myth as divine images point us toward the impersonal and universal – what Jung called the Self – that lies behind all dualities. In stories, however, the gods can be spiteful, unpredictable, childish, incestuous and violent. They can fight amongst themselves or be humorously detached. They are unconcerned with good and evil or pious behavior…they expect little of us, other than to amuse and feed them.
Archetypes can force their way into our lives in astonishing and destructive ways. Such iconic figures as Adolf Hitler, Marilyn Monroe and David Koresh were all seized by archetypes. They identified with them rather than allowing these energies to flow through them. Instead of serving the archetype of the King, for example, one may believe that he is the King. He becomes inflated, entitled and assumes that conventional moral restraints don’t apply to him.
I’m suggesting that Hitler was so seized by the archetype that it manifested in the most extreme charisma, arising out of a thousand years of Teutonic victimization, apocalypticism and cruelty and gave him the power to cast a spell over an entire nation. In his brutal pathology and hatred, he knew exactly what he was and what he could do. You can see it in his eyes.
Trumpus, on the other hand, is a master American con man and TV entertainer, a Las Vegas lounge lizard who has spent these ten years cosplaying Hitler. As Ben Tarnoff writes:
The substance of his style is simple: a gleeful hostility toward the institutions that have traditionally organized American life. He positions himself not merely as an outsider but as a destroyer: someone who delights in the demolition of norms and normalcy. “This is not normal” was a protest slogan from his first term; for Trump and his admirers, that’s exactly the point…His disorderliness is part of what makes him so entertaining…the consummate heel, a performer who owes much to the beloved antiheroes of professional wrestling.
This doesn’t mean that his administration won’t be as painful as we’ve been fearing. Tarnoff continues:
But beneath the buffoonery is something deathly serious. Large numbers of Americans have come to believe that their body politic is severely diseased. In Trump, they have found a man ruthless enough to inflict the remedy.
Their rage, as I write here, has its source in American myth. I usually don’t find psychoanalyzing very helpful, but in this case we can see how our dominant mythologies become embodied in family pathologies. Indeed, such a narcissist, with such an obvious inferiority complex, can feel driven by his unacknowledged childhood trauma to prove just what a Hitler he can be. He certainly has mentioned Hitler many times, including his praise that “Hitler did some good things, too”.
And we as a culture, because we have never acknowledged, let alone grieved, our national crimes and diminished imaginations, collectively dreamed him up to force ourselves to begin the long overdue process of looking in the mirror. We created him; we deserve him.
Trumpus, however, has no ideology beyond thievery and self-aggrandizement; he remains a con man, a trickster and an entertainer. But behind the mask is the little boy who never got seen for who he was and never got enough love. You can see it in his eyes.
Maybe if America were to take the opportunity to look in that mirror, we’d see it in our own eyes. Consider the Spanish painter Francisco Goya’s masterpiece, Goya’s Saturn Devouring One of His Sons. Jay Scott Morgan invites us to:
Cover the right side of the face, and we see a Titan caught in the act, defying anyone to stop him, the bulging left eye staring wildly at some unseen witness to his savagery, his piratical coarseness heightened by the sharp vertical lines of the eyebrow, crossed like the stitches of a scar. Cover his left eye, and we are confronted by a being in pain, the dark pupil gazing down in horror at his own uncontrolled murderousness, the eyebrow curved upwards like an inverted question mark, as if he were asking, “Why am I compelled to do this?”
To answer that question, we must go deeper than personal or family psychology. To even begin, we need to reframe it into: Why are we as a culture so hardened in our resistance to looking at the depths of our national darkness that we are periodically compelled to vomit out such creatures as Trumpus (Trump/us) into prominence? When we look at those eyes, are we looking in the mirror?
To put Trumpus and Fascism into a mythological context, I invite you to read some of my earlier articles:
The Two Great Myths of the 20th Century
Breathing Together — QAnon and New Age Thinking