The King

MAGA mirror on the wall, who is the most corrupt of all?

It was Debate Day, so I went to see The King.

The King is my favorite painting by my favorite painter, Max Beckmann. Like many of the German artist’s works, it is a self-portrait. Over four decades and two world wars, Beckmann painted himself as an everyman in horrific times. He painted prisoners and profiteers and prostitutes and his own face, impassive, as humanity unraveled around him.

Beckmann started The King in 1933 and finished it in 1937. In the four years between, Hitler took power and deemed Beckmann’s work “degenerate art” that defied the Reich’s mandated joy. After Nazis confiscated hundreds of Beckmann’s paintings, he fled.

Beckmann left Europe and landed in Missouri. The King hangs in the St. Louis Art Museum, home to the largest Beckmann collection in the world.

The King is Max Beckmann, and he stares with no eyes. There are only black holes, but he retains his accoutrement: a purple robe, a golden crown. His legs are splayed, because he is the king, and kings take up space. Two figures guard him: awed, afraid.

He is the King of Nothing. He is the ruler of a dead regime, and he is its defiant subject. He reflects the circumstances into which he is placed, and his nightmare vision holds your gaze. He forces you to imagine every horror he sees because the regime forced him to experience it. He mocks his own plight, but to bruise, not amuse.

They turned him into this — this thing, this king. In 1937, Beckmann blackened the contours of the painting and proclaimed it complete.

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I went to see The King a few days after the 2016 election. By then, I knew the painting well.

I raised my daughter in the St. Louis Art Museum. She and I had been going to Family Sundays, where we did crafts in the Beckmann room, since she was three years old. In 2016, she was nine. Now she’s 17 and cannot remember a time before Trump clogged the air with the fog of crime — but I’m 45, and I can’t remember either.

She caught me staring at The King while she colored. I asked what she thought he was thinking.

“That he wishes he could close his eyes,” she said, and I told her I wished I could too.

I had long predicted both Trump’s win and that his goal was to rule like an authoritarian kleptocrat. These predictions were derided in 2016 but have now become mainstream to the point of spawning a cottage industry. Unfortunately, the cottage industry does not address the root causes of American autocracy but reduces them to Trump — and Trump alone.

To do otherwise would require challenging the institutions that made Trump possible — in particular, the DOJ that let him run free despite his half-century crime spree.

As a result, Americans are forced to live forever on the precipice, while politicians and pundits feign opposition for profit. They need you to see Trump as a novel and singular threat, instead of a long-time player in multiple corrupt networks — because they inhabit those same networks, as do their financial backers.

My guess is that you, dear reader, would like autocracy to actually be defeated — in the form of Trump, and in general.

But that is not what The Autocracy Cottage Industry wants. They would rather join the Trump administration and then write tell-all books about crimes they witnessed but did not stop. They would rather pass the same repressive policies Trump did but cloak them in gentler rhetoric. They fundraise off your fear.

The Autocracy Cottage Industry is extremely American: anti-fascism became so commercialized that it enabled fascism. Instead of fighting the autocrat or analyzing the institutional corruption that rendered the US the first country in history to let a coup plotter run for president, an “opposition” swarming with scammers bolstered Trump’s brand — elevating it instead of ending it. Former DOJ employees, baselessly insisting that Trump was being secretly apprehended, were key to this endeavor.

One consequence of DOJ inaction is that Trump’s voters no longer consider him a threat, even though a record number did in the months after the Capitol attack. The lack of punishment for committing sedition has convinced them that Trump is innocent, which he is not, and further inflamed his base.

But lack of accountability does not bother Vichy Democrats or Never-Trump Republicans or the predatory scammers surrounding them. It keeps them in business. For their operation to succeed, the public must abandon critical thinking in favor of cult logic. Memes and mantras replace contemplation and compassion, rendering humans indistinguishable from bots. They took MAGA and made a mirror.

In their formulation, there is only Trump and Not-Trump. Your thinking must never extend beyond that binary.

Nor can your knowledge of history. Or you will see a recurring cast of corrupt characters guiding politics, some of whom — Elliott Abrams, Michael Chertoff, Jamie Gorelick — pop up in both Democratic and GOP administrations for decades on end.

You will notice parallels to Trump’s rise in war criminals like Dick Cheney, who was elevated to power in the 2000 SCOTUS ruling buoyed by a riot led by Trump advisor Roger Stone.

You will note that Cheney is endorsing Trump’s opponent, Kamala Harris, and that Harris is “honored” by his support.

Harris cannot control who endorses her. But her warm response to Dick Cheney’s approval should be greeted with alarm — particularly when war criminals are welcomed into the Harris fold while antiwar protesters are rejected.

It is obvious what happened even if some are reluctant to cop to it: Bush-era Republican operatives, unable to function in the chaos of MAGA, saw an opportunity to remake the Democratic Party, which had been lurching to the right since the 1990s, and took it. They left receipts: the conservative Lincoln Project is Harris’s fourth biggest donor. Change in Democratic Party policy is determined by donations — not only the Lincoln Project’s — and then rationalized with the Trump/Not-Trump binary.

Democrats are now told that Dick Cheney is “good” because he endorsed Harris and that they should see this as “unity” instead of contamination. Ironically, Dick Cheney had already unified America in loathing, leaving office with a 13% approval rating.

That’s real unity though — like the unity of Americans across parties who want to stop arming Israel. The kind of unity that is deemed unacceptable by Democrats, even though it would help them win.

*          *          *

I look into the blackened eyes of The King and imagine a future combining the worst sins of the recent past. I don’t like going down this road, but there are too many warning signs to ignore them.

I am worried we are being dragged to war with Iran, and that the chaos of the 2024 election masks a long-term plan about to reach its culmination.

If I were an operative whose goal was war with Iran — the goal of neocons since the Reagan era, shared by Netanyahu and his cabinet, and frequently mentioned as likely regardless of who is president — I would do the following:

I would partner with the most warmongering members of the Democratic party and oust progressives by hand-picking and exorbitantly funding their opponents. I would rehabilitate Bush and Cheney. I would extol the virtues of Ronald Reagan at the Democratic National Convention. I would brag about having “the most lethal fighting force in the world.”

I would frame this militarism as normal, even joyful. To Democrats wondering what happened to the 2020 version of their party, I would claim that there is no other option in a Trump/Not-Trump world.

“It’s a binary choice,” I would recite like a mantra.

I would shrug at the fact that both sides want war and abet genocide, forcing voters to “choose” policies they despise while trying to practice harm reduction on other issues. I would say “that’s just the way it is” so no one would dare dream of how it could be.

I would frame sadism as pragmatism and get away with it.

While rehabilitating GOP evildoers of old as respectable vanguards of the American way, I would continue portraying MAGA as their wild-eyed opponents — even though Trump has proven just as useful to the Iran War effort, and it wouldn’t be a problem for the plan if he won. Trump filled his cabinet with Iran war hawks like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, carried out extrajudicial assassinations of Iranian leaders, and was allegedly seeking to strike Iran right before he left office.

The real obstacle to the plan would be Americans, who oppose war across the political spectrum. With the World War II generation largely gone, most Americans have only witnessed pointless, devastating wars built on lies — wars that only corporations won. The prospect of an Iran war would likely lead to mass protests.

But if precedent holds, a narrow Trump loss would also lead to mass protests by MAGA voters — including ones involving threats of violence to civil servants and to Democrats in general.

The nightmare scenario is if these protests happen concurrently. It is easy to imagine, if post-election violence occurs, liberals approving extreme force being used to suppress protests — whether against a civil war or a foreign war — out of sheer terror. Dissent would cease, and regulations on opposing the war — laws restricting speech and assembly — would pass in the chaos.

If this outcome were my goal, I would prepare years in advance. I would make sure powerful seditionists stayed unpunished, back the creation of Cop Cities, and flood the police with money. I would leave in place saboteurs from the 2020 election, like FBI head Christopher Wray and Louis DeJoy, to make a coup sequel easier.

I would countenance brutal tactics in Israel, including the assassination of non-violent American activists, to show that the American government will not protect you if you deviate from the party line.

If you think all this sounds far-fetched, wait until you hear about the Iraq War.

*          *          *

Beckmann’s King sits on a double-edged sword. How much truth do you tell when it terrifies? How much do you reveal of yourself when you are already under attack?

“Painting is a very difficult thing. It absorbs the whole man, body and soul — thus I have passed blindly many things which belong to the real and political life,” Beckmann wrote in 1938, his first year in exile. “I assume, though, that there are two worlds: the world of spiritual life and the world of political reality. Both are manifestations of life which may sometimes coincide but are very different in principle. I must leave it to you to decide which is the more important.”

Beckmann painted like the canvas was a mirror that allows truth to emerge — about himself and about the war-torn world. In each portrait, Beckmann remains expressionless as reality breaks. He’s an observer who knows he is also the observed, trapped in a story that he makes his own to the degree he can. He lets the symbols surrounding him speak, telling tales of melancholy and mystery.

I went to the museum before the debate because I needed to see ambiguity before I faced lies. I needed to see humanity before I saw the world stripped of it on a stage.

If you’ve read all this way to see who I thought won the debate, it was Harris, of course. Trump was terrible — not only because he lied constantly, but because he lied carelessly. His shock value advantage is long gone, and Harris is a skillful debater. She was in top form, reminding me of her days interrogating Trump goons in Senate hearings.

All of which made it sadder what she has chosen to embrace, and how she has chosen to impose it.

That’s why I needed to visit The King. His eyes are obscured out of self-protection, because he never wanted this role. He only wanted the dark pantomime to be exposed.

No one was doing it, so he took it upon himself, because it fell upon him anyway.

*          *          *

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