“The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts, all on a hot summer’s day. The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts. The mad Queen said, “Off with his head, Off with his head!” Well, that’s too bad…no more heads to cut..” — Alice in Wonderland.

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THE TRAGEDY, THE PLOT:

Prologue: A terrible pandemic comes to the Democratic Republic. The famous healer Fauci is chosen by the protagonist, King Trump, to save the country from it.

Parados: The epic pandemic paralyzes the country. The King And Fauci speak to their frightened subjects every day, hoping to soothe them.

Episode. The ruthless King tires of the pandemic and seeks to soothe his restless and angry people by promising them it will soon pass. He orders his aides on pain of banishment to never speak of the pandemic again.

Stasimon:  Fauci, who is haunted by the cries of the sick and the mourners,  confesses to practicing parrhesia, he tells the King he cannot lie, he is a physician, and is sworn to save lives. The King warns him to be silent.

Fauci sees that the King is Mad and unable to govern. He makes his choice, casts the dye. He alone knows how the story must end.

Exodus:  Fauci is banned by the Mad King from the palace and spends his days wandering through ravaged cities, comforting the dying, spreading the alarm, alone, and forgotten.

Polis, The Rival: Andrew Cuomo shows the nation – and the jealous King – how to manage the crisis. He undermines the King and plots to replace him.

Epilogue: The King falls.

Greek Chorus: The dead and the dying, of course.

 

I think I can help explain this very American version of Greek tragedy.

The Greeks invented theater, and Donald Trump and Anthony Fauci have starred in this form of theater for months now, they were destined for it (Governor Andrew Cuomo performed in a supporting role.)

These plays presented tragic tales of heroes who strove for greatness but were brought low by fate and their human flaws.

That may sound familiar.

Watching the news now is a revelation. We are living in our tragic story.

A remarkable book – Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary Trump –  is coming out tomorrow, Tuesday. I got hold of it today.

It was written by a clinical psychologist named Mary Trump, who happens to be our Mad King’s niece.

It is a devastating book, valuable and essential, and heartbreaking and frightening. It tells us the true story of what has happened to Donald Trump and to Dr. Anthony Fauci and why.

I’ve never read a book like it.

It’s the book I’ve been waiting for when it comes to understanding Trump, a sometimes hobby of mine.

The book is not about politics and transcends the suffocating left-right fog that sometimes passes for writing and argument.

Mary Trump has a lot of axes to grind – she hates Trump and is a Democrat – but she grinds them powerfully and overwhelmingly and convincingly.

I don’t have to guess any longer. I can put a lot of the pieces together.

I understand how Donald Trump came to be what he is, and what a horrible mistake it was for our country to choose him as our leader.

Like the Godfather movie, this book is about family, not power.  It is, in many ways, a brilliant soap opera.

And although he will hate this, this is the book that will define him, and forever.

This book has the feeling of being told by an observant and sensitive child who was often a fly on the walls, the kind of quiet kid nobody really noticed,  listening to things she was never supposed to hear, and that no one imagined she would ever tell.

She describes Trump as a man who hid in institutions all of his life and was protected from the consequences of his aberrant behavior.

I am unaware of any famous American leader who had a family member angry enough to bare their lives in so unsparing a way.

As Don Corleone dominated the Godfather story, Fred Trump Sr. , the President’s father, dominates this one. Ultimate this is a story about the power of cruelty and child abuse and the damage it can do to children, and even to a nation.

The man – Fred Sr. –  was a monster, according to Mary.

Mary means to warn us that this man should never get anywhere near the White House, and she succeeds, although it’s too late for that.

But she also has a trained healer’s eye for the harm we do our children and the terrible damage that was done to our President.

Trump’s toxic behavior has forfeited mercy or empathy from a nation of abused citizens. I accept that he is simply doing what was done to him, but it is difficult to forgive a 74-year-old billionaire with so much power.

He has yet to use it for good or to protect anything but his own self-interest.

Mary Trump has also given us a front-row seat into the mind of a man who has so detached from reality and his own shortcomings that he would isolate and slander the person he most needs to survive right now: Dr. Fauci.

Told through the prism of Donald Trump and his brothers and sisters,  the book blew my mind and touched my heart at the same time.

Uncle Donald, says Mary Trump,  will always be a frightened five-year-old child who knows he is in too deep and way over his head.

She says he is ignorant and incapable of managing a peanut butter sandwich, let alone a crisis. She says that deep down, “he knows he has never been loved.”

She says he went to the movies as his brother Fred. Jr. lay dying in a nearby hospital.

There is nothing in this book that will send Trump to jail, or blow up his election chances. I mean, really, who could be shocked by anything he has done by now?

I doubt the book will harm him much politically, but you never know. It would probably get me to throw myself into a raging, freezing river in January if it were written about me by a family member.

Mary Trump describes Trump as a petty and pathetic little man.

As one critic put it, in the vast Trump literature, “this one is something new.”

He is right.

This is an entirely different and compelling way to look at Donald Trump, and I think after all the soul searching and gossip, it’s the right way to look at him.

Mary Trump also got my attention with this line: His re-election “would be the end of American democracy.”.

The book is timely, coming as it does Anthony Fauci, and Donald Trump play out their inevitable and ancient ritual of tragedy, a  powerful protagonist silencing a truth-teller.

This time, a lot of lives are on the line, and sadly, a lot of lives are being lost.

It is imperative to me, and I imagine, to others, to understand how our national tragedy happened, and what it tells us about our country.

Finally, with four months to go before our Presidential Election, we have arrived in our version of Wonderland. Our Mad Queen is a Mad King, and his mission is to turn everything upside down.

“What a strange world we live in,” said Alice to the Queen of Hearts.

It is our challenge to live in the new normal, at least for the next few months and possibly longer.

Amid a killing and spreading pandemic, the mad and damaged leader, who believes drinking bleach may cure the awful virus,  has silenced the most knowledgeable authority on pandemics on the earth and presumed to take his place.

The fatal hubris.

In political terms, it’s a dumb, even suicidal move. No one could help him more. In terms of his own upbringing and insecurities, it makes perfect sense. There were no other options. No one is more important than he is, or even as important.

Trump is also sending his cowardly acolytes to whisper in the reporter’s ears and spread lies about the good doctor. This is by now familiar. If you can’t bribe or bully, smear, and destroy. Most people can’t defend themselves against a President with vast power. (Spoiler alert: Dr. Fauci can.)

Donald Trump, who just a few weeks ago was waxing effusively about the bleach and UV light rays until the vaccines come, is without humility,  irony, or common sense when it comes to his lengthening list of really awful bumbles.

The Greeks had it right all along.

The minute Dr. Anthony Fauci became a practitioner of parrhesia, the Greek term for the hapless truth-teller whose job is to tell the King the truth, it was just a matter of time.

Parrhesiasts can’t lie; it is impossible for them.

They have to speak the truth and face the consequences. And it seems that in Greek tragedy, the outcomes were the same as they are in the United States in 2020.

The truth-teller is discredited by secret and cowardly agents, banished from the court, and jailed, tortured, killed, or sent away. If they are lucky, they get to flee.

And meanwhile, people get sick and die.

Etymologically, “parrhesiazesthai” means “to say everything — from “pan” (everything) and “Rhema” (that which is said).

The one who uses parrhesia, the parrhesiastes, is someone who says everything he has in mind: he does not hide anything, but opens his heart and soul completely to other people through his discourse.

It is the perfect description of the earnest and honest Fauci.

Dr. Fauci is a ghost now in this campaign; he will haunt Trump to the last day, popping up here and there to scold us and warn us.

He the President’s worst nightmare, an honest and much-loved man who can’t be fired (he’s a civil servant).  bought, intimidated or even slandered.

He is more prominent, even than the virus.

He is a spirit, a dybbuk, a doomed functionary now, he can be labeled but not killed.

He stands for the public servant who can only speak the truth, and Trump, self-destructive ever, stands as the corrupt leader who can only lie.

Fauci isn’t going to do Trump the courtesy of running away. He grew up in Queens also. After the Russian investigations, it was said of Trump that if you go after the King, you better kill the King.

Dr. Fauci is the King of infectious disease. They didn’t kill that King.

There is the one thing more frightening than an unhinged president: a proud and experienced civil servant who knows how to play the game.

How could it happen that in America, famed for its science and civil servants, Donald Trump gets to make coronavirus policy, and Dr. Fauci can only speak in podcasts the White House doesn’t know about?

Fauci, who trains health officials from all over the world to deal with pandemics, is a refugee now, hiding and on the run, telling his truth when he can.

He’s a charming and grandfatherly older man, unlike the angry white men who hate his commitment to the truth. His passion is to save lives; he is a fanatic in his way, a warrior for honesty and science.

Donald Trump. by comparison,  isn’t trusted by many people these days. About 67 percent of all Americans say they trust Dr. Fauci when it comes to the coronavirus.

Only 29 percent of the country trusts President Trump to tell the truth about   COVOID-19.

Our world is upside down, are there any more heads to cut off?

But wait a second. If we can’t stop the Mad King, at least we can try to understand him, maybe to prepare for the inevitable day when our children or grandchildren will ask us what we were doing when our country went off the cliff.

Well, we can say, were posting on  Facebook or Twitter for a while. Then, a pandemic woke us up.

Sometimes, it seems that every other person felt he or she was abused.

Trump, unique in all ways, insists he wasn’t abused, Mary Trump’s book describes his abuse in detailed and chilling ways.

He was abused, even if he doesn’t know or can’t admit to the vulnerability it causes children.

Mary Trump’s book is unsparing in its portrayal of Donald Trump’s father. In some ways, and some chapters, the book is really about him. She describes him as a callous, sneering, vicious, domineering, lying, cheating, vindictive workaholic, and a bigot.

It didn’t escape me that his second and favorite son Donald is often described in those very same terms.

The Tony Fauci tragedy – when we most need him, he is nearly gone – and Mary Trump’s gripping new book- do something essential when it comes to understanding Trump.

It brings some unity to the narrative that is Trump, his rise and fall and rise and fall again, and elevation to the most powerful position in the world.

This is a sad story, from beginning to end, from Fred Sr. to Donald Jr. to the White House, the pandemic, and the grotesquely unfair trial of Anthony Fauci. An awful lot of helpless Americans are dead.

I doubt too many people will blame Dr. Fauci for trying to stop it.

Aristotle contrasted the tragic form with epic poetry, which scholars have come to call the tree rules of unity. These three rules suggest that a tragedy has unity of place, time, and action.

The three dramas of drama were comedy, satyr plays, and, most important of all, tragedy. The first essential to creating a good tragedy is that it should maintain the unity of the plot.

Mary Trump’s story slips perfectly into the one unraveling in  Washington, her unprecedented kind of book gives us some peace in that many things suddenly make sense.

This isn’t your usual tell-all book, there’s no sex, violence, or great scandal in it. Unlike John Bolton’s impenetrable work of vengeance, it is readable, penetrating.

And most of all it is revealing.  Ultimately, I think it tells me a lot more than Donald Trump’s tax returns ever could.

I think he just got hit with the thing he most feared, the truth about him and his life, the scared five-year-old sleeping in the White House, desperate for adulation.

The praise he is always giving himself, says Mary Trump, was meant to placate his angry and cruel father, to whom he is still speaking.