“I Know Donald Trump’s Type”
I know his type too, his archetype: Trickster.
I was once having lunch with Gwen Thompkins, a NPR correspondent in East Africa (2006-2010), and senior editor of Weekend Edition Saturday, and now host of public radio’s superb music interview show “Music Inside Out.”
“Gwen,” I complained over sushi, “I’m trying to write a general audience book about improv, a form of art that the Trickster persona always dominates. How can I get a mainstream audience that they have to sit still for my discussion of archetypes?”
Gwen offered her solution with a generous laugh. “Marvel Comics, Randy! Nothing is more ‘general audience’ than the archetypes that fuel the Marvel Comic Universe. Your audience might resist the idea, but they stream the MCU like there’s no tomorrow.”
We resist archaic myths and yet we binge the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) films and series, which are replete with mythological references and heroes’ journeys. At the center of the MCU, the history’s highest grossing film franchise with 34 installments over 15 years and total worldwide box office revenue of 30 billion U.S. dollars, is the ongoing battle between Reason—Ultron, Thanos, Iron Man—and Unreason: Loki, Doctor Strange, Black Widow, Wanda, and Vision, all Tricksters. That battle—between what neuroscientists call Cold and Hot Cognition—is at the heart of improv.
Trickster is universal. Trickster loves to stir the pot, to make trouble out of which, often by accident, he renews society by disturbing the status quo. It’s safe to assume that Donald Trump has not read Joseph Campbell nor watched Bill Moyers’s 1988 PBS series “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth” which made the hero’s quest a cultural commonplace. But compared to Trump, who among us is more motivated by id—where archetypes live? You don’t need to read Joseph Campbell to get Star Wars.
Usually benign, Trickster has a dark side. Offspring of Zeus and the mere nymph Maia, Hermes is a provincial from Arcadia—the suburbs. A mere demi-god from outlying Queens, Trump always longed to play with the big boys who dominated Olympian Manhattan. Like the Trickster Hermes, he was Lord of Liars and Patron of Thieves, and, according to The Atlantic, “the country’s most accomplished trickster.” Like Hermes, he is a man of unquenchable appetites. Trump claimed, “My gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can ever tell me.” Unlike Hermes, not so friendly.
In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, intent on tricking his way onto Olympus, Hermes steals Apollo’s sacred and immortal cattle of the sun. He sacrifices them, immortal no more, by cutting them at the joints, the articulations, and so creates the system of sacrifice that enriches Hellenic culture, mutually nourishing humanity and the gods.
Trump’s gut told him that democracy’s articulations — easiest to sever — were embedded in civil society’s unwritten norms. He enchants his base with his Twitter/Truth Social feeds and free-associative riffs at his rallies, churning up their fear and anger. It quickly became clear that his ramblings were shtick, oft repeated. But there was power in the impression of spontaneity he achieved. His improvised discourse blared the message, Trust me, only I can do it. Why? Because I’ve been gaming the system my whole career.
Myth and Ritual
In her essay, “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” Zora Neale Hurston argues that “Every phase of Negro life is highly dramatized. There is an impromptu ceremony always ready for every hour of life.”
“Impromptu ceremony” captures a central paradox of improvisation. One must be impromptu — at the ready — for every hour of life. Yet the performance is also a “ceremony” — like Hermes’s ritual of sacrifice — that echoes and renews cultural traditions. Created in the moment but intentionally, such ritual elevates the everyday. As Oscar Wilde has it, “spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art.” Meticulously prepared yet spontaneous, myth and ritual uplifts ordinary experience into the transcendent.
Trump’s off-repeated shtick too is ceremonial. His base sits at the foot of their cult leader “uplifted” by the fear and anger his vision of American carnage evokes.
Myth, Ritual, and the Blues
The blues, to which Kamala’s as half African American is heir, is also ceremonial. “The blues is an impulse,” writes Ralph Ellison, Living with Music: Jazz Writings, “to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain [as Robert Johnson’s bent blue notes do] and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically.”
I hear that chronicle, at once tragic and comic, in Kamala’s laugh. Eschewing rational explanation (“the consolation of philosophy”), the meme that made her laugh famous (or infamous), her mother’s coconut tree story, insists on the imperative to remember:
“My mother used to — she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?
“You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.”
You young people may think you write your story as if on a blank slate. But you must pay attention to tradition if you mean to change it. Myth and ritual are tradition’s primary cultural bearers. In the persona of Trickster, myth and ritual are society’s primary culture changers.
The irony always implicit in Kamala’s laugh, “an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically,” keeps brutal experience alive in aching consciousness and transcends it.
Kamala’s laugh isn’t “crazy” as the Donald, Lord of Liars, would have us think. Her laugh is like the bent notes of Robert Johnson’s blues, her finger on American life’s jagged grain.
When Apollo and Zeus confront Hermes about his theft and sacrilege, Hermes makes them laugh. Lifted by Apollo from his crib, Hermes farts in the sun god’s face, a perfect symbol of Trickster’s — and improv’s — always disruptive force.
“I’m just a baby still in swaddling clothes,” he adds, “how could I have managed that heist?”
As he spoke, Hermes winked and clutched his baby blanket tightly in his arms. Zeus laughed aloud at the sight of his scheming child so smoothly denying his guilt about the cattle. And he ordered them both to come to an agreement and go find the cattle. He told Hermes the guide to lead the way and, dismissing the mischief in his heart, to show Apollo where the cattle were hidden. Then the son of Kronos [Zeus] nodded his head and good Hermes obeyed, for the will of Zeus, who holds the shield, persuades without effort.
Zeus, who “persuades without effort,” is the ultimate improviser. Trickster’s laughter moderates Zeus’s autocratic power and allows community to emerge. The future guide of souls becomes for a moment the guide of the gods.
Signifying on Trump’s dour vision of American carnage, Kamala’s laugh persuades without effort. Gods willing, she will soon guide us into a renewed community.
