Trump imagined himself a modern-day Midas. His touch was anything but golden.
“Pride goeth before destruction,” as they say. I mean, the parable practically writes itself: “There once was a man who lived in a house of gold, in a tower high above a city, a self-regarding huckster who believed he was destined for great things. Lacking temperament or wisdom or shame, he sought to make himself in the eyes of the citizenry — some of them gullible, others horrified — an unchallenged ruler . . .”
For four years and more, we watched a disaster coming to a boil, many of us anxiously bingeing on the accumulating outrages, as if we were trapped in a perpetual season of “Homeland.” Those scenes last week on the U.S. Capitol steps of an angry mob, whipped into a frenzy by a seething president, were carried live on television. You felt, as you observed the rampage unfolding in real time, that this riot and all that had come before it had been inscribed in the
country’s calendar since that January day in 2017 when the words “American carnage” echoed on the Mall.
“Everything Trump touches dies” was the phrase that one of the president’s most incendiary antagonists, Lincoln Project co-founder Rick Wilson, made the title of his 2018 book about the catastrophic folly of electing Donald Trump — the only president now to wear eternally the descriptive disgrace of “twice impeached.” That image of a lethal touch stretches back millennia, of course, to Greek mythology and the classical exemplar of arrogant overreach — King Midas.
You recall the curse of the Midas touch? Bizarrely and brazenly, Trump made “Midas touch” the title of a 2011 personal finance book, co-authored by Robert Kiyosaki. What the authors were summoning in that reference was the notion that some people have an ineffable gift for profit and riches. The original myth, though, carries quite a different connotation: Worshiping lucre, Midas is visited by the god Dionysus, who grants his wish that anything within his grasp turns to gold.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/end-of-trump-presidency-impeachment/2021/01/15/7602ec52-5696-11eb-a817-e5e7f8a406d6_story.html
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