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What would Mark Twain make of Donald Trump?

The proudly coiffed and teased hair, the desire to make a splash, the lust after wealth, the racist remarks: Donald Trump? Or Mark Twain?

Mark Twain photo portrait, 1871 by Mathew Brady from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. Mr Donald Trump at New Hampshire Town Hall on 19 August 2015 at Pinkerton Academy in Derry, NH by Michael Vadon. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Mark Twain photo portrait, 1871 by Mathew Brady from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. Donald Trump at New Hampshire Town Hall on 19 August 2015. Photo by Michael Vadon. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Tomorrow marks Mark Twain’s 180th birthday; he was born on 30 November 1835, and died on 21 April 1910. He is often celebrated as a great democrat, who stood up for the rights of racial minorities, whose novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is about a white boy learning to appreciate and live with a runaway slave. Twain attacked everyone, from the super-wealthy, to European kings who pursued brutal colonial policies, to over-charging cabmen. Alongside this Twain, there was the one who made quite a few racist comments over the years, who dreamt of and schemed for wealth, and loved the company of the kings and millionaires. He knew himself to be an egotist with a desire to show off. He knew himself to be divided, unable to live up to the values that he believed to be right and American.

I am not Mark Twain’s chosen representative on earth, and I cannot say what he would have made of Donald Trump. I suspect the two would have enjoyed each other’s company for a time – men of the world, both fascinated by and determined to achieve success. But would Twain have seen in Trump the traits he disliked in himself? Further, would he have seen a fulfilment of his fears for the nation? Twain was worried that the United States was becoming a plutocracy, in which political power was controlled by money interests. He was appalled by the predatory techniques of the business leaders of his own day, and appalled by their – to use a 1930s term – “approval ratings” among ordinary citizens. He declared in 1907 that the “political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet,” and he lamented that the people “worship money and the possessors of it.” Trump, of course, approaches this in a different spirit: he reminds us, repeatedly, that he is very rich, and that this is a chief recommendation of his candidacy for the presidency. According to him, this means that he knows how to run things, and he cannot be bought off.

In watching Trump, however, another figure springs to mind. Twain disapproved of Teddy Roosevelt, because Roosevelt was “always showing off” and “always looking for a chance to show off.” Twain thought that in Roosevelt’s “frenzied imagination the Great Republic is a vast Barnum circus with him for a clown and the whole world for the audience.” Twain likened Roosevelt to his own fictional character, Tom Sawyer, who would be kind, loyal, treacherous, and equivocating by turns, and always with the aim of drawing attention to himself.

With Trump’s comments on “Mexican rapists,” his unsaying of the same comments, and his boast that he employs “so many Latinos”; with his rejection of gay marriage while claiming to think gays are “great”; his asserting common ground with ordinary Americans, while distinguishing himself from them with references to his personal fortune – is this the same Sawyer-ish, abusive-yet-needy behaviour? Would Twain have seen in Trump the same “irresponsibility” that he saw in Roosevelt?

Finally, both men’s famous hair. Twain double-washed and dried his obsessively so as to get the perfect buoyant, white aureole. He described the process at length in his autobiography. Trump’s hair, most experts to have ventured an opinion agree, is his own, though doubt has been expressed as to whether it is, these days, a natural colour. Perhaps one day Trump too will go on record, and tell us how he produces the endless-forelock/comb-over, as mesmerising as a Penrose staircase.

Featured image credit: American Flag by Unsplash. CC0 via Pixabay.

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  1. […] Peter Stoneley, Professor of English at Reading, was asked to contribute a blog to the Oxford University Press website.  Peter decided to combine his research interest in the American novel with contemporary politics, in a blog entitled “What would Mark Twain make of Donald Trump?”  Peter says “I wish they had given me more than 500 words!”  You can read his blog by following this link. […]

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