by David Betteridge
… I will do such things –
What they are yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the earth!
– WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, King Lear, Act II, Scene 2
I had an absurd dream, in which Donald Trump lost his trousers, and his pants, too. (I use the term “pants” in its British meaning, not as in the US.) When I say “lost”, I do not mean that the American President mislaid these items of clothing. I mean that his legs were suddenly divested of them. They seemed to lower themselves of their own volition, quickly and neatly, down to his feet. Then they ran away across the floor of the Oval Office, leaving the President half naked. He seemed not to notice, so busy was he rehearsing how to bend the world to his will.
So off they ran, cheekily, these trousers and pants, out of the Oval Office. They explored the White House, upstairs and downstairs, until they found an open window, out of which they flew. Their destination was a nearby TV studio, where they were scheduled to give an interview on a current affairs programme, with me as the interviewer.
As this Disneyesque spectacle unfolded, I heard a sound track playing, as if in a film. It featured the Scottish singer, Andy Stewart, singing about a certain Donald, not Trump, but a fellow from Skye, who was also trouserless:
Let the wind blow high, let the wind blow low,
Through the streets in my kilt I’ll go.
All the lassies say, “Hello!
Donald, where’s your troosers?”
I heard myself asking Trousers and Pants how they rated Trump’s performance in this top job of his. It never occurred to me, oddly, to question the very idea of clothes having opinions and being able to speak. an opinion on this subject, but without being asked, they told me how and why.
“We know him better than most,” said Trousers and Pants, speaking in unison, three octaves apart, as if they were a bassoon and a piccolo respectively. “You might say that we are undercover agents. We hear everything that he says, on-camera and off, in public and private, whether loud or under his breath. We sense his changes of temperature, of pulse, of breathing. We register the ups and downs, the zigs and zags, the fits and starts of his thoughts and moods. We feel them in our stitches and seams, and most of all in our elastics, our gussets and elastics, as he looms above us, voicing his thoughts, as when he parades himself in front of a MAGA audience, out-clowning – and combining in one act – the personas of Popov (the USSR’s Sunshine Clown) and Penniwise (Steven King’s fictional child-killing clown, also known as It)”.
This reference by Trousers and Pants to Trump as a clown, or rather as two clowns, prompted a cross-cutting in my dream from the TV studio back to the Oval Office. There he stood, the subject of our scrutiny, still bare-arsed and still not knowing it. His face was changed now, his fake tan having been daubed with thick white grease-paint combined with red. Popov’s benign physog featured on the left side, and Penniwise’s leering one featured on the right.
In dreams, as all dreamers know, things morph pretty quickly from one shape to another, from one mood to another, like clouds in their un-making and re-making. So with my Trump and his double-face as I slept, more and more uneasily, more and more unhappily, more and more unnerved by what my subconscious was throwing up.
The common elements unifying the Popov and the Penniwise halves of Trump’s face, namely the bulbous red nose and the lips, swiftly coalesced; then they dissolved into a close-up of a bleeding wound, then to a volcano’s seething vent just before erupting; then they enlarged to a bombed and burning city. The sound track that I heard as these images unfolded was that horribly grandiose music by Wagner that Francis Ford Coppola used so well in his Apocalypse Now, in the helicopter sequence of this film-portrayal of the Vietnam War.
Sitting here now at my keyboard writing this account of my dream, I can rise above it, or step aside from it, and so try to see what it means. I think, in my wide-awake state, that Popov and Penniwise are respectively the Hyde and Jekyll of Trump’s political nature.
Trump is Hyde when he coos euphorically about the prosperity and the peace – the “quick peace” – that his Trumpian golden age will usher in; and he is Jekyll when he threatens “hell to pay” or things getting “pretty ugly” for those who assume to go against him.
Normally, I remember only visual images from dreams, but in this case the very words that Trousers and Pants spoke impressed themselves on me to the extent of still being in my mind when I woke up. I wrote them down there and then, for what they may be worth, and now copy them into this account. They constitute the main matter as well as the summing-up of this obscene mash-up that composed itself as I slept, slap-stick comedy combining with real-life tragedy, leaving me feeling sick.
In answer to my invitation to give their verdict on Trump’s legacy, with one voice, their low and high, their bass and soprano, my interviewees replied:
He is a guilty man, or child-man, rather. He is a fantasist, a blow-hard, a routine liar, a petty holder of grudges, a thug, a sedulous self-admirer, a master of incompetence, a megalomaniac a coercive controller on a national and international scale, a latter-day Nero or Caligula. He is the spirit of Capitalism incarnate, therefore reckless, unfettered and destructive. He is a clear and present danger to allies and enemies alike. He is hell-bent on perverting the course of history.
