Talking Quixotic Trumpism with Cervantes and his Homies Stephen Colbert and Sacha Cohen
That the right-wing media would resort to glorified images of Donald Trump as the anointed crusader of the silent majority victimized by hordes of colored invaders and lefty traitors intent on raping America is of course not particularly surprising. But when the American crusader image of Trump morphs with the iconic Spanish mock-hero of Cervantes’s masterpiece -as in Ben Garrison’s cartoon “Don Trump Quixote”-, well, let’s just say the irony is lost on him, a simple fact that led to a string of trolling tweets duly documented in mainstream media outlets, including in a Salon piece: “@KevinlyFather Does Ben Garrison not realize that Don Quixote was completely insane and is the literary exemplar of futilely raging against an imaginary foe? @jonficke, Reasons why a liberal arts education that includes ‘classics’ is important now needs to include: ‘So you don’t radically misinterpret ‘Don Quixote’ and get dragged by the entire internet.’”
While these tweets make excellent points about the well of ignorance behind the cartoon, as a Cervantes specialist, I would underscore a somewhat different but equally unintended revelation of “Don Trump Quixote.” In a nutshell, if Garrison and his right-wing allies don’t see the irony here is because irony is not really their thing; heck, irony might actually be their (not so imaginary) enemy. Quick reality check: who can name one modern U.S. president who made it a point to skip the White House Press Corps dinner? That’s right, for all the bluster of his reality-TV president persona and his public bragging about his expert handling of the press, going back to The Art of the Deal (1987), your self-proclaimed “favorite president” cowers sheepishly before the old enemy of strongmen demagogues and authoritarians: irony, the Cervantine “instrument against stupor” dreaded by fascist ideologues like Ernesto Giménez Caballero. For “the Spanish Goebbels” -as he was known in fascist circles-, the devastating irony of Cervantes’s masterpiece was the writer’s treasonous weapon against Spain’s Imperial dream, an awakening pill (to go with a Matrix metaphor) that threatened to end “the greatness and adventures of Spain” (Genius of Spain: Exaltations for a national resurrection of Spain and the world, 1932, p. 40). This coming from a fascist pioneer who was himself thoroughly invested in making Spain great again, a first step in his messianic call to world resurrection. His was a visionary Spain First worldview in search of a fascist crusader, a role that the future dictator Francisco Franco would be happy to fulfill, as Ana Laguna has recently reminded us. The cover of her 2021 book is a good illustration of why Spanish fascists feared the irony of Cervantes’s masterpiece, with Don Quixote charging at the grotesquely oversized and glorified mirror image of Franco himself.
Today, the Cervantine irony that 20th century fascism needed to guard against is alive and well in the satirical brand of two of Cervantes’s closest homies and disciples, Stephen Colbert and Sacha Baron Cohen. I am talking about the Colbert Report persona who authored I am America (And So Can You!) (2007) and America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t (2012) ahead of America’s latest Greatness that never wasn’t in Trump’s MAGA merchandising; and I am also talking about the Borat persona resurrected by Cohen for the 2020 election cycle as a comedic act of warning, or as he put it in a New York Times interview with Maureen Dowd, “to ring the alarm bells [that] democracy is in peril.”
Colbert’s legendary 2006 roasting of his “hero” President Bush explains Trump’s own cowardice. Who would forget these nuggets: “Guys like us, we are not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We are not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That’s where the truth lies; right down here, in the gut. Do you know that you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. Now, I know that some of you are going to say I looked it up and that’s not true. That’s because you looked it up in a book. Next time look it up in your gut […] The greatest thing about this man is that he is steady, you know where he stands; he believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change. This man’s beliefs never will.”
As I look back at this iconic moment of comedic history, I can’t help but think that Colbert’s caricature of President Bush continues to shed light on what is effectively a crescendo of anti-smarts, anti-expertise, facts-be-damned attitudes that have been poisoning our political sphere and civic society for decades. Colbert’s hero president is as immune to inconvenient facts as Don Quixote is to the bruising reality of windmills and herds of livestock. While the fact-resistant stance of W. and his imperial presidency may pale in comparison with the fact-bulldozing authoritarianism of Trump and Trumpism, we need to keep in mind that this is all part of a historical continuum of 21st century Republican politics whose tenets had been boldly spelled out by an influential Republican strategist (eventually identified as Karl Rove) back in the summer of 2002: “We are an Empire now and when we act we create our own reality.”
As for Cohen’s own lavishing praise of the Quixotic president, how about his October 2020 twitter feed devoted to Borat’s exaltations of Premiere Trump true leader? “Trump would have leave hospital sooner, but he nice and did not want to hurt covid’s feelings. Premiere Trump true leader –he have prove himself stronger than more than 200,000 of his American subjects. Trump delivered powerful message to 20,000 of his supporters then told them to go back to their communities and spread what they got from him.” Isn’t Borat’s string of pre-election tweets the perfect (preemptive) response to Garrison’s cartoon in its devastating exposure of the naked emperor behind the image of Crusader Trump? I would argue that Cohen’s “premiere true leader” is the equivalent of Colbert’s “hero President,” updated for the times. These two instances of comedic genius strike me as particularly effective illustrations of the power of irony as a weapon (perhaps the best weapon) against authoritarian mythology.
So what’s the takeaway here for our post-Trump world? Youngkin’s win in the Virginia gubernatorial race this past Fall was built on a lie cooked up in Fox News and spread in Trumpist circles: that Virginia public schools are teaching kids something called Critical Race Theory. Republican leaders are already talking about using the same playbook for the 2022 election. Never mind that Critical Race Theory is not taught in schools anywhere in the country or that those same republican leaders don’t seem to know what CRT is. When they talk CRT and “parent’s rights” in the context of schoolboard fights, this is all about exerting control over education, history, and ultimately reality itself. Even as Trump is no longer president, this kind of Trumpism is here to stay because it is “native” to our disinformation-plagued media environment. Fact checking approaches to this kind of politics often miss the point. This is not a war that can be fought on the facts alone. As we travel deeper into the reality-on-demand digital age that has produced the most effective and far-reaching disinformation-spreading machines in history, from Fox News to Facebook/Meta to Twitter, let’s not underestimate the power of irony to expose counterfeits and combat demagoguery. There’s surely a reason why Spanish fascist ideologues feared Don Quixote and why cultural critics like Walter Benjamin embraced the Cervantine strategy against toxic political mythologies. Benjamin was explicitly discussing the illuminating power of Don Quixote when he wrote: “The magic of true critique appears precisely when all counterfeit comes into contact with the light and melts away. What remains is the authentic: it is ashes. We laugh at it” (quoted in Un-Deceptions, 2021, p128). For more on this, check out Un-Deceptions (2021) and What Would Cervantes Do? (2022).
Referencias
Castillo, David. Un-Deceptions: Cervantine Strategies for the Disinformation Age. Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, 2021. Print.
Castillo, David and William Egginton. What Would Cervantes Do? Navigating Post-Truth with Spanish Baroque Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022. Print.
Colbert, Stephen. America Again: Re-Becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2012. Print.
Colbert, Stephen. I am America (And So Can You!). New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2007. Print.
Colbert’s Roasting of President Bush. 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSE_saVX_2A Web.
Dowd, Maureen. “Sacha Baron Cohen: This time he is serious.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/17/style/sacha-baron-cohen-maureen-dowd-interview.html Web.
Giménez Caballero, Ernesto. Genio de España: exaltaciones a una resurreccion nacional y del mundo. Madrid: La Gaceta Literaria, 1932. Print.
Laguna, Ana. Cervantes, the Golden Age, and the Battle for Cultural Identity in 20th-Century Spain. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Print.
Reed, Brad. “Right-wing cartoonist draws Trump as Don Quixote –but draws mockery for missing book’s point.” https://www.salon.com/2021/07/09/right-wing-cartoonist-draws-trump-as-don-quijote--but-draws-mockery-for-missing-books-point_partner/ Web.
Seipel, Brooke. “Sacha Baron Cohen joins twitter as Borat to mock Trump.” https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/520563-sacha-baron-cohen-joins-twitter-as-borat-to-mock-trump Web.
Suskind, Ron. “Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush.” https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/faith-certainty-and-the-presidency-of-george-w-bush.html Web.
Trump, Donald J. with Tony Schwartz. Trump. The Art of the Deal. New York: Random House, 1987. Print.
