In the year 1920, the War to End All Wars had been wrapped up at Versailles and the Spanish flu epidemic was over. A new decade was dawning, perhaps promising more than the previous decade had delivered. William Butler Yeats published “The Second Coming.”

Contrary to what some might have thought on seeing the title, the poem had nothing to do with the return of Christ, and it was certainly not a celebration. It was a grim, dark assessment of a world falling apart. According to Yeats, “mere anarchy is loosed upon the land,” and “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.”

For more than a century, people interested in such things have interpreted the poem. They note that Yeats may have been seeing beyond the immediate good news into a darker present and even darker future. Versailles did, in fact, set the stage for World War II. The Irish War of Independence raged. Large segments of the American population were feeling the beginnings of the Great Depression. And “the rough beast slouches towards Bethlehem.”

All of that may be true; however, I believe that Yeats was (or should have been) talking about Trump and his second coming. The images of the poem fit the facts of the presidency.

In his first term, Trump was mostly an embarrassment, but, prior to the COVID pandemic, not really a danger. He had his moments, such as when he essentially dared North Korea to bomb us, bragging that he had a “bigger button.” But, thanks to adult supervision provided by people such as McGahn, Mattis, and Kelly, most of his more dangerous impulses were headed off before they did real damage.

But the adults have left the room, and now it’s fully staffed with sycophants who rush to tell Trump what he wants to hear. His spokesblonde bends the truth into a pretzel to justify grabbing people off the street, his department heads fire people who have the skills to keep us safe, and they defund programs that might prevent our country from going through another deadly pandemic.

He has appointed a person with no taste (himself) to be in charge of our most important cultural institutions and a man with no science to head our most important scientific institutions. The person in charge of our counter terrorist programs is man whose previous experience is in lawn care and who is slightly older than my youngest grandchild.

His immigration police are arresting people at a record rate, including some who are here legally and some who are going to scheduled hearings or mandated meetings. The people doing the arresting wear masks, display no ID, and refuse to identify themselves.

It all stems from Trump’s mindset, one that he recently voiced out loud: I can do anything I want to. I’m the president. (Nixon said something similar to David Frost in an interview and was proved wrong. However, we were a better country, and the Republicans were a better party back then.)

Among the several things engendered, inspired, and enabled by the Trump presidencies has been a grim sort of game: To what period in the past does the Trump administration want to drag us back. There are many defensible candidates.

For instance, it might be pre-1964, before the Civil Rights Act, when companies and individuals didn’t even have to try to make up excuses for their discrimination. It might have been around 1922, with the rise of the KKK, although this time they wear camo clothes and tactical vests instead of robes and hoods. Or it might be the one Trump started threatening us with this year: The Golden Age. That was a period of great wealth inequality, massive poverty, nonexistent worker protections, and overt voter suppression.  

Although we can make a case for any of these, as well as for any number of books that fit the current situation (Brave New World, 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, It Can’t Happen Here, The Plot Against America, and selected parts of Revelation), I think all of these are too current and possibly too optimistic. Presidential utterances this week made me think we were going much further back to the beginnings of far worse consequences.

His statement made me think of Louis XIV, who is reported—more or less reliably—to have said, “L’etat. C’est moi.” I am the State.

And there are some similarities between that time and this. In the middle of the 17th century, Louis XIV shucked his advisors, said that nobody did anything without his personal approval, and set the country on the course that about a century later resulted in the French Revolution.

And that’s the way Trump is thinking, forgetting or ignoring that France was moving from a feudal system to an absolute monarchy while the US is—at least at this moment—a constitutional republic, and he’s supposed to be bound by the Constitution, laws, and checks and balances.

There are some similarities between Trump and Louis: the funny hair style, the love of opulence, the need to grab the reins of the nation’s culture. The differences are more dramatic. Louis XIV, for instance, was smart. No matter what your opinion of absolute monarchy might be, it’s impossible to deny that he was an effective ruler. In his seven-decade reign he waged and won wars, expanded France’s territories and influence, and pulled a collection of fiefdoms into a unified country. It took Louis, Louis, Louis (XIV, XV, and XVI) to destroy the country, bringing about revolution, death and destruction. Trump may accomplish this in a matter of years.

Yeats’s poem reeks of inevitability. He says, in a line that seems all too appropriate to our situation that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

I believe that in those lines Yeats has given us a clue about what we must do to protect our democracy. It is not a matter of removing Trump from office via the 25^th Amendment or some other Constitutional process. If Trump is gone, Vance is president. If Vance is gone, Mike Johnson is president. And so it goes, down through the entire cabinet.

The answer is in the midterms. Even with a compliant Supreme Court, Trump won’t be able to overcome both houses of Congress determined to hold him in check.

If we fail, we will continue to slouch toward…what?

Pray for the Republic