“Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”

Mark Twain said that. It’s a good line, a plainspoken truth that neatly undercuts every grandiose pose you might come across in life. Vanity needs puncturing; Twain’s ten-word needle does the trick.

Clearly, however, Mark Twain never met Donald Trump.

One cannot imagine Trump blushing about anything. He is, literally, shameless. This is a strength, not a weakness, of Trump’s ferocious public persona. It is very hard for normal people, who are endowed by nature with a proper and healthy sense of personal fallibility and the capacity to recognize when we fall short of our own expectations, to imagine, much less understand, Donald Trump’s armor of shamelessness. It’s mythical. He is, every day, like a man in a fable, a man who is living forever in that marvelous moment when, in the high and dazzling glory of falling in love with the woman of his dreams, he truly believes that nothing she does is anything less than wondrous. Perfect. No one can say a word to make him doubt the heavenly magnificence that is his beloved. But with Trump, it’s not a woman. It’s him.

I think, in this light, of President Richard Nixon, who was so different psychologically, and paid for it. Nixon’s squirmy, sweaty self-loathing announced itself in every public appearance he made. He was trying too hard his whole life long. His mother was a devout Quaker deeply suspicious of worldly perils like dancing and smoking, and she drilled into Dick (who once, at ten years old, signed a letter to her “Your devoted dog”) the belief that character is destiny. Years later, when President Nixon was forced by the Supreme Court of the United States to turn over the tape recordings of his conversations in the Oval Office, he was utterly mortified because the American people heard how he talked behind closed doors. The cursing, the snarling hatreds, the bitchiness, the raging sense of inferiority. More than anything else, the cursing. He was broken by what the public could see and hear for themselves, and by how his fragile, serpentine self was revealed, naked, before the public.

“The President was deeply shaken—not only by the legal implications of the tapes, but by the exposure of his private conversations,” Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser, wrote. “He feared, correctly, that the country would see a side of him he had spent his life concealing.”

What does Donald Trump conceal from the world? The Trump family is buckraking up billions of dollars around the world, leveraging the power of the presidency to line their pockets, and they are basically doing it in plain sight. Trump is the most brazenly corrupt president in our history—and he brags about it! He is also the only president to attack a legitimate election with a relentless campaign of lies, and ultimately of force, an attempted coup that was only stopped by the bravery of the Capitol Police and the 2020 leaders of the Department of Defense and the US military. Yet somehow Trump has transformed that unparalleled crime into a righteous rallying cry for “truth” and “justice,” determined to bend history itself to vindicate his despicable claim on the presidency in 2020. Tens of millions of Americans have taken up his cause.

As I say, Trump’s imperviousness to shame is an essential aspect of his political strength. The irony is that this political superpower is born out of the desperate vanity of a weakling. He is a man who simply cannot bear to think of himself as anything but the greatest of God’s creations, whose every word and every deed are the greatest of all American history, of all world history, and he must be constantly reaffirmed in that infantile fantasy every second of his life. When he is not, when events or his own errors lead to setbacks, Trump is not humbled or embarrassed or thoughtful. He is furious. He rages. He seeks revenge, lies with savage defiance, and shifts blame. No one around him is safe. That is why every month the nation is subjected to those grotesque, North Korea-style cabinet meetings, where the grown men and women who lead the Departments and agencies of our government grovel and crawl before him rhetorically, abasing themselves before the world. All because of one man’s vanity.

Look at him in the photo above, putting a medal on himself for “winning” the comical “FIFA Peace Prize,” a truly pointless little treat invented to appease the man-child who is hosting the World Cup. It’s transparent. And embarrassing for our country.

Nevertheless, millions of his supporters love it. Every bit of it. Some of them believe the buncombe; they’re conned by the Trump Show. But for many others, I suspect, Trump offers something darker and more permissive. He grants them leave—moral leave—to stop restraining themselves. To sneer instead of argue. To dismiss decency as weakness. To treat cruelty as candor, and contempt as honesty. In Trump’s world, talk of “norms,” “fairness,” or “compassion” is for suckers and losers. Christianity becomes a tribal badge rather than a moral discipline; patriotism becomes a performance emptied of its founding truths. The result is not strength, but license: a politics that flatters resentment, rewards aggression, and teaches people that their worst impulses are not only acceptable, but virtuous.

So let us turn to the old, solid truths to be found in great poetry.

Poets have written a lot about vanity, usually in love poems or satires. That kind of personal vanity, while corrosive, is common, more a foible (or “venial sin”) than a crime. But the vanity of powerful men has always been recognized as something else, something far more dangerous.

“The principle of despotism is fear; but a despotic prince is himself governed by vanity,” the French philosopher Montesquieu wrote three hundred years ago.

W.H. Auden understood that, and he grasped the consequences. In the opening lines of his great poem, “September 1, 1939,” written on the day World War II began, Auden saw that Europe had been led once again into catastrophe by the mad vanity of the dictators thirsting for conquest, but also by the vain evasions of feckless democratic governments.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published"I sit in one of the divesOn Fifty-second StreetUncertain and afraidAs the clever hopes expireOf a low dishonest decade:Waves of anger and fearCirculate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth,Obsessing our private lives;The unmentionable odour of deathOffends the September night...

I and the public knowWhat all schoolchildren learn,Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knewAll that a speech can sayAbout Democracy,And what dictators do,The elderly rubbish they talkTo an apathetic grave;Analysed all in his book,The enlightenment driven away,The habit-forming pain,Mismanagement and grief:We must suffer them all again."

W.B. Yeats grasped the same dire consequences of the vanity of powerful men—and the dangerous timidity of too many others—in some of the most famous lines in poetry written in English, from “The Second Coming”:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedThe blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.

But let Percy Bysshe Shelley have the final word. Shelley (who, surprisingly, makes his second appearance in “The Sunday Poem”) seems to have written this great poem in a cold fever of judgment. All the lies, he asks of vain and powerful men, all the shamelessness, all the grasping and hoarding and self-glorifying—what is it really worth?

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedI met a traveller from an antique land,Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;And on the pedestal, these words appear:My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal Wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away.

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