Child King

For all his strongman rhetoric, a President Trump would be much more likely to function as a figurehead.

He’s simply unequipped—intellectually and temperamentally—to be anything more. He has no clue how governance actually works, no interest in policy and no attention span. He doesn’t even have ideas. He has, at most, impulses.

The notion that Trump would play any serious role in formulating policy objectives or seeking to shepherd them through the legislative process is absurd. . . .

If he does make it to the White House, Trump will assume the role of a child king, allowed to dress up for state dinners, issue decrees and ogle the wives of foreign leaders. . . .

Ultimately, Trump represents the most perilous qualities one can imagine in a potential leader: sloth, grandiosity, ignorance and a towering arrogance that allows him to indulge in childish cruelties.

–Steve Almond, “Worse Than Your Worse Fears: Donald Trump Won’t Be a Tyrant—He’ll Be a Child King, Which is Far More Frightening”

In a Salon article published six days before the election of the forty-fifth president of the United States, Steve Almond warned that Donald Trump will be a “child king” if elected, a prospect he suggests is far more frightening than our worst imaginings about a Trump presidency. The hyperbole speaks volumes about how the figure of the child is constructed in American culture. Not only is the child here constructed as immature, clueless, impulsive, and sexually perverse but also as a subject that cannot maintain complete control over his life: Trump will only be allowed to dress up, issue decrees, and ogle the wives of foreign leaders; likewise, “[s]ome poor lawyer would have to explain to Trump, gently, that he couldn’t actually do” the things he has declared he will do should he be elected—setting off nuclear weapons, for example, or “stealing oil from sovereign nations and forcing NATO countries to pay the U.S. protection money” (Almond). The problem, of course, is that as president Trump could do many of the things he has promised, a fact conspicuously absent from Almond’s article and yet one that might make the spectre of Trump as child king truly horrifying. Ramping up the terror of this spectre is Trump’s own confidence in his intelligence: his brain is one that “knows more than the generals” (Almond). Almond’s use of the child-king trope paints a picture of Trump as a lazy, grandiose, ignorant, arrogant, and overconfident dictator who will “indulge in childish cruelties” as president.

This image of Trump recalls the teenage king of HBO’s Game of Thrones: Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson; see fig. 1) does whatever he wants to whomever he wants, no matter the consequences, but, paradoxically perhaps, given his own vulnerability as an adolescent ruler, he reserves his worst cruelties for those even more vulnerable than him, especially young, unmarried women. If he is “childish,” it is because he carries many of the markers we associate with white male childhood in North America, the same markers that Almond attributes to Trump: he neither knows nor cares how governance actually works; he has a short attention span; and he is impulsive and overindulged, not to mention lazy, ignorant, and arrogant. From his first appearance in season 1 until his untimely death in season 4, Joffrey remains—to borrow Almond’s words about Trump—a “blustering adolescent, incapable of moral reasoning, of discerning between his feelings and the facts.” Will Trump, as Almond warns us, be a real-life Joffrey, all the more frightening because he resembles the child? Is it really Trump’s childishness that makes the prospect of him as president so frightening to his detractors? Does likening Trump to a “child king” highlight the danger of a Trump presidency in important ways? What do we gain by supplementing “king” with “child”? Why rely on the construct of child at all in our efforts to show that a man who has become known for his xenophobia is unfit to be a world leader?

I want to tell a second story in my own post-US election attempt...