The Great Man Theory

What animated force directs today's White House?

A vision for the future (Auction Lot 271: UPA Mr. Magoo Celluloid Picture)

In a recent Instagram post, author and Trumpologist Michael Wolff revealed a dynamic inside the White House that’s straight from the post-war era. Of TV cartoons.

Wolff said that when he asked his trusted source in the current administration what he and his colleagues were afraid of, he answered “a recession, a Russian conflict with NATO, a spread of infectious disease, a degrading of government services across the board” — topics on which even the apparatchiks are apparently as clear-eyed as anyone else. 

So, Wolff mused, WTF? 

These people are “perfectly aware that Donald Trump is on a train heading toward the wall,” he observed, that the president is “fundamentally self-destructive.” But as this train hurtles toward that wall, he said, they recall a thousand self-inflicted disasters the man somehow survived. 

So even as they’re thinking, “‘Oh my God, we’re going to lose, the country is going to lose, everybody is going to lose,’” Wolff says, some kind of nostalgic phantasmagoria floods the minds of these best positioned to restrain or oppose him. “They go back to looking at Donald Trump as…a miraculous magical being.” 

This is indeed a being that incited a deadly insurrection against the US government and not only escaped all legal and political consequences but also the assassin bullets that killed one person, critically wounded two more, and made contact with his damned head — yet was somehow allowed to totter off into the next episode.

But are these signs of Divine providence, in what would have to be God’s most inscrutable plan since erasing Job’s entire family? Or does this curious chain of events actually reveal a different governing spirit at work, a blithe, jovial presence now perceptible in certain 48-point headlines (“Gulf of Mexico Changed to Gulf Of America,” “High-Level Military Chat Includes Journalist”) and in sunny, rambling utterances recently given to reporters in legacy media?

I can’t be the first to notice that America has entered its Late Magoo stage.

I am of course referring to Mr. Quincy Magoo, the wealthy, jovial cartoon retiree who speaks in the bluff millionaire voice of Jim “Thurston Howell III” Backus, and whose 26 episodes pursued exactly one comedic trope: a rambling myopic senior escapes the chaos he rains down around him.

Originally aired from 1960 to 1962, these ran to workmanlike gag reels like “Safety Magoo” (Magoo attempts to pass a driving test) and “Zoo Magoo” (goes to class reunion but ends up in a zoo) but many show a fair amount of sublimated Cold War terror, like “Yachtsman Magoo” (tries to go fishing but boards an ammo boat), “Mis-Guided Missile” (bumbles way into the rocket capsule at Cape Canaveral), “Lost Vegas” (leads a family excursion onto a military base), and “High Spy Magoo” (mistakes a bomb factory for a supermarket and, per one online synopsis “accidentally creates W.W. III!”). This last airing 19 months before the Cuban Missile Crisis.

While fairly unwatchable today — and featuring a Chinese houseboy character that makes Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi seem positively woke — these cartoons managed to engrave their title character deeply into America’s numinous realms.

While phrases like “Magoo syndrome” or “Magoo phenomenon” have floated around the business world for a while, their connotation of mere senility or managerial obliviousness wastes the metaphysical implications of this character.

Mr. Magoo signifies an extreme and even infectious denial, a spiritual myopia that acts as a protective shield around the sufferer but not its victims. At this stage, he’s not so much a character or narrative tendency, but a valence, a phenomenology — a vast subatomic physics of will, act, and outcome. 

A dawning awareness of this might be expressing itself obliquely.

Podcaster Ben Meiselas observes that “Trump keeps zigzagging on tariffs like a drunk driver with the wheel of the global economy.” Senator Chris Murphy tells Kristi Noem that her Trump-directed “myopia about the border…has shattered many of this country’s most important defenses.” 

And sure enough, all those acts of Trump’s first 100 days — mistaking Fox News hosts for military leaders, firing inspectors of nuclear weapons, blaming Ukraine for being invaded, driving the economy off a cliff — start to play as beats in a dreamy stroll through an active construction site: onto a girder just as a crane lifts it from the ground, along its length as it rotates rising above the city, then off its end just as the beam aligns with the upper floor of a skeletal skyscraper, and then merrily along the railing, knocking off workmen, sending bricks plummeting onto passersby.

Looking back, there’s a creepy inevitability to all this.

Mr. Quincy Magoo was born in 1949, just three years after our president, as if called to life by that karmic disruption in Queens, New York. Since Trump once publicly denied knowledge of who Mr. Magoo even is, we can assume not only that he knows full well who Mr. Magoo is, but that this figure plays a foundational role in his shadow self.

He was invented by director Millard Kaufman and pioneering animator John Hubley (father of Yo La Tengo’s Georgia Hubley), and initially conceived as a mean-spirited reactionary, though he was soon softened into a bumbling senior citizen with squint lines for eyes and one foot into his second childhood.

In this sense, his evolution was opposite that of the “Donald Trump” in “The Apprentice,” who producers initially scripted as a clear-eyed and avuncular Daddy Warbucks type, before the show’s success emboldened its star to demand that he be allowed bring his real personality to the role, which revealed a tone-deaf nastiness whose poor ratings brought a swift course correction and a dozen seasons of runway to launch the star’s next act.

As a political figure, Trump began posing for Daumier or Thomas Nast from the start, as if basing an entire political persona on vintage caricatures of folly and greed. He’s a plainly preposterous man. 

But just as obviously, the myopic-kook critique fails to account for the viciousness, corruption, and sadism of his administration — which may be one extremely bleak outcome of a profoundly damaged soul transmogrifying into a cartoon.

That’s a time-tested path to social imperviousness and global power: exceed a satirist’s wildest imaginings to such an extent that you enter the liberating sphere of two-dimensional animation — with all the freedom from norms, restraints, and physical laws this implies. 

You can see certain leaders, like Nigel Farage, pursuing a similar tactic. The xenophobic leader of Britain’s newly resurgent hard-right party, Reform UK, Farage has ugly enough politics to move the otherwise sensitive comedians on BBC4’s “News Quiz” to describe his appearance as an American’s offensive caricature of a fuggy, wall-eyed, dissipated Brit.  

“He is Toad from Toad Hall, isn’t he?” Irish comic Andrew Maxwell cracked on the panel, his reference to the wealthy and compulsively reckless amphibian motorist from Wind in the Willows getting us one step closer to the relevant cartoon avatar.

Political theorists say the American Century officially ended in 2016 with Trump’s election. In a way, this validates Hegel’s iteration of the Great Man theory, in which certain historic figures channel the will of the World-Spirit, not by creating the future but revealing it. 

Which means that it wasn’t just our dumb luck that caused us to have not one but two Magoo administrations in quick succession. 

Joe Biden clearly had no idea that the office he campaigned for had been so transformed by its previous occupant, a force that left American governance awash in his own disordering residual field. 

When special counsel Robert Hur recommended against prosecuting President Biden for mishandling classified material, his infamous description of “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” was one of the first modern statements to Magoo-ify a commander in chief. 

Which was unkind, ageist, and wildly disproportionate, but, during Biden’s blinking, dreamy appearance in the debate, impossible to forget.

And again, we look back at the abrupt repeal of covid guidelines followed by the approval-crashing withdrawal from Afghanistan followed by the appointment of Merrick Garland to slow-walk Trump’s prosecution as beats in another merry misadventure among speeding cars, wild animals, power tools, and explosives.

Finally, if too late, Joe Biden did the very un-Magoo-like thing and withdrew from presidential contention. But the great wheel of history had turned. Perhaps, the office itself had been altered to fit only one bulky, orange-hued, all-too-energetic form. 

After running on a platform to end poverty, Herbert Hoover ignored his senior economists’ advice and signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, causing U.S. exports and global trade to plummet and turning an economic crisis into the Great Depression that now defines the phrase “Herbert Hoover.” 

This will never happen to Donald Trump, to whom fate has assigned the role of schlemiel but never schlimazel. So empowered and freewheeling is his sauntering path of destruction — through the economy, federal institutions, human rights, the rule of law, civil society, global alliances, environmental survival, truth, dignity, humanity — that it will be impossible to lay any particular disaster at his feet.  

His victory will be the same as Mr. Magoo’s, the same as the figurative debtor who, in owing the bank not $20,000 but $20 million, thereby owns the bank. It’s not the victory of a man but of a force, a sociopolitical condition. 

Is Mr. Magoo the patriarchy? White privilege? Is he America in the World? Sauntering into this or that foreign territory to brush the switch of a buzzsaw, toss a cigar into a powder keg, then totter away with a distant smile?

Clearly, he’s not the Donald Trump who acts through executive orders, schemes, lies, and incitements to hatred and violence. Or the one who spews tireless streams of bilious, deranged social media posts, and who, as Raymond Chandler said of “dames,” lies about everything “for practice.” 

But he is the one we see on TV these days. Pointing at all the invisible heads of lions and tigers on his trophy wall. Mistaking a ruinous sales tax imposed on Americans for a heroic blow against global foes, or the Declaration of Independence for a greeting card. Making daffy, self-delighted quips about reopening Alcatraz, and then practically offering the old episode-closing tagline, that amused, half-in-the-bag toast to self, “Oh Trump, you’ve done it again.” 

And more to the point, Mr. Magoo is clearly the Trump that his staff and supporters semi-consciously see when they take in all that he’s doing, see where it’s heading, and hope his plot armor will shield them too to when the inevitable happens. To everyone else.