If Lemony Snicket Described Donald Trump

It is a strange fact of this world that the buildings people live in often reflect what they are like. For example, I once knew a woman who lived in a very impractical home shaped like a shoe, and who suffered from perpetual verrucas, due to damp from an ineffective drainage system shaped to look like shoelaces. It is therefore not surprising that we sometimes use metaphors about buildings to say what somebody is like. So a person who is very learned and is a professor of math might be said to live in an ivory tower. Rather than being a tall building made of elephant's tusk, this means that the person in question inhabits a rarefied atmosphere, words which here indicate that they are so clever they have become removed from reality.

President Trump did indeed have a tower named after him, and he was quite removed from reality, but no one could say whether he was clever. Although Trump Tower was not a metaphor, it could be turned into one. For instance, somebody might say that the giant, glass construction was an evidence of his vainglory, a word which here means 'ruthless self-obsession and desire to take over the world'.

If it is unfair to judge people on the basis of the houses they live in, it is even more insensitive to criticize them for how they look. Polite, respectable children such as Violet, Klaus and Sunny would never have said that Count Olaf was evil because he looked evil. Yet he did look villainous, because he enjoyed playing the part of the villain. This being so, however, he went to great lengths to appear not to be a villain in order to fool people over the course of his evil schemes.

President Trump, the case in point, was a very bad man, but he cultivated the air of a permanently affronted toad. What we would like from this world in which people act in the ways we expect from their clothes and their houses is for villains to disguise themselves ostentatiously, a word which here means 'in ridiculous wigs and with make-up that fools no-one except those with responsibility for the Baudelaire orphans'. We should like our villains to go about their evil plans in underhand manners helped by a troupe of immoral actors. We should like them to reveal the plan gleefully to its victims, and for it to just barely fail at the last minute, so that they can once again escape the clutches of justice and leave the Baudelaire orphans with a glimmer of hope, even if that glimmer of hope is like the memory of an ember fading in the fireplace of a beloved mansion that was all-too tragically burned to the ground.

What we want from our villains is that moment when the scales may fall from the eyes of those who were up-to-now taken in.

President Trump did not need to disguise himself to engage in his peculiar brand of villainy. The suit into which he fitted like a plasticine model of himself was one he was probably born into. Everything that seemed ridiculous about him was in fact essentially him, no matter how improbable it seemed. For this reason, there was no moment at which the fake moustache could fall off, so to speak, and for the evil scheme to suddenly become apparent to all. He had made himself successful by a curious show of telling everyone how evil he was, so that he was like a magician who tells you what the trick they will perform is, then fools you anyway. Now nobody could grab at the side of his face and tug to show that it was really a convincing rubber mask. It no longer had any effect to point out, rationally, why his whole rationale was evil. To use one of the real metaphors of which we have just spoken, what seemed to be his wig was, in fact, unconvincing hair.

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