A Hundred Classics to Get Me Through a Hundred Days of Trump
On X, a post recounting this exchange got 1.7 million views, as if catching Patel in this dumb lie constituted a meaningful win. The same day that Patel appeared before the Senate, a meeting of the Democratic National Committee began in Maryland, where officials squabbled over rules, were flattered by MSNBC hosts, and did not dare suggest that Biden ought not to have remained in the race for so long. The Senate subsequently confirmed Patel, on a 51–49 party-line vote. Meanwhile, I read Penguin Little Black Classics No. 4, “On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts,” from 1827, by Thomas De Quincey, who observed that crime is often done badly but what an achievement when done well!
Did I feel guilty for taking refuge in my books? I did. Was it refuge? It was. “It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.”—No. 11, Yoshida Kenkō. Was seeking that comfort cowardly? It was. Was it also idiotic? Possibly. “The sun threatened to set before long, but he went on reading book spines with undiminished intensity. Lined up before him was not so much an array of books as the fin de siècle itself. Nietzsche, Verlaine, the Goncourt brothers, Dostoevsky, Hauptmann, Flaubert. . . .” No. 56, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, “The Life of a Stupid Man.”
No matter the emergency, I eventually gave up on reading the Little Black Classics in numerical order, chiefly because I kept misplacing them. Did I leave No. 13 on a train? What if I wanted to skip to No. 57? I started keeping a commonplace book, notes of my favorite lines. Also, certain events began to suggest certain books. After Trump declared that a first-of-its-kind multiyear report known as the National Nature Assessment had to be halted and could never be published, the report’s director, an environmental scientist named Phil Levin, e-mailed the hundred and fifty scientists on the project, “This work is too important to die.” I underlined two lines from No. 9, “Three Tang Dynasty Poets”: “Can I bear to leave these blue hills? / And the green stream—what of that?” On X, Musk called U.S.A.I.D. “evil” and a “viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America,” part of a wider withdrawal from global public-health commitments. A stop-work order for an H.I.V./AIDS treatment-and-prevention program was expected to lead to the deaths of half a million children in sub-Saharan Africa by 2030; another 2.8 million were projected to be orphaned. I picked up No. 88, a volume of stories by Mark Twain, including “The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Didn’t Come to Grief,” the tale of a very nasty little boy who, unlike those in all the storybooks, never pays the cost for all the terrible things he does: “And he grew up, and married, and raised a large family, and brained them all with an axe one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and rascality, and now he is the infernalest wickedest scoundrel in his native village, and is universally respected, and belongs to the Legislature.” I passed an old woman standing on the side of the road in a snowstorm, alone, carrying a poster that read “I DID NOT ELECT ELON MUSK.”
By February, Trump’s meme coin had earned him a hundred million dollars. I scribbled down a line from No. 6, John Ruskin’s “Traffic,” from 1864: “Because you are king of a nation, it does not follow that you are to gather for yourself all the wealth of that nation.” Trump said during a news conference that “the U.S. will take over the Gaza Strip.” In “Caligula,” No. 17, the Roman historian Suetonius reported that Caligula once said, “Bear in mind that I can do anything I want to anyone I want!” Trump banned the Associated Press from the White House press pool because it refused to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Trump tweeted, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Suetonius recounted that Caligula, “in his dealings with the Senate . . . made some of the highest officials run for miles beside his chariot, dressed in their togas, or wait in short linen tunics at the head or foot of his dining couch.” I pictured John Thune running at a trot in a MAGA hat, the requisite red tie flapping in the wind like a tiny kite.
Penguin invented the modern paperback in 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression. Soon afterward, cheap paperback classics could be found everywhere from newsstands to dime stores. In 1941, when W. H. Auden taught a course at the University of Michigan called Fate and the Individual in European Literature, with six thousand pages of reading, he assigned mostly Everyman and Modern Library editions. In March, 1942, three months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, a group of publishers, booksellers, and librarians led by William Warder Norton, of W. W. Norton, formed the Council on Books in Wartime. The next year, the council began printing Armed Services Editions of more than a thousand titles, snug enough to fit in a soldier’s hip pocket: Dickens, Voltaire, Melville. The council sold them to the U.S. military at cost, six cents a copy. (They were printed on presses designed for magazines—either Reader’s Digest size or pulp-magazine size—and so were printed “two up,” in pairs, one on top of the other, and then sliced in half. ) Over the next four years, the council distributed more than a hundred and twenty million copies to soldiers across the world. Infantrymen: one foot in front of the other, one day at a time, turn the page. Penguin started printing the Penguin Classics in 1946. It launched the Little Black Classics in 2015, offering an eighty-volume boxed set, not because of any emergency but to mark the occasion of Penguin’s eightieth birthday. Only a decade later did they become my Trump Administration Editions.
On March 4th, Trump delivered a joint address to Congress. He took stock:
Some Democrats in Congress apparently quite seriously considered carrying empty egg cartons to the address as a form of protest. I took the occasion to reread No. 25, Dante, “Circles of Hell”:
Meanwhile, Trump kept talking about making Canada the fifty-first state and refused to disavow the possibility of taking the Panama Canal by force. No. 82, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “The Body Politic”: “You will say that the despot guarantees civil peace to his subjects. Very well. But what do they gain thereby, if the wars into which his ambition draws them, his insatiable greed, and the humiliations of his rule inflict more desolation upon them than would their own disputes? What do they gain thereby, if that very peace is one of their miseries? One may live at peace even in a dungeon—is that enough to feel at ease there?”
But there was no civil peace, either. Musk started waving a chainsaw onstage, screeching with glee at cutting jobs. Students with visas were being hauled away, apprehended on sidewalks. I watched a video of a Tufts graduate student on a visa from Turkey being handcuffed by immigration officers, and reread No. 27, “The Nightingales Are Drunk,” by the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez:
The U.S. opposed a U.N. resolution condemning Russia for the war in Ukraine. Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, announced a new editorial mandate: the newspaper would no longer print opinion pieces that questioned the free market. I read No. 46, Nikolai Gogol, “The Nose”:
J. D. Vance smirked at Volodymyr Zelensky: “Have you said thank you?” I thought of sending the Vice-President a postcard with one of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “Aphorisms on Love and Hate,” from Penguin Little Black Classics No. 5: “Crude men who feel themselves insulted tend to assess the degree of insult as high as possible, and talk about the offense in greatly exaggerated language, only so they can revel to the heart’s content in the aroused feelings of hatred and revenge.”
On March 10th, Trump’s press office marked “50 wins in 50 days.” I spent the day pondering “The Frogs Who Demanded a King” in No. 61, a collection of Aesop’s fables:
There were still fifty days to go. Even though I knew it was no good, I missed the piece of wood.
The emergency Presidency is exhausting. On March 11th, the Department of Education announced that it was laying off about half its employees, as part of the Administration’s Workforce Optimization Initiative. I picked up No. 29, Michel de Montaigne, “How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing”: “One day equals all days. There is no other light, no other night. The Sun, Moon and Stars, disposed just as they are now, were enjoyed by your grandsires and will entertain your great-grandchildren.” Ten days later, Columbia decided to allow Trump to dictate what college students will learn about the Middle East, and the White House announced an end to legal aid for migrant children. I consulted No. 8, Jonathan Swift, “A Modest Proposal”: “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my Acquaintance in London; that a young healthy Child, well nursed, is, at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food.”
On March 24th, Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, reported the bombshell story about the national-security group chat on Signal. I read a fairy tale in No. 68, by the Brothers Grimm: “After a while they found another man lying on the ground with one ear pressed against the grass. ‘What are you doing there?’ asked the prince. ‘I’m listening,’ answered the man. ‘What are you listening for so attentively?’ ‘I’m listening to what’s going on in the world at this moment, for nothing escapes my ears, I can even hear the grass growing.’ ” It sounds like Pete Hegseth, tapping at his phone, “Just CONFIRMED w/CENTCOM we are a GO for mission launch.”
Two days later, learning belatedly that one of Musk’s young DOGE employees went by the name Big Balls while another said that he was “racist before it was cool,” I went straight to No. 36, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings”: “Tell me with whom you consort and I will tell you who you are.” The next day, Trump issued an executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” in which he required the Smithsonian museums “to remove improper ideology” from any account of the American past. As D. H. Lawrence put it in an essay in No. 71, “It would perhaps be easier to go to the Archaeological Museum in Florence, to look at the etruscan collection, if we decided once and for all that there never were any Etruscans.”
On March 28th, driving on a highway, I saw a homemade sign hanging on a banner made of sheets stitched together and draped over the railings of an overpass. It read:
I had to pull over on the soft shoulder, not soft enough, and weep, thinking of No. 76, Virgil:
If ever there came a day when there wasn’t an emergency, or when the palpable, heart-racing sense of daily chaos seemed to diminish, the President of the United States made sure to create an emergency. He had to. He was exercising emergency powers; his powers required sustaining that sense of urgency. Without it, little remained but his malice, his pettiness, and his insatiable appetite for revenge. I sought solace in a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798 and reproduced in No. 35:
On April 2nd, Liberation Day, Trump announced his new “reciprocal tariffs.” The stock market and even the bond market plummeted. I read No. 62, the haikus of Matsuo Bashō, a seventeenth-century Japanese poet:
Democrats tried to seize the moment. Cory Booker spoke for twenty-five hours to little effect. (“I had thought him placid, and he was placid enough; such a surface was the hard polished glass that encased the bauble of his vanity.” No. 49, Henry James, “The Figure in the Carpet.”) Democrats celebrated an electoral victory in Wisconsin on April 1st. (“Did not a magnolia open its hard white flowers against the watery blue of April?” No. 48, Edith Wharton, “The Reckoning.”) Protesters rallied around the country on April 5th. And then, on April 7th, day seventy-eight, the D.N.C., having still failed to determine why the Party had lost the election, why it had become so unpopular, and what policies the state of the nation demanded, announced the formation of a war room for “rapid response” and “aggressive daily messaging,” to include hiring “influencers” and committing to “regular message briefings, daily talking points, and the dissemination of actionable polling and message testing,” as if the problem were not that the Democrats utterly lacked a compelling program but that they weren’t getting their message out. It seemed like a good time to read the last lines of Sophocles’ “Antigone,” No. 55:
Though, of course, things didn’t end well for Antigone.
On April 11th, the Trump Administration wrote to Harvard, demanding to control the university’s core functions. “When young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more / the monster relit his fire.” In No. 70, Odysseus and his men are trapped in the cave of the bloodthirsty Cyclops, a “giant, lawless brute.” On April 14th, Harvard declared that it was refusing to comply with the Trump Administration’s demands. Odysseus blinds the Cyclops and makes his escape. But he’s still a long way from home. The White House announced that it would freeze $2.2 billion in grants to the university, and seek to overturn its tax-exempt status.
The Trump Administration revoked visas from students, including some with green cards who were permanent residents, and initiated deportation proceedings. It deported—owing to what was admitted to be an “administrative error”—a Maryland man who had protected legal status, flying him to El Salvador, where he was confined in that country’s infamous prison complex. Trump shrugged this off and made it clear that he would defy court orders to bring the man back and return him to his family. He told the President of El Salvador that he’d soon begin deporting U.S. citizens and asked him to build more prisons for Americans. “Homegrowns are next,” he said at a meeting in the White House, beneath a portrait of Thomas Jefferson. “The homegrowns. You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.”
Birds shriek. “Are you still a patriot?” a law-school colleague asked, stopping me in a hallway. Fish eyes blink tears.
I kept Walt Whitman for last. Whitman wanted to be the Homer of America, the Herodotus of democracy. He, too, toted around little copies of the classics. “Every now and then,” he once wrote, “I carried a book in my pocket—or perhaps tore out from some broken or cheap edition a bunch of loose leaves.” He loved the Iliad. He pored over Virgil and Sophocles, Shakespeare and Dante. And yet he insisted, “I stand in my place with my own day here.”
On the morning of the hundredth day of Donald Trump’s second Presidency, in this America, I plan to read Penguin Little Black Classics No. 10, a collection of Whitman’s poems. I love best “With Antecedents,” written in 1860, on the eve of the Civil War:
There is no emergency, nor any day, that does not require poetry. ♦
