Trump is like Elmer Gantry, only not smart, cool, or clever
Donald Trump reminds me a good deal of the fictional character Elmer Gantry from the eponymous 1927 novel by Sinclair Lewis and 1960 movie by director and screenwriter Richard Brooks. Gantry is a ne’er-do-well small time swindler and hustler with a sordid past who becomes involved with a charismatic evangelist and barnstormer who in the film is modeled after Aimee Semple McPherson.
Like Gantry, Trump is a liar, a womanizer, a cheat, and a scoundrel. Like Trump, Gantry is a manipulative psychopath who happily leaves a trail of ruined lives in his wake.
But unlike Trump, Gantry is cool, he is smart, and he isn’t blinded by malignant narcissism. Although Gantry doesn’t have any evident sense of conscience, he does seem to grasp that doing good feels good, that exposing the hypocritical and wicked feels better and best of all, he knows when the jig is up and it’s time to get out of town ahead of the posse.
Copyright © 2017 Henry Edward Hardy
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Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Scanlyze is an online magazine of essays, commentary, satire, and analysis. Were we half as clever, for inspiration we would take Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Swift, Montaigne, or Seneca.
“The men who create power make an indispensable contribution to the Nation’s greatness, but the men who question power make a contribution just as indispensable, especially when that questioning is disinterested, for they determine whether we use power or power uses us.”
John F. Kennedy, October 26, 1963
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