Archives for February 2018

What’s to be done? Again, as in days that have passed and, probably, as in those yet to come, our nation confronts this quartet of words. It’s a quartet whose pitch, tuned habitually to tragedy, has become too familiar to our grief-stricken ear. So too is it one whose pith, succinct and desperate in the asking, strikes us and renders us mute.

From time to time, month to month, seemingly at this point week to week, the words are strung together, resuscitated, syncopated, and played on a loop. The backdrop through which they filter changes—San Bernardino on one day, Orlando the next. Then it will be Las Vegas or Columbine, Charleston or Sandy Hook, Sutherland Springs or Aurora, Austin, Fort Hood, Virginia Tech or Oregon with a rest, for now, at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. From the west coast to the east, from colleges to community centers, schoolyards to gay night clubs, this question dances to an ever-present dirge.

Changing with the scenes are the perpetrators and those upon whom they prey. The former is an eclectic, admittedly masochistic bunch. Some are repressed, be it either sexually or socially. Still others are racists, more of them sadists, yet all of them terrorists of domestic sort. The latter, the victims, are very much like them in that no two are quite the same. They are children, students, teachers, professors, church-goers, party-goers, concert-goers, all of them innocence incarnate and undeserving of their early deaths.

Still, knowing the places, persons, and motivations seem to bring us no closer to seeing this national blight of un-instigated mass shootings to an end. What then, we ask ourselves, is to be done? If “common-sense” gun laws are as self-evident as they seem, where in plain sight do they hide? In which conspicuous nook, surely the one we’ve tripped and fallen over thousands of times before, are they to be found? Is it possible that, on the contrary, they really aren’t so common after all? Perhaps we’re misled into thinking them more practicable than really they are. Maybe we’re imagining a country composed of legislatures, representing people, constituting a society that doesn’t consider it an inalienable and inextricable right to keep and bear arms. If we are, we’re thinking in terms of theory and nothing could be so uncommon.

This week, after a gunman opened fire in the halls of Stoneman Douglas High School, within minutes of the afternoon’s closing bell and, with that long sought-after sound, the impending, fleeting bliss of teenage freedom, the question above remains on everyone’s mind. All ask it, while precious few risk its answer: what possibly can we do to prevent future massacres on this or any scale?

For the further reaches of the political left, the answer is simple but absurd, high-minded but ill-fated. For them, nothing short of an Australian-style gun “buy-back”, or, more aptly put, confiscation program will suffice. It’s not a program everyone on the left has explicitly endorsed, nor is it one that’s reached with any seriousness the level of the Democratic Party’s leadership, but it is one that many subtly and others desperately would like to see put into place. Such a program would, in essence, complete our government’s monopoly over the use of force—both in the abstract and in the application.

Doubtless a useful transaction upon leaving behind our brutish and short lives, the state controlling the use of power is good. That said, should we agree to turn over all of our guns, we’d be giving to the state more power than our ancestors might’ve volunteered. We’d be relinquishing the very last tincture of our ingrained, unassailable propensity to militancy—that uniquely American ability to defend ourselves and our land in the face of those seeking, at their own peril, to take it away. And while those on left, most of whom are less encumbered with this Revolutionary-made-Conservative ideal, see in the absence of guns the potential for a second coming of a Pax Americana, I hasten to remind them it could just as easily bring anarchy. When asked its opinion about a broad-scale gun confiscation program, the likes of which Australia has in place, half the American population thought it inimical to their being, while the other half simply think it’s comical. If the country were ordered, by edict or fiat to divest itself of its guns, an armed rebellion, and likely, a civil revolution would proceed.

Clearly, in light of this, the far left’s preferred position on the matter is for naught. What, then, of the right’s? We’re told continually that it’s from their hands the blood of the victim drips. They share, as many Liberals would have us believe, the killer’s conscience and they bear his guilt. Of course, in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. This insidious sophistry, that of incriminating Republicans because of their allegiance to the NRA or because of their intransigence to move from their Second Amendment right is both spurious and unhelpful. The NRA and the Republican Party, appealing and easy scapegoats though they may be, simply aren’t to blame.

The reasons therein could be the subject of another post, but for now, we look to conservatives for their response. What, in their eyes, would amount to a practical approach to remedy this shooting spree scourge? As with the Liberals, their response is something, but it’s wanting.

Chief on the Republican’s agenda is a universal ban on the “bump stock”, a clever, dastardly little appendage affixed to a semi-automatic gun. Once applied, the bump stock increases lethality in a geometric, rather than an arithmetic way. Instead of killing by the few, it exponentially increases fatalities on a harrowing scale. The gun’s cumbersome recoil softens, its shakiness steadies, and, like an emetic, more bullets in less time can pour forth from its mouth. To ban the bump stock would be something, but not in the least sufficient. To see this carnage cease, more must be done.

It’s here that both sides tend to hit an ideological impediment. They find themselves stuck. They’re at loggerheads and incapable of proceeding forth. Both of the foregoing ideas, those of the right and the left, entail taking something away. In the one case, it’s a small accoutrement and in the other, it’s the gun itself. Better than both and, I think, probably agreeable to both would be any number of powerful additions instead of subtractions.

First, on school campuses, the police’s presence must increase. The current ubiquity of “gun-free zone” signs sprouting up and infesting every schoolyard is entirely absurd. To think of these signs as some kind of a barrier, a kind of membrane through which a murderer won’t pass, is beyond wishful thinking—it’s negligent. The pervasive “gun-free” zones no longer are, nor have they ever been, the inviolate little gatekeepers they were intended to be. The protection of innocent children demands that we do away with them and their illusory, peace-promoting ideal.

No endeavoring murderer counts his steps while approaching the gun-free zone, but he does just that, and likely returns whence he came, if he sees ahead of him an armed guard standing at the school’s front door. His greatest hope, in that case, might be an armed stand-off with the guard, who, if quick-witted and well-trained, will have surely dispatched for reinforcements. The assailant might strike an officer, maybe a passer-by as well, but his endeavor will be short-lived and so too will his life. More likely, he’ll die within a minute or two if the armed guard’s aim is true.

Banks, stadiums, airports, malls—all of them gestate with precious cargo, but none so much as our schools and the treasures they have within. Inside and surrounding all of those places, armed guards are not only present, they’re pervasive. And if we are to prioritize the commodities that those places of business, entertainment, and travel keep over our children’s safety, who are, without overstating it, our nation’s future and our greatest investment, we have a fundamental gap between the prices of mere materials and the sanctity of life.

A second addition would be to enjoin, or otherwise restrain, an unstable person’s ability to purchase a firearm. From a libertarian perspective, this sort of an injunction has little appeal, but outside of this freedom-loving niche, I think the nation, on the whole, could bring itself to its terms. The idea is simple, the application, potentially less so. It would require a parent, a guardian, a teacher, a colleague, or any other intimate associate to flag—for lack of a better word—any person deemed in their mind not only psychologically unwell, but gratuitously drawn to violence. If the case against said person can be made, a judge would have the ability to revoke from him his right to obtain a firearm. Of course, this covers only his legal acquisition of a gun. He might pursue a weapon through the black-market or any number of other avenues, both of which raise daunting concerns on their own.

The prohibition needn’t be a life sentence. He whose rights had been suspended by judicial decree would have the chance intermittently to be screened by a professional in the psychological, medical, or sociological fields. Such screens would reveal all improvements or regressions regarding his mental faculties. If his improvement is sufficient, then and only then should he enter a tightly scrutinized probationary period in which his right to carry is restored, in part if not in full. If, on the other hand, his clinical presentation fails in any objective way, based on any entrusted metric, the ban remains.

A third and final addition comes in the form of additional years. Years, that is, added to one’s life before he can legally purchase a gun. At the time of this writing, an adult aged eighteen has the legal ability to purchase a long-barrel gun (only he who is twenty-one, and no younger, can purchase a handgun). Think not of the halcyon, Revolutionary-aged musket when you hear “long-barrel” gun. From that time to this, when teenaged boys and farmers and philosophers fought back the British yoke, the long-barrel has come now to include the AR-15—that popular and infamous semi-automatic rifle used atop Mandalay Bay, in Sutherland Springs, and in Florida.

While I agree that guns shouldn’t be in the frighteningly impulsive hands of impetuous teens, there’s an issue one can’t avoid when it comes to raising the legal purchasing age. How, as a country, can we send our eighteen-year-old men (or boys, depending on how you see them) to the arid, hostile climes of a Somalia, or an Iraq, or an Afghanistan, armed to the gills with rifles, side-arms, and hand grenades with a dictate to kill in the name of our flag? Then, when these boys—now veterans—return home from the front, are we to bar them from carrying weapons as they did so nobly in defense of our land? Herein lies the disharmony of the idea. We can’t justifiably raise the age of purchasing a firearm without also raising the age of entrance into the military. And I see no impetus to act on the latter, which leaves me skeptical about changing the former.

These three issues, and likely many more, will arise in the weeks to come. Where they’ll go, and what kind of support they’ll receive will direct this nation through a watershed moment. The time wasted being quiet and quiescent about this issue has come to an end. The student protests have made this clear. And while we shouldn’t necessarily heed all of their proposals—after all, they spring from the callow wells of the upperclassmen—we must hear them out, somberly consider their plight, and sympathize with them in their (and our) loss. Far too much innocence has been lost and far too little to address it. What we need is a first step. We’ll see if, as a country, we can take it and take care of the future deceased.

Today, in the blink of an eye, or, perhaps better yet, in the image of a bruised and bloodied eye, we’re confronted with a tale of spousal abuse. It’s a tale whose script is rebarbative yet recurrent, primitive but enduring. It’s a story ripped from the pages of our cruder history, one passed along through decades and societies and kept alive on to these days of our atavistic here and now. We might have thought ourselves immune, adapted, or evolved, but recent events convince me otherwise. Strains of this chronic malady, this pernicious little disease of domestic abuse, this virile virus appear still to exist all around.

It’s shocking, though, that two cases of this blight have arisen in one week, under one roof, perpetrated by two men terrorizing four women. The duo of men, in this case, includes Robert Porter and David Sorensen. The former and more integral of the two was President Trump’s Staff Secretary and General John Kelly’s friend, point-man, and confidante. The latter and lesser-known Sorensen was a speechwriter for the president—and an apparently capable one, at that. Though perhaps less important than Porter’s, Sorensen’s absence is sure to be felt. It’s no small task, after all, to veil a president full of inveterate vulgarities, long-winded rants, and grammatical disdain with an unnatural eloquence and syntax. In this, Trump’s team of speechwriters who were, until this week, led by David Sorensen, should be considered among the masters of the ageless oratory art.

Sorensen was accused of physical, emotional, and verbal abuse by his ex-wife, Jessica Corbett. Most of their fights, she admitted, were of an emotional and verbal kind, but she could call to mind at least five times when he placed his hands upon her with unaffectionate intent. One of those times, in fact, ended with her being slammed into a nearby wall—an unforgiving end to any dispute. Sorensen, in response, sought to do her one better by claiming that it was, in fact, she who had abused him in all of those aforementioned spats. She did so not five, but six times. A henpecked victim of her wrath, Sorensen claimed that he was merely responding (or reciprocating) her attacks. Nevertheless, he mustn’t have wholly believed his own side of the story; he voluntarily resigned from his position in the White House on Wednesday.

Whereas Sorensen chose to defend his name by turning the tables of victimhood upon his accuser and playing the “he said, she said” card, Robert Porter hadn’t that empty luxury of a last stand. It’s been documented, verifiably and repeatedly, that Porter abused multiple ex-wives and a former girlfriend. His two ex-wives, Colbie Holderness and Jennifer Willoughby, made public their experiences with Porter during each one’s brief marriage. Willoughby, his most recent ex-wife, described in excruciating and incriminating detail Porter’s violent behavior. She recounted an evening when he, inebriated and irate, grabbed her from the shower, thrust her upon a bed, and proceeded to push upon her chest his formidable weight. Breathless and beaten, she sought a divorce not long after the event.

If you think that what happened between Porter and Willoughby was bad, you’re right—It was. Unfortunately, though, Porter’s barbarity and his mistreatment of his wife didn’t stop there.

Before Willoughby, Porter was married to Colbie Holderness. It’s the lurid picture of Holderness’s black eye that’s become this year’s early, indelible mark. It’s the image of a woman’s battered face with its tell-tale black eye, that infamous stigmata of domestic abuse. It’s the still-shot of incivility and Porter, the Cro-Magnon, incarnate.

You see in Holderness’ face a swollen eye drooping with silent courage upon a cheek. You see a face changing, painfully and iridescently, from unnatural hues of yellow to purple to black as the damage races from ear to nose. You see the broken blood vessels that will, in time, suture their unwelcome hemorrhage and invite healing. But what of her spirit—had that too been broken? In the photograph, taken immediately after the assault, Holderness prepares herself to answer that question. She looks into the camera with eyes at once stoic, unflinching, and without a tincture of sadness. In her stare is brave resolution.

It’s a testament to Holderness, and to Willoughby, that the two should be so strong. But, what to make of their shared aggressor? By all accounts, Porter’s abusive penchant in no way impeded his career and its success. On the contrary, it seems only to have been compounded, like interest accrued, as incoming honors kept coming. After serving as Senator Orrin Hatch’s Chief of Staff, Porter departed Capitol Hill for the West Wing. In the Trump administration’s employ, he was named Staff Secretary, first to Reince Priebus and then to John Kelly. Porter relished his new role and appears to have been someone especially capable of navigating the many cliques, conduits, and caprices of an administration forever in flux. Charismatic, ambitious, deferential, and succinct, he was a reliably, if not universally, popular figure within Trump’s cabinet.

But his agreeableness and efficiency came at a price. As recounted in full, he was, for lack of a better word, a criminal. Not only that, he was a recidivist—a repeat offender without compunction or scruple. You’d think a man with such a history would find it difficult gaining employment at a junkyard, let alone the highest echelon of the world’s eminent government with a salary funded by the tax-payer’s fee. Surely, the government, with all of its unencumbered oversight and efficiency, would spot a blemished past such as his (which again, was documented and submitted by Willoughby and by Holderness to the police prior to his White House employment). Not only that, it was placed right beneath the administration’s nose. Holderness, Porter’s first wife, not only submitted her police report (including the unassailable evidence that is her photograph) to the FBI, but also to the administration’s chief counsel, Don McGahn.

The FBI, for all of its accreting failures and missteps—be they self-inflicted or not—seems at least in this case to have adhered to its protocol and followed the proper route. The FBI sedulously provided White House officials with its findings as they pertained to Porter’s background. In the course of a year, the bureau’s director Christopher Wray claims his department to have given and continually updated the White House with all findings pertinent to Porter’s revealingly ugly past. In a statement that all but damned the administration’s position, which held that it was ignorant and thereby innocent of anything Porter had done, Wray chronicled when and how the department’s findings were released: in March of 2017, they were done so partially; in July of that summer, fully; and in January of the new year, the one in which we live, its investigation was finalized and closed. (Wray’s statement and its tight chronology came after an announcement made by Raj Shah, the administration’s deputy press secretary. In it, Shah claimed (as we’ve come to realize, mendaciously) that the FBI’s investigation into Porter was incomplete. Surprisingly, and rather unnervingly, his deceit has met little response and he’s yet to revisit and correct the claim.

What this means is that for at least six months, and more probably, ten months, the Trump administration was aware yet unmoved by the fact that it had in its midst and very near its helm a wife-beater, and a practiced one at that. It was for this reason, we would soon learn, that the FBI placed a stay on Porter’s security clearance—a proscription, of sorts, unprecedented when one considers the proximity he had to the Chief of Staff.

The reports should’ve roused the Trump White House into taking action against Porter, regardless of the inextricable antipathy with which it views the FBI. This, however, wasn’t the case. An obstinate administration needs more than just a politically-motivated intelligence community to sway its opinion. As if anticipating the times, Holderness took it upon herself to bypass the FBI and abridge the administration of her ex-husband’s past and of the abuse she’d suffered at his hands. On four separate occasions, Holderness contacted the chief White House Counsel, Don McGahn to inform him of just that. Worse than words falling upon deaf ears, though, hers collided with a negligent heart. To her fusillade of red flags, McGahn proved idle and unresponsive. He chose not to act on Holderness’ account with celerity, instead opting to ignore her claim altogether. Had he moved, the administration might’ve fired Porter and gotten ahead of the fall-out–this embarrassing morass in which it now drowns.

Just as McGahn is on the hook for his blatant dereliction, so too is John Kelly—Porter’s superior and President Trump’s aide-de-camp. It’s impossible to consider a scenario in which Kelly, a man vaunted for his punctiliousness, order, and “no nonsense” attitude, allowed into his inner sanctum a man so alleged. Ultimately, the onus lies with him. Just as a man is responsible for his hand and the injuries it might inflict, so too is the boss to his hireling and the executive to his employee (by this line of reasoning, the responsibility might actually lie with President Trump, being that he is the executive not only of the federal government, but of his staff. Likely, though, we won’t demand of him an apology, but it’s an important truth worth bearing in mind).

It’s manifestly clear that Kelly knew much more than he’s led us to believe. Immediately when the story broke, but before Holderness’ damning photo was released, Kelly issued a statement defending Porter and standing by his man. In it, he lauded Porter for his allegiance and his indefatigable commitment to the commonweal. It was hasty and short-sighted (and likely, the sympathetic defense of Hope Hicks, the White House’s Communications Director and, at present, ill-fated inamorata to Porter).  Within hours, his statement was replaced with backpedaling, equivocations, and the frantic search for an exculpatory narrative, which, in my opinion, he’s yet to have found. Kelly, like the rest of America, claims only to have learned of Porter’s past mere moments ago. Beyond unlikely, beyond even specious, this looks beyond a doubt to be a lie. In any other business, corporation, enterprise—you name it, Kelly’s misconduct would be an offense worthy of his badge and gun. Across the president’s desk they should be slid. Probably they won’t be. Obstinately, he’ll remain. In the end, added to this administration’s story will be another chapter of embarrassment with a subtitle reading “shame”.

Out of the mist, washed up and washed ashore is Ms. Stormy Daniels. Upon the scene she’s emerged—fully in command of the media, incipiently under the skin of the president, and with an eye toward the destruction of the status quo. Rather like a patient, if not exceedingly lecherous leviathan, she’s been waiting in the swelling tides. Now, the tempest is full blown and her story’s on display.

Perhaps, better yet, she’s less a storm and more a modern-day Scylla or Siren, a kind of femme fatale bent on enticing every eager boy passing by. What with her gentle blue eyes, blonde hair, and ample bust, she looks every part the intoxicant, the womanly and sexually-practiced figure that she is, but she hides up her sleeve, down her blouse a secret. There one finds the dangerous, ravenous maelstrom in which the nation’s captain has been caught. Ensnared, really, as he’s but another helpless victim of an amorous intrigue that’s sunk even lesser ships. President Trump is now one of the many curious seamen—virile voyagers they are—who accepted an invitation into her warm and accommodating port. He made a beachhead of her boudoir, a fool of himself, and in so doing he sowed the wind. Now, the stormy weather arrives.

Her Christian name is Stephanie Clifford, her patron saint, Mary Magdalene. The latter is the promiscuous mistress of Christianity; the former, of modernity.

She chose Stormy Daniels as her nom de guerre, not as a matter of choice, but as one of necessity. You see, Daniels works in an industry that demands erotic anonymity and unsubtle subtlety. It’s a cheap but essential artifice that everyone so employed needs. That which does the employing is none other than the pornographic film industry. It’s there that Daniels has made her bones (and I do mean her bones) in a business who’s product is the flesh.

Up to this point, she’s been a veritable star. In ranking dissolute starlets from the more scantily-clad side of the film industry, Daniels is to porn what Blanchet is to drama, Bette Davis is to history, and Melissa McCarthy is to comedy. In other words, she’s one of the best—the crème de la crème. Within this raunchy underbelly of the cinematic experience, she’s won for herself honorable positions in the venerable “NightMoves”, “AVN” (Adult Video News), and “XRCO” (X-Rated Critics Organization) halls of fame. She may not be chiseled in onyx along Hollywood’s more infamous walk of fame, but she’s carved, indelibly, into the masturbatory memories of more than a few lonely young men.

Acclaim bestowed upon such a gal from these hallowed bodies is no small feat, but her name—whichever one to which you choose to adhere—is everywhere and on everyone’s lips. It’s there for a reason unrelated to her formidable acting prowess. From the adult film industry, she next dabbled in the world of dalliance. In time, this world would prove more lucrative and eventually politically relevant than the last. She moved from cash-laden prostitution to expensive one-night stands. She became a courtesan and an opportunist with aristocratic tastes. She developed an appetite for the affluent, a craving for the nouveau riche. Looking not for love, but for satiation and perhaps a shot at a new career, she found just the man to ride to the top: Donald Trump.

The two met during a golf outing in Nevada in 2006. Presumably, they were so smitten with each other and swept away in comparing their political philosophies that they couldn’t help stealing away for an after-hours tête-à-tête at the nineteenth hole. There, away from the caddies and the grounds keepers, they’d be able to consummate their extracurricular affair. It should and must be noted that at the time, Trump’s new wife (of just over one year, mind you) was pregnant with the couple’s first and only child. Melania, new to her nuptials and to her status in this country, awaited eagerly the birth of her young son Barron. Her husband, on the other hand, unconcerned about her fertility and casually blithe about his infidelity, went out and sought greener pastures. In Ms. Daniels, and in the arid oasis that is Nevada, he found his field.

And just like that, her career made its advance up the demimonde’s ladder. Having gotten Donald Trump into the sack was undoubtedly a selling point in a competitive market (a market, I might add, that’s historically immune to booms and busts, inflations and flops). But she surely didn’t expect, ten years down the road, to be lavished with so much compounded interest. It appears the rate of return for a one-night stand can best all those silly cryptocurrencies and unicorn commodities. It’s recently come to light that in October of 2016, a decade after their initial romp and literally moments before the presidential election, Stormy Daniels received a check for $130,000 from Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen. It’s here we ask ourselves why it was Cohen and not Trump who decided to tap into his own personal account to reward, hush, or belatedly compensate Daniels? Could it be that Cohen fell victim to the temptation that is Stormy Daniels and was now desperately trying to cover his own tracks? Had Cohen, like Trump and like many men before and surely after, shared the passive love of this famous porn star? It’s a steamy but unlikely proposition.

No, it seems that the investment in Daniels was intended to be an insurance policy of a kind. Her silence was for sale, purchasable at the going rate of six figures. As such, it was a small price to pay for one’s peace of mind and another’s public image. Affixed to the monetary transaction was an agreement not to talk about her and Trump’s prior relationship. This is the ever-elusive non-disclosure agreement that always has a way of finding itself being breached. Nonetheless, to these conditions, Daniels agreed. For all intents and purposes, she’d sold her silence for a year’s salary in the Trump administration (for comparison, Nikki Haley, Ambassador to the UN, takes home about $160,000 for quite a bit more work and a lot less play).

It didn’t take long for this story to leak to the press. Lascivious tales need their telling, and like sunflowers they’ll always find the light. Fox News is said to have been first to learn of the affair and, subsequently, of the Daniels endowment. Again, one must bear in mind that all of this was coming to light mere weeks before election day. Fox News, I can assure you, wasn’t keen on publishing a story that would tarnish its candidate of choice. It had, up to that point, sunk a year into Trump, each day of it oiled with sycophancy and fulsome reporting, and this burgeoning story couldn’t compel them to journalistic integrity. So, they agreed to “spike it”, as the saying in journalism goes, and we’d have to wait another year before it would surface once again.

But, surface it has and we’re learning that Daniels is ready to emerge. Apparently, binding her to a contract and financing her silence proved to be insufficient means for tying up loose ends. The news outlets are clamoring at her door with cameras, microphones, and even heavier pay checks. Still though, she hasn’t yet spoken, but I do anticipate that will change in the days to come. She and her spokesperson are exploiting a recent mistake made by Cohen to open up and spill the beans about what happened in the boudoir at Tahoe that fateful night. Cohen’s bungle was releasing a statement that I outlined above. He said that he alone bore Daniels’ expense, thus outing their arrangement and disclosing details that, legally speaking, should’ve remained under wraps.

Which brings us to this: Daniels, it appears, will tell her tale. The media, famous for the tizzies in which they entangle themselves, will be fixated and overwrought. They’ll cover her in prime time and salivate over the delectably sordid sexual details. They’ll assure us that this is the long-awaited coup de grâce—the thing just shocking enough that Trump can’t possibly escape from it unimpeached.

This seems to me a hopeless wish. In all likelihood, Daniels’ story will be anticlimactic, gratuitous or innocuous, and above all, much ado about nothing. The question is, though, does the average American even care? Assuming we learn not only this, but every other sexual minute and dissolute detail of Trump’s profligate past, does it change anyone’s perception of the man? Will anyone truly think of him differently?

I think not.

Those who loathe him will respect him even less; those who deify him will do so just a bit more; and those who can’t be moved won’t be. To the victor goes ambivalence in this Left-Right war of attrition. The time for deliberating about his character has long since passed. The verdict came by the ballot box and the final judgment, for better or for worse, via that enlightened, republican process established in 1787. President Trump will stay just where he is—and this storm too shall pass.

Although four decades, five children, six thousand miles, and seven inches stand between them, President Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un aren’t so different after all. Taking seriously the media’s recent comparison of these two political parvenus, we in the audience are left with this strange conclusion: Trump and Kim are peas in a pod, thieves thick and thin, birds of a feather.

Both are famous for their eccentricity and feared for their impetuosity. Both adorn their lives with accolades (be they imagined or real) and retell their triumphs to fawning lackeys and sycophants. Together, they sweat caprice from their very pore every time their tempers become exercised or hot. In a word, collectively, they’re sweating often.

Both know the value of appearance in this brutally televisual age. It’s for this reason they attend to themselves with exhaustive cosmetic zeal. In both cases, this level of attention demands of them a careful treatment of their idiosyncratic coiffures: Trump’s hair, if nature permits of us our calling it that, emphasizes the temporal lobe. With a gossamer wisp of blond, it floats gently upon his ear while streaking front to back. In the front sits defiantly another plume of unnatural locks. Kim Jong Un has an interesting “do” in his own right. Fashionable in the Orient as it’s not in the West, Kim sports the faded, undercut yet over-kempt pompadour the likes of which has no rival. His hair takes a drastic leap from barren and shaved sides to an exploding parietal plumage. It’s a transition that’s too stark to be aesthetic and too unsubtle to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, the hair makes the man, and the man his country.

What then, can be said of the fabrics that enclose their flesh—the threads within which they administer and live? Both are rather rotund fellows, with waistlines exceeding those of their cabinet members and, by in large, their fellow countrymen as well. No doubt, the overflowing torso gives the gourmand away, but it also engenders a larger canvas upon which expensive suits can swim.

Mindful of their epicurean size, and cautious not to be constrained by it, neither man wants to be tailored to form or painted too close to his bones. Above all, their sartorial agendas revolve around breathability as their first and last concern. For President Trump, this comes in the form of a boxy double-breasted jacket (always black or blue), equally accommodating trousers, and a turgid, inflated, elongated tie. As for the Supreme Leader, he fancies a monolithic Manchurian two-piece—charcoal, solid black, or dark grey—with pinstripes darting north to south (in much the same way he’d like to do across the DMZ). He tops it off with a capacious “Nehru” neckline begirding his obese throat.

Each, outfitted as such, strikes fear into the heart of his opponent and pride into the soul of his people. Yet there’s also the face, and both share in the inscrutability of the other’s. Trump wears a self-assured Teutonic pout, while Kim sports a dagger-like Asiatic glare. Both conceal their emotions with impressive restraint but they make manifestly clear the frigidity and scorn that is their mug.

Obviously, they both like weapons of the nuclear kind. Trump has many and wants more; Kim has one and simply wants it to work. Still, in either case, they urgently agree that their arsenals are worse for what they lack and that proliferation is king. That said, neither could tell you, at least not with a reassuring sense of confidence, exactly what’s meant by the term “nuclear triad”—Trump because of ignorance, Kim Jong Un because of insufficient progress (his weapons are tied to earth, whereas Trump’s, whether he knows it or not, can float or fly). Technicalities aside though, both like to pose and make it known that in this apocalyptic capacity, they’re handsomely endowed. One parades his missiles through the streets, the other would like to, but is forced by staff, by constituents, and by general decorum to be a bit more discrete. One has a button, the other a larger button, just as one has an ego, and the other a larger ego. All things, as such, befitting their scale.

There’s an odd and uncomfortable feeling that, if not for the fetters of a family tree, one would make his sister, the other his daughter, the object of his romantic pursuit. Perhaps I’m alone in having sensed this, but at the Winter Olympic games, did you not also feel as if there was something tacitly incestuous going on between Kim Jong Un and his sister, Kim Yo Jong? Lesser gods have sated their lust with sibling love (one thinks back to the Titanic and Olympian dynasties of Kronos and Rhea and Zeus and Hera—both pairs were not only lovers, but brothers and sisters) so why wouldn’t the Kim dynasty do the same? After all, Kim fancies himself part of a veritable godhead on earth—complete with a father, a son, and a holy ghost. He, currently, stands atop the pantheon that sermonizes at Pyongyang. More explicit, though, is the way in which President Trump thinks about his lovely daughter, Ivanka. Never has a father been so audaciously amorous when talking about his baby girl. He left little to the imagination when he admitted blatantly that, were Ivanka not his kin, probably he’d be dating her. Even Electra (to bring forth another Greek)—that beautiful, vengeful orphan whose father-loving complex bears her name—would shiver at the thought. So too do we.

Perhaps the media is right. I feel myself as inhabiting the position of a man convinced. The arguments in favor of Trump’s and Kim’s consanguinity are ironclad and the conclusions are ineluctable. As for the similarities, the point from which our analysis sprang, they’re striking and clear as day. I think, all along, the media was telling the truth: Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un are really just one in the same.

A Potemkin Village is a place built in a manner similar to, if not with a blueprint shared with any other ordinary village you might see. It requires for its construction a few familiar tools of the superficial carpenter’s trade: geometry for its lines and unnatural orthogonality, color to mask its emptiness, engineering to patch its flimsy holes, a sense of artificial durability, and an overly refined quality to ease its coarse edges. Above all, though, the Potemkin Village must have standing at every corner and perched atop every lamp an uncanny ability to deceive. This quality, and this quality alone, is the village’s essence; without it, the façade crumbles, the charade fails, and the on-looker, eclipsed by a moment of clarity, sees through the curtain and gazes upon the puppeteer and his subtle strings. It’s what raises the village from the ground and plants it within our fertile, gullible minds. We look on, convinced and credulous, seeing what we think is a city and thinking what we see is real.

Precisely this has happened at Pyeongchang, the South Korean town and host city to the 2018 Winter Olympic Games. There, many meters and labored breaths above sea level, one finds the Olympic Village—that acropolis upon which, every four years, athletes from around the world ascend to rehearse, prepare, lounge, lust, celebrate, and despair their losses, their gains, their youth, and their sport (as far as the lust is concerned, the Village’s reputation for promiscuity in some ways precedes it). However, this year, the intrigue rests not on the graceful skaters nor the powerful skiers, who, with their effortless suspension of gravity’s law, amaze us with their dizzying spins and vertiginous feats. Rather, our attention has been taken in by some other unnatural phenomenon. It’s that of the Potemkin Village, and it has as its audience an eager, naïve world taking note.

From the capital at Pyongyang, Seoul’s geographical neighbor and philosophical foe, the North Korean dictatorship has shipped across the 38^th parallel an athletic delegation to represent the country in the international fair. Along with its ten humble athletes, the Hermit Kingdom has paid the fares for a conscripted claque of two-hundred and thirty fawning cheerleaders, a choreographed team of taekwondo acrobats, a gaggle of faceless fans, a press pool of eager journalists, and—most astonishingly—a diplomatic debutante, the likes of which we’ve not yet seen.

Emerging like a scintilla of feminine grace and hope from the endless depths of a repressive government’s shadows is Kim Yo Jong. Hitherto, we’ve known not of her countenance, her importance, nor even her existence, for that matter, in Asian nor in international affairs. Her profile is sparse, her résumé barren, and her achievements or crimes—assuming, as they do in Pyongyang, that little distinction rests between the two—are unknown. What little we do know of her, though, is that which precedes her in name.

As her infamous appellation implies, she is the sister of Kim Jong Un—the despotic ruler and sadistic captor of the benighted North Korean state. She, it turns out, is one of four siblings with whom Kim Jong Un was reared. It’s strange to think that such a rogue as he was brought through childhood and adolescence not in isolation, as we might’ve expected, but in a litter of once innocent little rascals. However, in no way does this common parentage guarantee Kim Yo Jong’s security or her life (exactly one year to this very day, Kim Jong Un ordered the asphyxiation of his half-brother at a Malaysian airport for reasons unknown and, three years before that, the execution of his uncle for clapping in response to the new leader’s oratory with insufficient zeal).

But these fatal transgressions seem to have been conveniently ignored by a news media always smitten with a seemingly genteel and refreshingly nubile face. Many outlets are still gushing over Kim Yo Jong, calling her “captivating” and a real “show stopper” and failing to see this sister of an autocratic for what she really is—namely, a complicit, and for that reason, a vile, criminal, and ultimately loathsome femme fatale. Beneath her soft feminine features, her gentle, endearing lineaments, and her innocent, translucent skin—so much at odds with the boyish, impish, overfed physiognomy of her older brother Kim Jong Un—is a grotesque realization. She is, in word and in deed, the very definition of a juxtaposition.

You see, Kim Yo Jong isn’t just the pretty little sister of Kim Jong Un, herself a guiltless princess confined to a tower high above the proletariat at Pyongyang. She isn’t some unwilling captive at the capital, some fettered queen, a modern Helen, Cassandra, nor a ravished Sabine stripped of her agency and shackled to a foreign land.

Far from it. She is, both hereditarily and professionally, a vitally important person to the regime. With the title of “Director of the Propaganda and Agitation Department” she is responsible for keeping her country’s unenlightened, under-nourished stock of wretches in an interminable cycle of docility, ignorance, and political impotence. It’s her propagandizing, the first half of her job title for which she’s responsible, that makes an existential enemy of liberalism, republicanism, egalitarianism, and freedom. Her messaging, directly or indirectly funneled to North Korean ears, is reliably against the West. More than that, and not in the least surprisingly, it’s vituperatively against the U.S. It’s because of her propagandistic drivel that her benighted nation sighs, thinking there must be more to this life but sees no evidence of it. It’s a population that’s been riven with famine, repressed with pretense, and denied basic human rights to the point of inhumanity, and much of this is thanks to her.

Even so, the news media can’t inoculate itself from its inveterate flaw—its ready willingness to indulge this North Korean ruse and take seriously this woman who is an alabaster farce. It sees in South Korea not the Olympic Village, but the Potemkin Village—a straw house exported from Pyongyang to our dazzled and far too credulous eyes. It sees not the humanitarian crisis that underlies each day, nor the protracted plight of the millions, nor the wanton politicide of the thousands. It sees not the generations ravaged with ancient diseases and atavistic ailments like tapeworms, parasites, tuberculosis, and hepatitis B (all of which are preventable with even a limited administration of modern remedies). Instead, with no more than a facile grin thrown its way, the media finds itself swept up in North Korea’s carefully manicured machinations, beholden to the comely Kim Yo Jong, enjoying the toadying sycophants—all meticulously choreographed for its viewing pleasure. Like watching shadows dance on walls and jesters grin on screens, can we really be so easily taken in? Led through the front door of this Potemkin, rather than Olympic Village are we.