Hoisted by their own dotard

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

In Act 3 of Hamlet, the titular character has been acting mad to throw off suspicion that he knows his uncle Claudius murdered his father and married his mother. Claudius convinces Polonius to hide behind a curtain to listen while Hamlet’s mother tries to ascertain if it’s truly madness that plagues her son. 

Upon Polonius revealing his presence, Hamlet thrusts his sword through the curtain and kills him, thinking it was Claudius.

Wracked with guilt, angry with his mother — the queen — for conspiring against him, Hamlet addresses her:

Thus it was Shakespeare who brought the term “hoist with his own petard” into its usage as a phrase that means, literally, a bomb-maker being blown off the ground — or “hoisted” by his own bomb. Figuratively, it’s a saying that captures the irony of one receiving poetic justice.

The phrase came to me the other day while thinking about our fragile president, who can’t seem to stop hoisting himself (and his legion of supporters who mindlessly follow him) into the air.

After all that Trump has said and done — some 30,000 lies according to The Washington Post — it’s perhaps telling that the one thing that threatens to undermine his entire edifice of power is the very cause that his supporters have been blathering about since he lumbered down the gold escalator.

Yeah, I’m talking about Epstein and the fabled “list” that may or may not have you-know-who all over it.

The layer cake of irony starts with the fact that Trump’s foray into national electoral politics began with the “birther” movement, which he concocted as a bigoted conspiracy that former-President Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. 

Trump stoked the fires of distrust in the government and built a formidable army of sycophants who have embarrassed themselves before the nation, all because a Black man had the audacity to get elected president.

With Trump as their lodestar, the MAGA faithful splintered into various degrees of psychosis, calling for Democrats to be assassinated, jailed or castrated to appease their bloodlust. Meanwhile, the QAnon conspiracy complex was founded on the idea that there was a satanic cabal of high-profile people in government who are also pedophiles.

Enter Jeffry Epstein, a financier who was friends with Trump in Palm Beach, Fla. They are photographed many times together, seen together on video leering at younger women at a party. The Wall Street Journal reported a “bawdy” letter Trump sent to Epstein for a birthday present that ended with the sendoff, “Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Shielded by his wealth as a financier, Epstein was a sexual predator. He and his accomplices, such as Ghislane Maxwell, lured dozens of underage girls to his Palm Beach mansion to give massages for $200, where he’d tell them to remove their tops and bottoms, touch them in private areas and masturbate in their presence. Witnesses allege he’d schedule up to three “massages” a day, all with underage girls.

After one of the 14-year-old victims’ family members reported an incident to the police, Epstein was arrested and ultimately given a “sweetheart deal” by U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta, who Trump later appointed as his secretary of Labor until he resigned in disgrace in 2019 after criticism over his handling of the Epstein case. 

Following the report of 60 criminal counts against Epstein involving sexual misconduct with minors, Acosta agreed to charge him with two counts of solicitation of prostitution in exchange for a federal non-prosecution agreement, which resulted in Epstein being sentenced to an 18-month term in a minimum-security facility where he was allowed to leave for 12 hours a day to work at a foundation that he had recently incorporated. Epstein was released after serving 13 months.

The outrage was fierce, both from the public as well as others who worked to put Epstein away for his crimes. By 2019, federal agents had arrested and charged him with one count of sex trafficking of minors and one count of conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors. Acosta resigned around that time after fierce public backlash. Back in jail and awaiting charges, Epstein was found hanged in his cell — an apparent suicide.

In February, Trump-appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi said the files related to Epstein and his “clients” were “right there on my desk” after handing out declassified binders labeled “Phase 1” to several right-wing media personalities. 

The Post reported in July that Bondi informed Trump as early as February that his name was found in the files numerous times.

Then, pfft. Gone. Bondi released a report in June saying Epstein definitely committed suicide and there was definitely no Epstein files. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Except this time, hardly anybody bought it. The irony of the U.S. government telling a bunch of conspiracy theorists and anti-government nutjobs to “trust us, bro,” is just too delicious to avoid mentioning. 

Trump rope-a-doped with some masterful distractions — releasing hundreds of thousands of pages on the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination, accusing Obama of treason and recommending to the DoJ that they file charges on him, threatening to hold up a new stadium deal if the Washington Commanders don’t change their name back to the Redskins, even announcing that he had convinced Coca-Cola to alter its recipe to include cane sugar (just like in Mexico). 

The irony is thick here. The Epstein files are, in a sense, Trump’s own petard. He has cultivated his base into distrusting the government, into believing wild conspiracy theories, into retreating from fact and relying on emotion. Every lie, every ad hominem attack, every projection and trolling statement from his mouth built that bomb on his back.

Speaking of Trump’s base, that’s the next layer of irony. While hoisting himself on his own petard, Trump’s supporters are hoisting themselves on their “dotard” — the term that North Korean dictator Kim Jong-ung Jong used to describe Trump during his first term amid a period of saber rattling. It’s an archaic word that literally means an “old and senile person.” Point to the dictator. The North Korean one, I mean.

Trump’s base packed everything into the man. They bought the hats, the flags, the bumper stickers, perfume, memecoins and the shirts. They attended the rallies and shouted their two minutes of hate with the others. They bought into the lie so deeply that they didn’t notice when Trump claimed he could suspend the Constitution, that he could “take the guns first,” that Russia was our ally, that everyone was ripping us off, that the world respected him and that his meme-laden presidency stands for something other than a boil on the already blighted American political body.

These are the same “good Christians” who wanted to “save the children,” who have reshaped our reproductive laws because “abortion is murder”; who claim our country has lost its respect for law and order because of Democrats, or gay people, or green M&Ms, or “wokeism” or whatever distraction is the most useful at the moment.

While Trump sinks himself, his supporters trail after — like a train falling off a bridge and dragging every car into the ravine with it. Once caterwaling about “saving children” and “locking up the pedophiles,” these same supporters might now have to come to a realization that their orange god is not who they thought he was.

Real patriotism is recognizing when you’ve had enough. Real patriotism is refusing to follow your party blindly into the abyss. Real patriotism isn’t whatever the hell Trump is.