Donald Trump in the White House: a new Jekyll and Hyde tale
Niall Ferguson is reminded of the good-versus-evil puzzle as the US president goes from friendly to prickly and back on a weekly basis, but it is chief strategist Steve Bannon who seems intent on being a full-time Mr Hyde
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: it’s one of those stories that hardly anyone ever reads but everyone knows about. You may find it helps you cope with the “Time of Trump”.
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In Jekyll and Hyde, the narrator mistakenly believes he is dealing with two people: his urbane friend Henry Jekyll and the ogre Edward Hyde. The equivalent delusion today is the argument that there are two different sets of tweets: those written by Trump’s staff, and those written by Trump himself.
Only gradually does the reader of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella come to realise that Jekyll and Hyde are the same man. For the ghastly truth, as Jekyll’s confession goes, is “that man is not truly one, but truly two … All human beings … are commingled out of good and evil.”
The Trump presidency seems set to re-enact Jekyll and Hyde on a weekly basis. World leaders will henceforth pick up the phone with trepidation. Will they get Dr Jekyll, so affectionate that, as Theresa May discovered, he wants to hold hands? Or will they get the prickly Mr Hyde, as Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull did?
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The brilliant but inflammatory Stephen Bannon seems intent on being Mr Hyde on a full-time basis. “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,” Trump’s chief strategist said last week. “The media here is the opposition party.”
Bannon’s confrontational style is about to be applied to foreign policy. First up is Iran, with their ballistic missile tests. China is likely to be next. Will Dr Jekyll be content with exerting economic pressure? Or will Mr Hyde insist on gunboats?
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In the book, Hyde is violent by nature, running over little girls and beating up old men. But the strength of the bully lies in only picking on the weak.
Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford