Donald Trump has become unique in American history.  He has survived and prevailed against so many plots of evil hypocrisy, so many creatures of wickedness risen against him, trying to take him off course, to destroy him, his circle, and his supporters.  There have been many great presidents, but perverted ideologies and pervasive new technologies have enabled a depth of vilification and persecution of Trump unparalleled in American history.  Yet he triumphs.

It brings to mind the fantastical sagas of Greek mythology.  I’m thinking Odysseus (AKA Ulysses) and that triumphant warrior’s ten-year saga to get back to country, wife, and son.  Trump’s odyssey of miraculous survival is also coming up on ten years, from the iconic down escalator in his golden palace in 2015 to the fervently hoped for re-inauguration of 2025.

The Odyssey of Homer is a vast poem based in Greek religious mythology.  Though inspired by the fact of the contemporary Trojan war, the tales of the epic poem could not have happened.  We Americans look at the incompetence, injustices and crimes committed by evil media and government — the ignored Constitution, the smashed borders, the collusion with private industry to destroy our freedoms and sicken us — and we say, “This cannot happen in America.”  And yet year after year since 2015, the dark phantasmagoria continues.

Even before Trump’s first inauguration, the Department of Justice, the Cyclops, a monstrous beast who sees the world with only one eye, was bugging and infiltrating the new administration to hobble Trump.  Ludicrous accusations like Russia-Russia-Russia, absurd impeachments, and current panoply of lawfare, including a reported government permission to shoot to kill if he objected to the ransacking of his own home.  The Cyclops of mythology adopted the habit of imprisoning, crushing, and eating Odysseus’s companions.  Consider Trump associates (lawyers, consultants, and employees) George Papadopoulos, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Allen Weiselberg, General Flynn, Peter Navarro, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, and Jerome Corsi.  It’s a testament to the courage of these men that only Michael Cohen was turned.  The one-eyed DOJ was blind to a nationwide crime spree in the summer of 2020 but persecuted thousands of Americans, and even killed a few, in the J6 insurrection hoax.

In the Odyssey, the lotus-eaters lived on an island of perpetual stupor, lulled into losing a sense of urgency about their own lives.  Maintaining a constitutional republic takes so much energy.  The lulled are too stuporous to understand the media’s accommodation to the rigged election, endless investigations that get to the bottom of things without penalty to the perpetrators, the ongoing invasion, and so on.  Trump is rescuing the American people from their languor, not by blaming them, but by challenging them to greatness.

Odysseus was not a perfect man, and neither is Donald Trump.  Odysseus was faulted for hubris, for giving his name when he should have kept it hidden.  The jealous-minded and those distracted by the unimportant also fault Trump for his pride.  The hero who stands up for his beliefs cannot be self-effacing.  The mythological heroes of any time do not falter, do not doubt themselves or their cause unto facing death, which is why history honors them through the ages.

Dedicated to a true hero: Corey Comperatore.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.