Shame Makes a Comeback
There is a wonderful and devastating scene at the end of the film Dangerous Liaisons, where the Marquise de Mertueuil (played by Glenn Close) goes out to the opera and the entire audience turns to her and boos her. The final scene has the Marquise standing in front of a mirror and rubbing the thick makeup off her skin as tears roll down her cheeks. Her schemes had been made public and she had been publicly shamed.
What a fitting end that would be for Donald Trump, wiping off his orange tanner, alone, with tears running down his cheeks.
There are still many, many people on the fringes of American society who support him (and they are still dangerous), even after his lies and incitements leading to the rioting and insurrection of January 6th, but a good many of his followers have walked away. Finally, something that is unforgivable has taken hold of the consciences of basically good people.
Shame has made a long-overdue comeback.
I’m not talking about the faux outrage of enablers like Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio and so many others in the public eye, but everyday Americans who, even if they can’t quite say it out loud, have realized in their hearts what a horror this was, and how Trump played such a major part in it.
When corporations begin to distance themselves it is, frankly, about money. But it’s also about being ashamed to be associated with such a person. This has to come as a big blow to Trump himself, who has spent his life branding an image to attract wealth. Not only has Twitter banned him, but even the new rightwing conspiracy hothouse, Parler, lost enough sponsors to force its shutdown.
Closing down avenues for Trump and his sycophants to communicate is the power of shaming: They are being isolated, pushed back into the closet. They are still here, and still mad as hell, but I think the days of openly wearing MAGA hats and proudly screaming their rage at whoever is in earshot are mostly behind us.
In an era where we often hear the sentiment, “Is there no shame?”, we may have finally found enough of a reason to shame someone. Trying to overthrow the government, killing a police officer and others, urinating and defecating and breaking windows, and stealing artifacts in the Capitol? Yeah, maybe that’s enough to get us to shaming.
What’s sad about it for Trump — although no tears wasted here — is that whatever positive legacy anybody was able to conjure up about him will now come down to that one day. As it should be. Although one criminal act doesn’t have to define one’s life, it often does, especially among those in power.
Trump may well end his days in ruin, and, like any good destroyer, he will have taken so many with him. What kind of jobs are most of those Cabinet members and press secretaries going to get? How many House and Senate members who flew too close to the sun will now get burned? And what’s to become of his children? What company is going to take them on? And the Trump brand itself may soon be finished. There aren’t enough wealthy fringe people to stay at his hotels and golf courses.
And so, we may come to the day when we turn the cameras and microphones away from Donald Trump. If he’s lucky enough to escape prison, he exiles himself to Mar-a-Lago, where he roams the hallways raging at the world, night after night, until his third wife leaves him and takes what’s left.
Without Twitter, without a reality show, without lights, camera, action, without power, it’s a fate that, for him, may as well be prison.
