Anne Boleyn in England’s National Portrait Gallery
When I interviewed historian David Starkey about his new documentary and book “The Six Wives of Henry VIII” in 2001, I asked him about the downfall of the most bewitching of the wives, Anne Boleyn (No. 2) How did such a smart Rules Girl lose her head?
Starkey’s response was a shrewd one: What’s attractive in a mistress is often annoying in a wife.
I thought of that as I watched President Donald J. Trump back on the stump as if it were 2020. (God, if only it were.) Not that Trump is any Anne Boleyn. If anything, his outsize ego, multiple wives and sybaritic cruelty are much more reminiscent of Henry. But The Donald is an Anne in this regard: They have proved better at the pursuit than the prize.
There are lots of people who are temperamentally better suited to the hunt than the attainment of the hunted. Former tennis No. 1 Martina Navratilova once said that once you were the No. 1-ranked tennis player, what could you do – be the No. 1-ranked player longer than anyone else? It becomes all about boring maintenance.
Throughout her career, she often rooted for John McEnroe against her former compatriot – and Johnny Mac’s bitter rival – Ivan Lendl. You sense a kindred spirit. Mac always said it was better to beat the best than be the best. Once he rested the No. 1 ranking from Björn Borg and Borg subsequently retired, some of the life went out of McEnroe’s game.
Trump, too, is better on the attack. (Oh, the understatement.) His questing spirit – or limited attention span, take your pick – spurs him to bright lights, big city and the open road. Witness him in his element back on the campaign trail in Melbourne, Fla., railing against a nonexistent terrorist incident in Sweden Friday night that prompted all kinds of internet ridicule involving IKEA and Swedish meatballs, including this sharp retort from Chelsea Clinton on Twitter: “What happened in Sweden Friday night? Did they catch the Bowling Green Massacre perpetrators?”
In fairness to the president, he was referring to a story he saw Friday night on Fox News correlating the rise of immigration and refugees in Sweden with an increase in crime, particularly rape – rape by the dark other being a motif in Trumplandia going back at least to his campaign comments on Mexico. (Note the concern isn’t about women being raped. It’s about foreigners doing the raping, as if domestic rape matters less than the import.) Clearly, to throw another metaphor into the mix, Trump is more of a right-brain lover of visuals than a left-brain wordsmith. But he also displays the paranoid jealousy evident in some white males who do not wish dark outsiders encroaching on their territory – women being the battleground in this game men play.
The point, though, is that even if you think Trump is a few floors short of a skyscraper observation deck, he remains an effective, albeit fearmongering, campaigner. The problem is that governing is mainly a fear-quelling desk job that is less about speaking wildly off the cuff before adoring crowds and more about reading thick binders of position papers late into the night. More important, being on the attack after you’ve won the war is unnerving to the citizenry you must now govern, which includes many non-supporters.
As Henry found with Anne, sharp-tongued comments are more piquant when you’re not listening to them every day. But then, some people always need a windmill to tilt at.