“Like priest, like parish”, goes a Russian proverb. This is a rough equivalent of our “birds of a feather flock together”, except that the English saying implies avian parity, whereas the Russian one conveys an ecclesiastical hierarchy.
Translated into the language of political realities, when presidents (or prime ministers) form their cabinets, they often look for their doppelgängers, or at least candidates with qualities similar to their own.
You may contest this observation, but I challenge you to come up with any other explanation for the presence of Robert F Kennedy Jr in Trump’s cabinet. Among many traits the two men share, I’d like to highlight one: bad taste.
Both Plato and Aristotle devoted much attention to what they called ‘transcendentals’, objective ontological properties of being they defined as Truth, Beauty and Goodness.
These existed as One – meaning that a deficit in one transcendental also diminished the other two. In other words, what’s true and moral is also beautiful, what’s beautiful is also moral and true – and hence what’s ugly can be neither true nor moral.
I’m reminded of this simple truth whenever Donald Trump opens his mouth in public, which is to say all the time. You see, we may argue against ancient Greek metaphysics all we want, but this idea rings true.
That’s why I can’t take seriously anyone who displays horrendous taste. My judgement of a person or, for that matter, an idea starts out by being aesthetic. Any evidence of bad taste, and I don’t explore any further.
Trump, he of orange tan, rotten grammar, crude manners, nauseating narcissism, bombastic delivery, boundless egotism, insatiable thirst for sycophantic praise, is the epitome of bad taste. In fact, I can’t think of any other American president even remotely close to him in that department. Even LBJ looks like an elegant, eloquent raconteur by retrospective comparison.
Yet even before we talk about Kennedy’s taste, I struggle to think of what it is exactly that qualifies him for the post of health secretary.
He is on record as a fierce opponent of any vaccination, including the kind that, since 1955, has reduced the world’s polio cases by over 99 per cent and eliminated them altogether in most countries.
Fluoride in water is, according to Kennedy, an “industrial waste” and “dangerous neurotoxin” that lowers IQ in children. He himself must have drunk the stuff by the gallon on this evidence.
Kennedy also makes a believable claim that a part of his brain was eaten by a worm. His CV includes such adventures as dumping a dead bear in Central Park and sawing off a whale’s head. In other words, the man is away with the fairies, which is where Trump must have detected a kindred spirit.
Then, upholding his fine family tradition, Kennedy is highly libidinous, which is again a trait he shares with his boss. But, where Trump self-admittedly approaches courtship in a straightforward manner by grabbing a woman’s private parts to render her docile, Kennedy expresses himself in poetic idiom.
This is where his taste comes in. It appears that during the 2024 presidential campaign Kennedy was conducting an affair with Olivia Nuzzi, a journalist who at the time worked for New York Magazine.
She has since been sacked because it turned out that the young lady had been using notches on her bedpost as pitons on her climb to the top. One such notch was Kennedy, but there had been a few other prominent politicians as well.
When wooing his fair lady, Kennedy used the technique that had worked in the past for troubadours, minstrels and other poets, not least Shakespeare.
The Bard, for example, wrote, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?/ Thou art more lovely and more temperate…”, but that was oh so 16th century. Kennedy expressed his feelings in more up-to-date versification:
“Yr open mouth awaiting my harvest… I mean to squeeze your cheeks to force open your mouth. I’ll hold your nose as you look up at me to encourage you to swallow. ‘Don’t spill a drop.’ I am a river. You are my canyon. I mean to flow through you. I mean to subdue and tame you. My Love…”.
According to his inamorata’s jilted fiancé, who revenge-published this poetic masterpiece, the cited verse is the only one fit for public consumption. Everything else is lewd.
Quite apart from adultery, am I the only one to detect elements of S&M and B&D coercion in Kennedy’s lyricism? But never mind his unorthodox, possibly illegal, amorous tendencies. It’s his taste that attracts me at the moment.
Applying the standards set by Plato, Aristotle, later Augustine and, still later, Aquinas, I maintain that a man capable of delivering himself of such effluvia has to be a mendacious, immoral idiot.
I’d suggest that a chap like that isn’t fit to be a proverbial dog catcher, never mind a cabinet minister in a great country. But Trump’s criteria are evidently different from mine.
Here I have an admission to make. When I was courting Penelope, I wrote her a bawdy limerick every day. This genre is the upper limit of my poetic attainment, although, judging by the fact that Penelope still keeps those yellowing pages in a secret hidey-hole, the verses weren’t too bad, as far as such things go.
But that was just a joke, comic doggerel. Aware of my limitations, I would never attempt to write real poetry. God may or may not have given me some writing ability, but certainly not in that genre. And no sane man would ever write Kennedy-style verse in all seriousness, nor expect to produce any effect on the recipient other than an emetic one.
Then I look at photographs of Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth naked to the waist (from the top down, as I hope you understand) and see a torso densely covered with tattoos. Let me tell you, a Tahiti denizen of Gauguin’s time had nothing on Pete in the area of body art.
Does one detect a certain deficit of taste there as well? I go over the mental list of the men of impeccable taste I’ve ever known, and not one of them had a single tattoo, much less used his whole body as a broad canvas to paint on.
Now, I can’t level similar criticism at two other members of Trump’s cabinet: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Foreign Secretary Mark Rubio. But they seem to be outsiders whom Trump barely tolerates.
Rubio and Bessent are the ministers who try their utmost to prevent Trump from acting on his insane instincts. One such instinct is to deliver all of the Ukraine to Putin (who, with his elevator shoes, is another exemplar of bad taste), by twisting the Ukraine’s arm into accepting peace terms that amount to capitulation.
At the same time, both Kennedy and Hegseth are committed Putinistas. During the presidential campaign, for example, Kennedy parroted the Kremlin line by saying: “But we must understand that our government has also contributed to its circumstances [the on-going war] through repeated deliberate provocations of Russia going back to the 1990s.”
And the Russian press agency Tass once complimented Hegseth for sporting, at a meeting with Zelensky, a “tie, featuring bold white, blue, and red stripes arranged in the same order as on the Russian national flag.” That’s like Putin wearing a MAGA cap.
So there we have it: Rubio and Bessent against Hegseth and Kennedy, with Trump leaning towards the second two. If you believe Plato and Aristotle, taste – or rather the absence thereof – must have something to do with that.
Call it a paradox, but this is the most innocuous explanation I can offer for the US stance on Putin’s aggression. God knows I’ve put forth the less innocuous ones often enough.
P.S. Speaking of that, I watch football matches not only for the enjoyment of the game, but also in the hope that the commentators, native speakers every one of them, may enlarge my English vocabulary, originally acquired second-hand.
Thus, over the past few weeks, I’ve learned that ‘innocuous’ can also mean ‘annoying’, ‘infamous’ is a synonym of ‘famous’, ‘melodramatic’ of ‘dramatic’, and – my particular favourite – ‘amount’ can stand for ‘number’, as in “the amount of matches”. Learn something every day.