The president is bored
Trump wants to "move on" from his war of choice. Tony Soprano would sympathize.
I read the news the other day — oh, boy — and came across something that’s been nagging at me ever since. It was a piece from Jake Traylor at MS NOW (née MSNBC). Trump, it seems, is bored with his war of choice:
Trump calling the war already won is “mostly hyperbole,” said a senior White House official granted anonymity to speak candidly about the administration’s thinking. “It’s part [of Trump] just wanting to declare victory and move on.”
That impulse, the official said, has become more pronounced in recent days.
“[Trump] is getting a little bored with Iran,” the official said. “Not that he regrets it or something — he’s just bored and wants to move on.”
A second White House official who was granted anonymity for the same reason said that Trump has begun to “move on” from the conflict and has started shifting conversations and personal focus toward the economy, domestic issues and the upcoming midterm elections.
The White House’s public communications have suggested a similar detachment, presenting the conflict less as an ongoing war with human lives at stake and more as a cultural moment that generates online content.
This is decadence beyond all comprehension. The president launched an unnecessary and legally dubious war on a whim, without seriously considering its likely consequences.
And now that this colossally stupid gambit is going as poorly as anyone with even a superficial understanding of the issue would predict, he’s decided the whole thing is just, like, y’know, so boring. So whatever. 1
Tawdry, and — given the stakes — grotesque. Equal parts evil and banal.
But the reason this stuck with me isn’t because I was shocked to discover that the president is a profoundly unserious person. It’s because it reminded me of one of my favorite scenes from my favorite show.
And the more I thought about the parallel between the scene and our present crisis, the more I started to wonder whether focusing on Trump’s depravity isn’t wrong, per se, but rather a way of letting us — by which I mean American society — off the hook.
The boredom of Tony Soprano
“House Arrest” is the 11th episode of season two of The Sopranos. It’s not one of the series’s most celebrated chapters, but it’s always been one of my favorites. It's an episode about boredom, and about whether "boredom" is a concept we use to mask something deeper and darker about ourselves.
The setup: Tony has narrowly escaped arrest for a murder he committed impulsively, against his own interests, because he couldn’t stop himself. His lawyer tells him, not for the first time, that he needs to insulate himself from the nuts-and-bolts of his criminal empire.
So for one whole episode, Tony tries. He avoids the Bada Bing. He goes to his straight job. He stops immersing himself in the lifestyle of the mob.
And he cannot stand it.
When he goes to see his therapist, Dr. Melfi, he is overcome with resentment: “Trying to keep a low profile, what’s the fucking point? I’m still a miserable prick, and I’m still passing out.”
At this point in the show, Melfi’s ambivalence about having Tony as a patient is near its peak.
Rather than validate his self-pity — which, in truth, is all Tony ever really wants from therapy — she is reserved, even somewhat withholding. Tony senses this and it makes him mad.
He sneers, “You seem very mellow today.” And she responds:
MELFI: Let’s talk about you.
TONY: You seem like you’re on drugs, and I’m boring myself to death. I’m ready for the George Sanders long walk here.2
MELFI: Do you know why a shark keeps moving?
TONY: They gotta keep moving or they’ll die, they can’t breathe or something.MELFI: There’s a psychological condition known as Alexithymia, common in certain personalities. The individual craves almost ceaseless action, which enables them to avoid acknowledging the abhorrent things they do.
TONY: Abhorrent? What certain personalities?
MELFI: Antisocial personalities.
TONY: My future brother-in-law ... Ran over a guy, no reason. Guy’s paralyzed, has to piss into a catho-tube … What happens when these antisocial personalities aren’t distracted from the horrible shit they do?
MELFI: They have time to think about their behavior. How what they do affects other people. About feelings of emptiness and self-loathing, haunting them since childhood. And they crash.
A nation of sharks
The easy thing would be to compare Trump to Tony and leave it at that — to end this with some high dudgeon about how Trump’s boredom reflects the same antisocial personality traits, albeit on an impossibly grander scale.
And there would be truth to that. Trump is clearly someone who needs constant action, constant attention, to avoid any opportunity to stare at the abyss within himself.
But the point of The Sopranos was never that Tony was bad and the rest of us are good. The point was always that we are Tony. It’s why the finale is titled “Made in America.”
Tony is not something alien or other. He’s a (slightly) exaggerated version of the modal American — his materialism, his narcissism, his boredom. Just taken to the nth degree.
If that’s true of Tony Soprano, a fictional character, then how much more true is it of Donald Trump — a man the American people elected, nearly reelected, and then chose to elect again? Can we honestly say we’re so different?
The better question is what it is about our lives — our politics, our society, our culture — that has us all so bored. What makes Donald Trump the president we may not want but that, on some deep level, we seem to think we deserve?
Yes, Donald Trump is bored. His boredom is obscene. But what is our excuse?
In fairness, I recognize this move: It’s the same one I pulled in school whenever I was confronted with a math or science problem that made me feel inadequate and challenged my sense of myself as a the world’s smartest boy. In my defense, I was 14 and not the president of the United States.
This is a reference to suicide. George Sanders killed himself and left a suicide note saying that he did so because he was “bored.”