“Wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant”: Walt Whitman saw Trump Coming
Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil, I am he who knew what it was to be evil… blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d,
Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak,
Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant,
The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me,
The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting,
Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting…
Walt Whitman, from "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,," 1856, (As read, with some paraphrase, by Ed Norton on a farewell visit to Stephen Colbert’s "The Late Show" on March 18, 2026
To venture into Donald J. Trump’s command of U.S. miliary history is to at once descend into farce.
To examine his stewardship of our fate, and that of the entrie Middle East, summons visions of a much darker farce, as will be cited below.
But sticking with the lighter side for now, his stupidly smirking attempt at banter with Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi—“Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”—well captures the obtuseness of the middle-school bully he was and is.
Whitman’s poem excerpted above, a cousin to the great poet’s epochal “Song of Myself,” was an everyman’s tribute to his own —and our own—universal flaws. But somehow across his two administrations Trump has come to publicly embody all the worst of the listed attributes. Norton read it like a sacred vow, face to face with his television and broadcast audience. At one point saying "meanesss" twice in a row for effect, knuckles clenched.
If you’ve been following Trump since his 2017 initial presidential trip to Asia, you recall his apparent mystification as to the Pearl Harbor monument that memorializes the infamous raid, even as it rests above the sunken, watery grave that was the USS Arizona. (It's a site long ranked as sacred, alongside the sites of Gettysburg, the Alamo, and September 11.) In their book A Very Stable Genius , two Washington Post Pulitzer Prize winners depicted Trump on that day asking accompanying General John Kelly “Hey, John, what’s this all about? What’s this a tour of?”
Feasibly the first part of Trump’s puling query this week--"Who knows better about surprise than Japan?”—might have served a different role, as a reference to the atomic bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing some 150,000 Japanese. (He did compare the June 2025 "Midnight Hammer" bombing strikes on Iran to the finality --“That ended the war”)– of the 1945 bombings:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI1fJT9wW3o
This is the man who just sent a flotilla of Marines to the war zone, with an equal force said to be added in shortly. Who here is ready to put their son or daughter at his service and shipped off to the darkly looming next edition of our Forever Wars in the sandbox?
On his way to thoroughly giving the lie to his key campaign promises, Trump has engendered a new era of Russian hegemony in the region. Putin has eagerly been fattening up the Kremlin’s treasury with oil and gas sales hugely plumped up by Trump’s removal of sanctions on them; a corollary is Russia gaining power in their aggressions against a Ukraine Trump has grievously under-supported.
The fallout among our NATO allies has also called into question the good will of Europe–notably Denmark as it spat back at Trump’s notion to perhaps occupy Greenland.. Trump has put a considerable piece of America’s self-defense capabilities into a state of wary withdrawal.
The Republican legislators have been cowardly (a word Trump throws at our actual allies) and mostly hidden in the weeds on all this—part of what Georgia Senator from Georgia Jon Osoff calls the party loyalists’ “`Dear Leader’ problem”, as epitomized by Tulsi Gabbard’s obtuse non-replies as to how Trump dictates kinetic chaos regardless of what was once called intelligence.
Trump and his reptilian `Department of War’ chief, Pissed-Off Pete Hegseth have been congratulating themselves on the Epic Fury fireworks for nigh to three weeks now, and indeed, who can stand so much winning?
In what sequence do we celebrate it all?
Is it first of all the re-obliteration of the previously ever-so-obliterated-like-nobody-has-ever-seen nuclear weapons refinement?
Or the disabling of ship traffic in the Strait of Hormuz with the attendant interruption of fuel and fertilizer, bidding to immobilize and bankrupt multiple economies?
Or maybe it's the subjecting of previously friendly Middle Eastern trade partners to the Iranian payback of Gulf states shelling and economic dismemberment?
Hmmm…the credible-to-many accusations that Bibi Netanyahu is jerking Trump into action while spreading death and black plumes of smoke to whatever prized enemies now somehow feel justifiable as targets?
The most horrible part of the horrible joke on his voters has to be the Dignified Transfers, two of which he’s handled rather than lateral that work to V.P. J.D. Vance, who still dreams of sliding past blast radius of suckered-MAGA types. He's so far ducked a verbal spanking from the likes of antri-excursionist Megan Kelly on her Sirius channel. Former fellow Fox talking head Mark Levin described Kelly as an “emotionally unhinged, lewd, and petulant wreck”, drawing return fire in the form of her citing his “micropenis”.
Just while we’re at it, you schismatic MAGA people, will Ice Barbie be assessing Corey Lewandowski’s Deep Penetrator credentials as deployed on the Ice-Fuck One jet? I’ve been waiting to know more since the days when Trump himself, as alleged in Michael Woolf’s Fire and Fury, advised former White House staffer Hope Hicks she was “the best piece of tail he’ll ever have.” Even now Lewandoski’s latest grift is being revealed, even though he’s just making couch change compared to presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner’s money-grab diplomacy.)
Even as I add, “Stay classy, Donald,” genuine regret intrudes at how the aforementioned farcical elements fly in on the wings of sordid gossip. Most of his haters--he made wo many of them--are being joined by more than a few of his MAGA base. Plenty of them find the cases belli to be the President’s need for a whopping distraction from.the Epstein inquiries.
Can we also name-check Cuba, that unfortunate island that Trump probably feels was best run back in the Fifties by the repressive and corrupt Batista? Thanks to its similaries with the ransacked-and dumped Venezuela, it’s at present being quite literally disempowered, left in the darkness of an increasingly impoverished (read: starving) population who already had enough problems. Perhaps an easy target to pivot to when the black smoke blots out the sky over the Strait.
I journeyed to Cuba in the late 1990s, where I found the citizens full of grace and displaying a hard-earned dignity that hid out in their bitter whispered jokes about life under Castro; This was well before the current U.S. clampdown, and life was tough enough to gin up the the go-to saw about life in a struggling Communist state where “The three major failures of the revolution were breakfast, lunch, and dinner."
“I do believe,” Trump said, gloating in his own sense of imperial majesty, “I'll be having the honor of taking Cuba. That'd be a good honor, that's a big honor…. I mean, whether I free it, take it, think I could do anything I want with it…you want to know the truth…a beautiful island, great weather. They're not in a hurricane zone, which is nice for a change. They won't be asking us for money for hurricanes every week.”
Well, there’s that. After all, we have our own violent storms up here in El Norte, as the executive orders pile up and impel us to global warming.
In sum, the thuggery from Trump knows no bounds, it seems, nor any scrap of empathy, nor an explicable plan.
Which returns us to Iran.
It requires some strain to think back through the current waves of Hollywood sequel/prequelitis to recall the 2012 release Argo, which won Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, along with Best Supporting actor for Alan Arkin and four other noms.
A quirk of working as a freelance across decades was that in 1983 I first wrote about much-lauded Ken Taylor, who as Canadian ambassador to Iran during the crisis sheltered endangered U.S. embassy personnel, and then three decades later interviewed Chris Terrio, the deft screenwriter whose script put Ben Affleck more prominently in the hero’s role as real-life CIA operative Tony Mendez. (Though it was Arkin’s portrayal of a fictionalized producer Lester Siegel that gave the story buoyancy as also being a profanity-rich Hollywood satire:
As you could glimpse from the snark that Trump recently dropped on Carter’s management of the 1979-81 hostage crisis in Iran, the wound that still informs Pentagon thinking about certain species of international hostage rescue was Eagle Claw, often tagged as Desert One after the site in the Iranian desert where a special operations rescue effort things fell apart with nine service personnel dying.
In the story I wrote for the Los Angeles Times Calendar section (link at bottom), the framing was this: Terrio, over coffee, finds that, despite the passage of more than two decades since the drama in Iran, there are messages relevant to our media-centric world: “The hostage crisis was the first big world event in which media was used in this way — that’s something the students, the hostage takers, the Iranian government and particularly the ayatollah certainly understood. He was a master of manipulating his image and his message to the world. That interview he did with Mike Wallace that you see in the film was no accident. He’s thought of sometimes as being stuck in some medieval paradigm. But it’s clear that this is a man who was quite savvy about how to manipulate world opinion to bolster his power.
It’s probably already too late to get a decent Polymarket pick down as to whether Trump or the wounded but grinding new Ayatollah is coming out on top in the conflict’s propaganda war. But current indications are prettydire, PR-wise.
To give the showbiz side of all this a further look, Terrio’s path through Hollywood post-Argo August of 2021 is probably not what he hoped. Here’s how the then 37-year-old he foresaw his prospects when we spoke in 2013 just before his Adapted Screenplay Oscar win:
All the attention the film has received — “Argo” earned seven Oscar nominations, including a screenplay nod for Terrio and a best picture nomination — surely must feel like vindication for Terrio’s work history of ducking so-so film projects that could pay the bills in favor of more humble but interesting work. “I think any writer could tell you it’s so lonely, and so full of self-doubt and angst, that when you actually are working on a project, it has to be a world you look forward to going to every day.”
Cut to August, 2021, when what has to be recognized as an embittered craftsman undloaded to Vanity Fair on the damaging lessons of his time in superhero filmmaking: “ For five years the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Argo kept his mouth shut about his work on the DC films Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League, even as scorn from critics and fans exacerbated already-painful behind-the-scenes memories. Worst of all, he agreed with many of their complaints.
Re the former he said: “So this house of cards that had been built in order to motivate this clash between America’s two favorite heroes made no sense at all.” And ultimately, his good name as a writer was now being kicked apart online by the zealots who but tickets to franchise films: Yeah. It hurts your reputation, but more importantly, it poisons your soul and your confidence, especially when this other version of the film wasn’t seen. Finally, I’m getting back to smaller, character-driven worlds where I don’t have any of the franchise issues that have been difficult to grapple with in the past.”
Then, just this week, Terrio wrote his own essay online for Airmail. Citing a fanboy reaction from an unnamed high official (okay, tell me Obama without saying Obama), he wrote: “The former official went on to explain that the film had proved useful in negotiations, when the administration was trying to convince Congress to approve the Iran nuclear deal brokered by the White House in 2015. A number of members of Congress, this person explained, had known nothing of the history of the United States’ involvement in Iran until they saw Argo’s prologue—a brief history lesson in which the narrator details U.S.-British exploitation of Iranian oil fields in the early 20th century; the C.I.A.-backed coup to overthrow the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953; and subsequent U.S. support for the Shah and his brutal, torture-happy secret police.”
He issued a mea culpa, adding props to Canada: “I have often asked myself whether the film I wrote is a 21st-century cowboys-and-Indians tale...but there is an important point about Argo that I always bring up in my discussions of it: in the film, the Americans in hiding are rescued without the firing of a single American bullet. The exfiltration succeeded because our close ally, Canada, sheltered the American diplomats without hesitation.
“In turn, the “Houseguests,” as they were called, were rescued through intelligent planning and ingenuity—not by Navy SEAL marksmen or a bombing campaign with just the right number of civilian casualties as calculated by an analyst in Washington.”
Terrio broadened his focus: “Do images of angry protests in the streets of Tehran contribute to the paranoid view of the Middle East that has pervaded much of the U.S. since September 11? The president of the United States has chosen bullets over nonviolence at every opportunity, even when he sees those bullets pumped into the faces and backs of American citizens. He has alienated and even threatened to annex our Canadian neighbors, closing off the very diplomatic channels that made the so-called Canadian Caper possible. Creative statecraft—soft power—has been replaced by bullying, saber-rattling, videos of performative killing at sea, and the dime-store-dictator rantings of Stephen Miller as he stares into the camera with the kind of eyes you see in Psychiatric Emergency at three A.M.
“It’s the same goddamned script all over again. And as we know very well in my business—the sequel is usually worse than the original.”
The Canadian Caper was still top of mind for Americans’ sense of the history when in early 1983 the Toronto Globe & Mail assigned me a profile of Canadian Consul General to New York City, whom they depicted in the headline as “Our Man in Manhattan”.
THE WORLD has not been a safe place for heroes for some years now. Heroes tend to get shot, blown up in their cars, or satirized on late-night television. If diplomat Ken Taylor has evaded all but the last of these dangers in the three years since he smuggled six American diplomats out of an angry Iranian revolution, it is probably due to the sang-froid with which he wears his hero's mantle
Taylor's terminal, yet charming, calm has probably served him better than the undisputed courage he showed in hiding, and later spiriting out the six Americans whose flight to safety made him the toast to all North America. For his actions, he won the Congressional Gold Medal, becoming one of a select group that began with George Washington and had never before included someone who wasn't a U. S. citizen. He was also elevated, to the resentment of certain of his peers in the Canadian diplomatic service, into one of the more visible and cushy postings in the world, New York City.
Said Taylor: “It's oftentimes exhilarating, but you try to keep a balance, to see it as a response to Canada as well. There were four or five people very much involved (in rescuing the Americans) in addition to [wife] Pat and myself, but there's this reservoir of goodwill between the U. S. and Canada, and this sort of triggered an emotional display of it." Indeed, Taylor seems a tiny bit baffled by the adulation…the term "gallant" is pinned upon Taylor who, with his woolly silver hair, outsize designer glasses and French-cut suit, seems contradictorily peaceful.
“ He has been pressed into use, by two nations full of patriots, as a hero, I wrote in showing his address to a local group: He opens his remarks with a shaft aimed at his own profession, quoting Ambrose Bierce's definition of a diplomat as one who, "having failed to secure an office from the people, is given one by the government on the condition that he leave the country.”
My story showed Martin Short, then at SCTV, searching for a likely public figure to cast as the paid spokesman for a fictitious substance called Moose Beer, for a fake commercial that would be planted in the late-night comedy show's parody of Canadian television, which required three hours of make-up and a dedication to capturing some essence of the undemonstrative diplomat.
That was a trait he showed in re-living the memory of the nerve-wracking days back in Iran. Right after his postingto Tehran in 1977, "The Shah seemed pretty strong when I arrived. About a year later, it became evident that he was in jeopardy.”
Wife Pat, a public health executive throughout the couple’s various posting, had been tear-gassed while escaping a violent coup e’etat in Guatemala many years before. She’d be tested again in 1979: Pat Taylor crossed paths with the national whirlwind. Working in a blood transfusion center in a quarter of Tehran where the Shah's troops fought bitterly, block by block, with insurgent forces, she and her colleagues more than once had to duck out of the way as the government troops chased rioters right through the center's hallways and offices. "There was a lot of shooting into the building itself," she says. When the rioting militants took over the U. S. Embassy on Nov. 4, 1979, her husband simply called and told her, "There are some people who are in trouble and I've offered to help…”
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