David Bentley Hart (2011):
How then, I asked Ambrose, should one portray the prince of darkness?
After a pensive moment, Ambrose replied, “A merciless real estate developer whose largest projects are all casinos.”
And recalling this exchange brought Donald Trump to mind. You know the fellow: developer, speculator, television personality, hotelier, political dilettante, conspiracy theorist, and grand croupier—the one with that canopy of hennaed hair jutting out over his eyes like a shelf of limestone.
In particular, I recalled how, back in 1993, when Trump decided he wanted to build special limousine parking lots around his Atlantic City casino and hotel, he had used all his influence to get the state of New Jersey to steal the home of an elderly widow named Vera Coking by declaring “eminent domain” over her property, as well as over a nearby pawn shop and a small family-run Italian restaurant.
She had declined to sell, having lived there for thirty-five years. Moreover, the state offered her only one-fourth what she had been offered for the same house some years before, and Trump could then buy it at a bargain rate. The affair involved the poor woman in an exhausting legal battle, which, happily, she won, with the assistance of the Institute for Justice.
How obvious it seems to me now. Cold, grasping, bleak, graceless, and dull; unctuous, sleek, pitiless, and crass; a pallid vulgarian floating through life on clouds of acrid cologne and trailed by a vanguard of fawning divorce lawyers, the devil is probably eerily similar to Donald Trump—though perhaps just a little nicer.
Addendum, 24 February 2025:
I went to add a hyperlink to this post today and found that the link to the First Things article was no longer valid. Then I found that the article was no longer on First Things at all. I checked DBH’s Substack and not only found my suspicion confirmed but discovered that DBH, having reposted the article there, also had an opinion about it:
I have received a number of requests recently that I repost this article from 2011, written long before anyone could foresee the electoral horrors then in store for the country formerly known as the United States of America. It originally appeared in a journal with which I had a professional if not always cordial association; but, recently, readers who have gone in search of it on that journal’s site have found that it has been expunged from the record. I am not wounded. No doubt it is all in keeping with a wholly understandable and blameless desire on the part of the editors to grovel, whine, pant, and slobber in positively orgiastic submission at the feet of the loathsome imbecile to whom the article’s title referred, and in service to whom they have so eagerly betrayed their professed faiths. It may profit a man little to gain the world and lose his soul, but that is still enough profit for some, and who am I to criticize good, honest, enterprising moral cowardice? Back then, they may have grasped that DJT is a cut-rate Satan, but now he’s their cut-rate Satan and so naturally they adore him. Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. At least, that would be my charitable reading of the situation. (Do I sound bitter?)
Not that it was an especially brilliant article, but it was prompted by a strange premonition whose ultimate accuracy has now been incandescently confirmed.