Almost everything you could possibly say about Donald Trump’s return to the presidency has been said by now. The big problem with Trump as a symbol of America’s tragicomic decline is that he seems fictionally, improbably perfect for that role; the symbolism is painfully obvious, although that doesn’t deprive it of all resonance or meaning.
Every inquisition into exactly who’s to blame for this unmitigated disaster has to begin by looking in the mirror.
I covered Trump’s first presidential campaign back in 2016, which both feels like a lifetime ago and like the day before yesterday. (Time! It doesn’t seem to work the way it used to.) One of the songs in constant rotation at his endlessly delayed rallies that year was “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” until the lawyers for Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (or for whoever owned the rights to their songwriting catalog) made him stop. It struck me then, and strikes me now, as carrying a ham-fisted double meaning: Nearly nobody got what they wanted from Trump’s first presidency, but one could argue, at least for a while, that “we” — meaning both Americans and the people of the world — got a lesson we both needed and deserved.
So now what? With Trump reinstalled atop an administration of fully subservient toadies, apparently prepared to pursue a breathtaking range of unconstitutional, delusional or ill-advised policies, is it now clear that we need a different and harsher lesson, with potentially irreversible consequences? I don’t know; history will judge, and all that. But a different song suggests itself to me now: the final hit single from Leonard Cohen, the late Canadian Jewish prophet of doom and longtime observer of American folly, who never needed a weatherman to know which way the wind blew.
“You Want It Darker” was released in October of 2016, less than three weeks before Cohen died, at age 82, on Nov. 7. Donald Trump was elected president the next day. That coincidence was certainly noticed at the time; I hardly know what to say about it now.
Like the best of Cohen’s songs, “You Want It Darker” carries an undercurrent of thrilling subversion, the sense of expressing forbidden but undeniable thoughts. It’s also a song that comments on itself, and establishes some ironic distance from its own lyrical ambition, another Cohen trademark. (Hence the nearly infinite number of mediocre covers of “Hallelujah,” which somehow have not ruined it entirely.)
That certainly wasn’t the first time a Leonard Cohen song seemed to prefigure events that had not happened, or to capture a global state of mind before it fully coalesced. Most famously, there was “The Future,” released in 1992 at the moment of liberal democracy’s supposed global triumph, which offered an eerie forecast of a rootless new century, struggling with the loss of existential meaning:
Give me back the Berlin Wall
Give me Stalin and St.