Watching President Trump address the massive gathering in DC today, I kept thinking back to my days at the university when I read Edmund Wilson's, To The Finland Station. The edition I owned had a dramatic cover drawing depicting Lenin addressing adoring throngs gathered to receive him at Petrograd's famous train station upon his return to Russia in April 1917, after nearly 17 years in exile. That image has stayed with me over the years as a classic example of the melding of theater and politics. As noted, it came back to me watching Trump in DC. I don't want to push the analogy too far, but the subsequent televised images of a portion of the crowd besieging the Capitol and other government buildings conjured up in my mind the attack on the Winter Palace, the storming of the Bastille, Yeltsin on his tank before the Russian parliament building, the German Spartacist uprising of 1918-19, the . . . oh, well, you get it.
Read it all here: https://thediplomad.blogspot.com/2021/01/trump-at-finland-station.html