46 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 13, 20201
T RU M P ’SMEASURES“
I
like the numbers being where they
are.” This was Donald Trump’s
justification for attempting to prevent
the Grand Princess passengers from
disembarking on American soil. (He
made the statement on March 6th, a
hundred years ago.) I can’t not hear it
as a line of poetry. After all, it scans—
five alternating stresses, a line of pen-
tameter. And the prosody entangles the
statement in my mind with the his-
tory of verse, especially since, from an-
tiquity until the early nineteenth cen-
tury, “numbers” meant poetic meter, the
number of syllables or stresses in a line.
“Numbers” denoted orders beyond the
poetic, too; it named the harmony of
the universe. “All is numbers,” the Py-
thagoreans claimed; Trump’s raising the
question of numbers sounds like part
of an ancient debate. Alexander Pope:
“But most by numbers judge a poet’s
song; /And smooth or rough, with them
is right or wrong.”
Trump-speak has always been a rad-
ically rough and wrong kind of poetry.
The line that’s haunting me sounds tra-
ditional, but usually Trump is avant-
garde: his non sequiturs, his use of dis-
junction, his mangling of syntax can make
his rallies resemble nightmarish (and
much more crowded) versions of poetry
readings I’ve attended in which nonlin-
ear language is conceived of as an attack
on the smooth functioning of bourgeois
political rhetoric. (Those were the days.)
Trump campaigned in this pseudo-po-
etry, and he fails to govern in it, too, using
language that intends to inflame or ob-
scure but almost never refers to anything
real. Like many poets, he conflates beauty
and truth: We’re going to have a beau-
tiful wall. Beautiful (Confederate) stat-
ues. Beautiful rallies (despite the virus).
He has said that he’s “automatically at-
tracted to beautiful—I just start kissing
them .. .” He likes the numbers being
where they are. Melania is a 10.
On the one hand, an (unintentional)
evocation of a poetic lineage. On the
other, the language of a gambler: I like
the six; I like those odds; I like the Lak-of many people in the large bin of S,
and if she moves into I she becomes
an anecdote.
—Weike Wangers against the Clippers; I like mid-cap
consumer goods. What makes Trump’s
line compelling as poetry is how it sounds
at once like Wallace Stevens and a bookie.
Plato warned us against poets. I’m
not sure I fully understand his argu-
ments for deporting them from the Re-
public, but now I’m sobered by this
statement of his about numbers: “The
property of numbers appears to have
the power of leading us towards real-
i t y.... The soldier must learn them in
order to marshal his troops; the philos-
opher, because he must rise above the
world of change and grasp true being,
or he will never become proficient in
the calculation of reason. Our guard-
ian is both soldier and philosopher.”
Our guardian in the White House
is neither; he’s just a failed poet like me,
unable to marshal the troops to build
the new hospitals, to manufacture ven-
tilators. He wants to protect the num-
bers, not the humans they are supposed
to denote. The grownups and the post-
ers used to say, Don’t be a statistic. That
meant don’t get shot or O.D., but for
Trump it means: die without being
counted, and without counting. He likes
the numbers being where they are.
How to end on a note of optimism,
however frightened and furious I am?
Iamb: an unstressed syllable followed
by a stressed one, the sound of a heart-
beat, the oldest number, an embodied
rhythm held in common, a force big-
ger than any tyrant or fool, a collective
pulse that beats beneath his sophistry.
—Ben Lerner
1
AV E N U EOFSUPERFLUITIESR
egent Street, in central London, is
a sweeping boulevard laid out by
the architect John Nash at the request
of his close friend and client the Prince
Regent, later King George IV. Nash,
who had made his name building coun-
try houses for aristocrats, was a Geor-
gian-era precursor of New York’s Rob-
ert Moses: a town planner who sought
to separate the poorer, more squalid
eastern side of London from its newer,
grander, wealthier west. Nash’s instru-
ment for dividing London was Regent
Street, a wide concourse devoted to lux-
ury shopping. The journalist George
Augustus Sala described it in 1858 as
“an avenue of superfluities—a greattrunk road in Vanity Fair.” When the
street celebrated its two-hundredth an-
niversary, last year, superfluities were
still abundantly represented among the
retailers that could afford its rents:
Coach, Burberry, Lululemon, Apple.
Apple was the first to close volun-
tarily. It did so on March 14th, when the
company announced that all its retail
stores worldwide, outside of those in
China, would temporarily cease opera-
tions—displays of devices designed to
invite touching having been alarmingly
rebranded as possible vectors of conta-
gion. When I rode my bike down Re-
gent Street’s dramatic curve on the af-
ternoon of Sunday, March 22nd, all the
stores were shuttered. Apart from a cou-
ple of guys in track pants eying the Rolex
display at Mappin & Webb, the upscale
jewelry store, the sidewalks were empty.
We’re accustomed to reach for the phrase
“post-apocalyptic” to describe an urban
landscape devoid of life, and the Chris-
tian preacher with the microphone and
the amp who was haranguing an almost
deserted Piccadilly Circus added to the
dystopian atmosphere. But what the
streets really recalled were images of Lon-
don during the economic crisis of the
nineteen-seventies, when Prime Minis-
ter Edward Heath imposed a three-day
week to conserve fuel, and power cuts
regularly dimmed even the busiest thor-
oughfares. Now the city looks not so
much post-apocalyptic as post-capital-
ist, as if the fever of consumption that
has come to characterize the metropo-
lis had finally burned itself out.
That Sunday ended a weekend that
was a turning point for London. Schools
closed on Friday afternoon, remaining
open only for the children of “key work-
ers”: nurses, police, supermarket staff.
Students in the equivalent of the tenth
and twelfth grades, who had been ex-
pecting in summer term to sit an in-
tense sequence of exams, for which they
have been preparing for two years, were
informed that exams were cancelled,
and they’d be assessed by their teachers
and mock-exam results instead. “She
feels like she’s been fired,” the father of
a devastated sixteen-year-old girl told
me. Public transport had already con-
tracted. On Friday evening, the Prime
Minister, Boris Johnson, appeared at the
government’s now daily press confer-
ence to announce that cafés, bars, restau-