Does Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” Predict Trump?
Willy Loman is Donald Trump’s secret identity
At first sight, we’d never confuse the US President with Arthur Miller’s main character — someone Trump would call a “loser”.
After all, it’s seventy years since Willy Loman brought to the stage his incoherence, his worship at the empty shrine of personality, and his vagrant malignity. And unlike Trump, Willy is forced to borrow a meagre salary; his house (in its experimental staging) is devoid of walls, let alone gold faucets; and his single, guilt-haunted affair does not suggest a man who claims to grab pussies with impunity.
Nonetheless, you’ll never see Willy Loman and Trump in the Oval Office at the same time.
When the lights came up on the 1949 premiere of Death of a Salesman, grown men were weeping in the orchestra. Arthur Miller had used Willy to lay bare the vanity of their consumerism, the loss implicit in their blind pursuit of success, the vacuous heart of their untamed individualism. How much we’ve forgotten since then. Trump was not pitied, as he deserved to be, when he flourished these curses as his political standard; he was voted into office instead.
In the meantime, we’ve had the chance to observe a character in the White House whose script might be Willy’s, its most obvious trait a helpless split from reality. Willy spends most of his time in reverie, hunting down — yet evading — the key moments that define his failure, even as he protests matchless success. “Knocked ’em dead in Providence, slaughtered ’em in Boston.” Like Trump’s response to adverse polls, it’s all fantasy.
Indeed, it’s a fantasy world that Trump lives in, convincing himself and anyone else he can that doing nothing — or doing nothing reputable or worthwhile — seals his status as the finest president in US history.
In a recent interview on ABC, challenged on his country’s pandemic mortality rates, he actually requires to be shown the true, terrifying figures. “I was told they were the best in the world,” he announces disarmingly. Angela Merkel of Germany, Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, are doubtless served by similar information policies.
As with Willy, the heart of Trump’s problem — now a problem for each of us — is an unsustainable relationship with his own self. “The man who makes an appearance in the business world,” Willy instructs his sons, “the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead.” Whether Trump ever admits, as Willy does in occasional moments of reflection, that such a front is the flimsiest of personas, we cannot tell.
But as a mantra, it’s in the authentic Trumpian voice, and as with Trump (for example, in his irreconcilable views on mask-wearing, or on racial equality) contradiction is the soul of Willy’s message: the Chevrolet, he pronounces, is the greatest car ever built — but they ought to prohibit its manufacture. In the manner of Trump lauding, then denouncing, his own appointments to office, Willy damns his son Biff as lazy, before asserting the exact opposite.
The sole point of consistency is a bottomless self-infatuation. “I am not a dime a dozen,” Willy cries, as a desperate Biff struggles to make him see reason. “I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!”
Uncle Charley has done his best to remind him that these things don’t mean anything. But Charley, famously, is not “well-liked”, and his wisdom is thrown away on a man who believes that it’s “not what you do… It’s who you know and the smile on your face!”
Or, as Willy’s unredeemed younger son proclaims at his funeral, It’s the only dream you can have — to come out number-one man. If there is a shred of sincerity in Trump, it will be in adherence to values of this sort: values that should be alien to any political world.
Death of a Salesman may be a work of genius in its staging, in its simple yet subtle language, above all in its merciless analysis of a self-defeating, wretched way of life. Yet it isn’t comprehensive. Miller’s fierce concentration on one malaise means that he can’t cover all the ills of a one-dimensional world, particularly in the experience of women, or that of people of color. Trump can’t engage with those either, although in his case that’s owing to lack of capacity. This defect may soon incur his ruin.
If Miller’s goal in Death of a Salesman is a tragedy of classical scale, it’s one designed for our non-hierarchical times, so he doesn’t focus on a traditional hero like a king or prince. This is why Willy’s surname is Loman: “low man,” man of no great position. Trump, meanwhile, is “low” in the simpler sense of mean or contemptible. Willy may not be “the world’s finest character”, as his wife admits. But at least he has the decency to feel some guilt, and his ultimate self-sacrifice is a skewed attempt to make amends.
That’s more than we’ll ever see from Trump.
