The Troll in the White House

I grew up thinking that trolls were evil magical creatures who lived in Scandinavian caves. Perhaps I was influenced by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” when the central character Peer Gynt, in a dream-like fantasy, enters Dovregubbens Hall. The insistent music at that point is so distinctive and memorable that it cannot be mistaken for anything else in the repertoire.

A variety of trolls populate Nordic mythology and Scandinavian folklore, including:

— The Norwegian jötnar, the Ice Giants of old: some had multiple heads, deformed bodies, claws, and fangs. Norse trolls dwelled in mountains, caves, and sometimes under a bridge.

—The Three Billygoats Gruff of 19th century Norway that fooled the troll who lived under the bridge they needed to cross, and was ultimately annihilated by the billygoats as they took advantage of the insatiable appetite of most traditional trolls.

— The troll in the Norwegian story “The Boy Who Had an Eating Match With a Troll” who was fooled by a farmer’s son Askeladden in another eating match to self-destruct and thereby save the boy’s family from danger and from debt.

Most trolls also “apparently smell the blood of a Christian Man,” loathe daylight, and turn into stone when they are exposed to it as well as tossing stones as their means of combat.

In addition, trolls are abundant in C. S. Lewis’s “The Chronicles of Narnia” (the Trollshaws) and J. R. R. Tolkien’s legendarium “Middle-earth,” where the Midgard of Norse mythology or its equivalent is found.

More recently, friendly trolls are central to the stories in “Frozen” and the “Moomin” books of Finnish-Swedish writer and artist Tove Jansson.

So much for the role of the troll in music and folk legends.

The term troll has in recent times taken a turn for the worse, from stupid strange mountain cave creatures to Internet bots pretending to represent particular points of view but actually inserted into gullible readers’ inboxes to insidiously twist the readers’ perspectives on alt-right or other positions to politicians turning any subject that might reflect negatively on them into nasty, twisted attacks on others, generally in public with a large audience. With regard to the latter type of troll I am speaking, of course, of Donald Trump, current President of these United States, Troll in Chief.

Reporter Chris Cillizza of CNN captures the present unsavory use of trolling from the Oval Office and environs against other politicians by Trump when he says derogatory things about his opponents or imagined opponents in breathtakingly negative reality television terms and gestures.

Cillizza describes the Trump Trolling mechanism as follows:

“That Trump says those sorts of things—even in front of a red-meat-loving crowd like the NRA—is notable. It's hard to imagine Barack Obama or George W. Bush or, well, any other past president saying that kind of stuff about former opponents (and maybe future ones) in public. . . .

“What's more telling to me, however, is how Trump absolutely revels in the reaction he gets from taking these sorts of shots. Go back and watch the [NRA May 28th] video. . . . Notice how Trump, theatrically, lets the crowd soak in [his attack on Senator Elizabeth] Warren . . . and then begin to applaud. Right after he makes the comments about [Senator Ted] Cruz, there are a few excited gasps in the crowd.

“That reaction is what Trump lives for. He is one part performer, one part provocateur and one part politician—and probably in that order of importance. He likes to, in the parlance of the Internet, troll people—go after a point of perceived weakness or insecurity relentlessly and without remorse.

“[W]hen Trump has the chance to return to his natural state as troll-in-chief, he takes it. He loves the barbs, the reaction, the aftermath. It's what makes him go at some level, what he truly enjoys about politics. It's also when he is at his best, the closest representation of the person 60+ million people voted for—a brash, unapologetic pot-stirrer who doesn't care what anyone thinks of him.”

This is what scares the bejesus out of all of us, especially American allies who have observed and heard Trump troll just about every public person with whom he has come in contact, not to mention a goodly number of private citizens who just happened to have enabled Trump’s ability to rise to a nasty challenge where none was invited.

What was always nearly inconceivable in an American statesman or politician heretofore, the deliberate public attack on “enemies,” has become commonplace, i.e., the Troll in Chief as American President.