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We Are All in the Dumps with Trump [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-18
From The Marginalian:
St. Paul’s Bakery and Orphanage, where the story is set, is a horrible place reminiscent of Auschwitz. In the game of bridge, “diamonds are trumps,” a phrase with a poignant double meaning, subtly implicating the avarice of the world’s diamond-slingers and Donald Trumps in the systemic social malady of homelessness — something reflected in the clever wordplay of the book’s title itself...
Whether or not Trump ever read Sendak’s 1993 tale, the book read him. It’s entirely possible that it may have pierced the cultural membrane surrounding Donald Trump, finding a place on his score-settling radar.
In his much earlier 1967 book Higgelty Pigglety Pop!, Sendak’s protagonist, a pampered terrier in a nice home, is dissatisfied and strikes out to seek more, saying at the start of the tale, “There must be more to life than having everything!” The dog first finds work at a “big white house” and eventually lands a starring role at “Castle Yonder.”
Interesting.
Now ponder, if you will, Trump’s purported birthday love letter to Jeffrey Epstein in 2003, which starts:
Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything
"Voice Over”? A nod to the phrase being a quote? An unrepentant call-back that doubles down on his own moral excesses in the context of power and predation?
We’ve just crossed a boundary — from picture book to parable, from nursery rhyme to social reckoning. In Sendak’s world, rats deal in orphans, towers loom over trash heaps, and dogs with everything set off in search of something more. Years later, a familiar voice echoes a line from that fable — a voice steeped in wealth, continually shadowed by scandal. Coincidence? Perhaps. But in this corner of the cultural landscape, where symbols linger and stories fold back on themselves, nothing is ever just what it seems. For here, enigmas never age… they only wait — in the shadows, in the margins, in the zone where the wild things are.
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