Trump as a Character from a James Joyce Novel

President Donald Trump could be a character created by James Joyce based on the way he thinks and communicates.

That’s the view of an unnamed national security expert, as reported by General Michael Hayden, a head of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency under former president George W. Bush.

In an interview published in the May 6, 2018, New York Times Sunday Magazine, Hayden was asked what it was like for analysts to brief a president who ignores intelligence with which he disagrees and embraces information that suits his policy needs.

“I’m not in the room, but the meetings have been described to me as chaotic,” Hayden said. “The president’s mind jumps from intelligence to the press to policy back to intelligence. One fellow who briefed the President early on said, ‘If we could have recorded the conversation and made a transcript, it would have sounded like a James Joyce novel.'”

Well, first one might say that it encouraging to learn that U.S. national security operatives read Joyce, or are at least somewhat familiar with his work.

Ulysses is probably the novel the analyst had in mind because there Joyce most notably employed a method of getting inside the head of his main characters and recording their stream-of-conscious thoughts.  The minds of men and women do jump around, often not in complete sentences, as one thought brings forth an association with something else, and Joyce wanted to make use of this phenomenon to flesh out his characters. When recorded literally, it can have a somewhat chaotic aspect to it – an aspect most people tend to keep to themselves. We are all conditioned to remain “on point” as best we can although it is not infrequent to hear someone not immediately respond and say, “sorry I was distracted by something.”

While it’s hard to sat what Joyce might think about Trump (he might see great possibilities there), I suspect he would be flattered by what the unnamed analyst had to say. In other words, Joyce had got it right.