It is always interesting to know what kind of book the devil would have written- but the theologians never gave him a chance…All who have had a hand in the Sudan must read it…A strange and sinister figure who threw a distant shadow across my generation in the ‘eighties. The Mahdi!…The life of the Mahdi is a romance in miniature…built entirely on slavery and slaughter…When the Mahdi’s successor met Kitchener, he met a weapon of undreamed power, the machine gun!…an unequal clash between East and West. Wonderful are the ways of England!
-Winston Churchill, Preface to The Mahdi of Allah by Richard Bermann
If the battle of Lafayette Park turns- as seems possible- into Donald Trump’s most telling misadventure, part of the credit should go to Winston Churchill. Churchill seems to have been on the President’s mind since he entered the Oval Office, where he returned a bust of the former British Prime Minister…But it was this week’s trek across the street, past a plaza tear-gassed free of protesters, that really allowed Trump’s Churchill fantasies full play.
-Bill McKibben
Winston Churchill’s The River War written in 1899 shows none of the raw jingoism that drips from his preface to The Mahdi of Allah in 1932. What happened between those years was his need to respond to the politics of the moment, to wave the bloody British shirt. The Empire was slipping, Albion was weakening, Germany was rumbling. He would be defiant.
Trump knows well his own bloody shirts, they helped get him elected. “American carnage”…”a complete disaster”…”the worst ever”…”she’s a loser”. So Trump tosses his political footballs- xenophobia, sexism, racism- onto the field in every play. He returns the Churchill bust, with that fierce bulldog grimace he practices in the morning mirror, to the Oval Office.
Who else’s head might carry a MAGA message? General Gordon’s, cut off by the Mahdi’s Helpers in an act of imperial defiance that Churchill had come to Sudan to avenge? Or the Mahdi’s own- his grave desecrated by British soldiers, his body disinterred, his skull stolen to serve as Kitchener’s inkwell? But ink to write what? That he had taken over their country, or that its people weren’t going away?