REVOLUTION: "I think he died for me," she said!

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 20, 2025

On Monday, Trump said something quite similar: On Monday, the president spoke to Emmanuel Macron, president of a vexatious nation called France.

His words were captured by an active mike. He'd just spoken to Putin on the phone. Strangely enough, the president now said this:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (8/18/25): I think he wants to make a deal. I think he wants to make a deal for me. 

Do you understand that? As crazy as it sounds.

[Addressing the entire room]

Sit down. Sit down, everybody. I think we’ll let the press come in for a minute.

He seemed to be saying that Vladimir Putin wanted to fashion a peace deal. More remarkably, he seemed to be saying that Putin wanted to fashion a peace deal for him, apparently as some sort of favor for the sitting American president

The president said that sounded crazy. We're strongly inclined to agree.

We also agree with the various analysts who have said it was a very strange moment when Trump said that to Macron.  Also this:

When we heard the tap of what Trump said, we thought of the great novella by Joyce. Inevitably, we thought of the climactic scene of the acclaimed story, The Dead.

 The leading authority guides us:

The Dead (Joyce short story)

"The Dead" is the final short story in the 1914 collection Dubliners by James Joyce. It is by far the longest story in the collection and, at 15,952 words, is almost long enough to be described as a novella. The story deals with themes of love and loss, as well as raising questions about the nature of the Irish identity.

The story was well-received by critics and academics and described by T. S. Eliot as one of the greatest English-language short stories ever written. It was later adapted into...the 1987 film The Dead written by Tony Huston and directed by John Huston.

[...]

Joyce biographer and critic Richard Ellmann wrote: "In its lyrical, melancholy acceptance of all that life and death offer, 'The Dead' is a linchpin in Joyce's work."...On the centennial of the release of Dubliners, Dan Barry of The New York Times called "The Dead" "just about the finest short story in the English language."

This story offers a critique of a society that has been gripped by a deadening paralysis of the spirit...

Ah yes, the "deadening paralysis of the spirit"—the paralysis that had somehow managed to grip the Irish society Joyce believed he saw around him. But let's focus on the direct connection between that widely acclaimed short story and the peculiar thing the president recently said.

We turn now to the end of Joyce's story—to the end of a long and convivial night: 

The elderly sisters Kate and Julia Morkan have staged their annual party in celebration of Twelfth Night. Now, as the party is winding down, a revelation is drawing near. It will involve Gabriel Conroy, nephew to the Misses Morkan, and his wife, Gretta Conroy:

As the party winds down, the guests filter out, and Gabriel prepares to leave. He finds his wife standing, apparently lost in thought, at the top of the stairs. In another room Bartell D'Arcy sings "The Lass of Aughrim." 

The Conroys leave; and Gabriel is excited, for it has been a long time since he and Gretta have had a night in a hotel to themselves. When they arrive at the hotel, Gabriel's aspirations of passionate lovemaking are conclusively dashed by Gretta's lack of interest. 

He presses her about what is bothering her, and she admits that she is "thinking about that song, The Lass of Aughrim." She admits that it reminds her of someone, a young man named Michael Furey, who had courted her in her youth in Galway. He used to sing "The Lass of Aughrim" for her. 

Michael Furey used to sign that song for her, she says. She has thereby started to echo the president's peculiar statement. 

Her revelation continues from there. You can see Anjelica Huston performing this scene simply by clicking this. Our advice to you would be this:

Don't cheat yourself out of watching.

For our money, the actor Donal McCann, playing her husband, may not have captured the scene in quit the way she did. We'll attribute that to imperfect direction. But as you can see by clicking this, these are the lines from Joyce's original text in which the revelation about Michael Furey is being completed:

“He is dead,” she said at length. “He died when he was only seventeen. Isn’t it a terrible thing to die so young as that?”

“What was he?” asked Gabriel, still ironically.

“He was in the gasworks,” she said.

Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another.

[...]

“I suppose you were in love with this Michael Furey, Gretta,” he said.

“I was great with him at that time,” she said.

Her voice was veiled and sad. Gabriel, feeling now how vain it would be to try to lead her whither he had purposed, caressed one of her hands and said, also sadly:

“And what did he die of so young, Gretta? Consumption, was it?”

“I think he died for me,” she answered.

(“Poor fellow,” Gretta soon says. “He was very fond of me and he was such a gentle boy.")

I think he died for me, she said. For our money, Anjelica Huston's performance of this story cuts extremely deep.

More than a century later, the strange man who is this nation's sitting president made a somewhat similar declaration, in this case regarding the deep friendship he seems to believe he maintains with Russia's Vladimir Putin.

Gretta's story continues from there. We thought of that famous scene from The Dead when we heard the tape of what the president recently said. 

At this juncture, we'll recommend this part of the synopsis we've posted above:

The Dead offers a critique of a society that has been gripped by a deadening paralysis of the spirit...

Our own society lies in the grip of a similar paralysis. That deadening paralysis is reflected, on a minute to minute basis, by the shriveled way our own Blue American tribunes are willing or able to discuss the remarkable oddness of the sitting president, the revolutionary leader in question.

Is something wrong with President Trump? If so, that would of course be a human tragedy—but under the circumstances, it would also represent a dangerous state of affairs.

Is something wrong with President Trump? The tribunes of our deadened world have agreed to avoid that obvious question. This Monday, the question loomed up again, as the president made a very strange declaration in a whispered aside to the president of France.

He seems to think that the man he calls "Vladimir" wants to fashion a peace deal—wants to fashion a peace deal for him! Presumably, this's an example of delusional thinking of the highest possible order.

What might that mean about President Trump? Tomorrow and Friday, we'll return to that question—but we leave you today with this broader point:

Those of us in Blue America need to step beyond our own tribe's deadened spirit. We need to see ourselves for who we are—and for who we plainly aren't at this point.

We need to find a richer way of understanding our current predicament. We may need to find the way that our deadened civilization can be "renewed by...the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of all mankind, the power which makes all things new."

We may be able to do some such by stepping outside the intellectual and spiritual poverty of the moment—the poverty of the shriveled discourse which emerges from our current round-the-clock pseudo-news environment.

We may need to let our feelings bloom, perhaps by consulting the poets, with Joyce as one example.

"I think he died for me," she said. As her story continues, we see that the weeping Gretta wasn't caught in the grip of a delusion in her thought about the gentle boy who died when he was just 17. 

Almost surely, our sitting president is. We very badly need to discuss the actual situation our deadened society is in.

We need to get wiser and deeper and better. What is actually going on within that peculiar man—within the revolutionary leader who, we're told, was divinely appointed to his current post?

Tomorrow: Delusions and fixed ideas