LAUGHINGSTOCK:

History doesn't repeat itself, but, as Mark Twain allegedly said, "it does rhyme." Trump, too, rhymes with the past. But his presidency is not a replay of twentieth-century fascism, as Yale historian Timothy Snyder and others have argued. Rather, the TV-obsessed US president is recreating something much older, and more in keeping with a Disney fantasy: his own princely court.

This explains why Trump is preoccupied with appearances and regal roleplaying, and why his administration has reprised classic courtly archetypes, down to the court fool. He has a beautiful princess daughter who can do no wrong, and emasculated grown sons who linger in their father's shadow. His foreign-born wife has a thick accent, and lives in a separate residence. Like a modern-day Marie Antoinette, she is often accused of profligacy and frivolity.

Beyond the family, Trump has a courtly entourage, complete with the evil adviser, Steve Bannon; the favored duke, Jared Kushner; a host of bankers; and, lest we forget, Sean Spicer, the jester. The only figure still missing from this cast of characters is the Rasputin-like mystic, whispering arcane advice in the king's ear. America should be on the lookout for his or her arrival.

The fact that Trump's presidency seems to have escaped from the set of a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century period drama is no accident. Europe's Baroque court culture was built around immensely entitled men who knew very little about the workings of government.

This generated considerably insecurity, which manifested in striking ways. Their palaces were not just magnificent architectural structures, but also venues for maintaining social control. According to a contemporary description of Louis XIV, which could easily be applied to Trump, "[t]here was nothing he liked so much as flattery or, to put it more plainly, adulation; the coarser and clumsier it was, the more he relished it."

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