Trump Loves ‘Les Misérables.’ But Does He Know What It’s About?
Or: What having no opinion about the human soul reveals about one particular human soul.
OF ALL THE SPECTACLES OFFERED TO US so far by the second Trump administration, perhaps the most curious is Donald Trump eagerly attending the opening night of Les Misérables at the Kennedy Center.
The musical, based on the epic 1862 novel by Victor Hugo, first produced in French in 1980 and translated masterfully into English in 1985, celebrates the heroism of young revolutionaries manning the barricades in a street uprising against an authoritarian monarchist regime. Yet Trump went to enjoy this show just a few days after ordering the National Guard onto the streets of Los Angeles in an authoritarian effort to crush protests against his immigration police state.
This is not a one-off. Trump has cited Les Mis as one of his favorite Broadway shows and used its revolutionary anthem, “Do You Hear the People Sing?” for some of his political events.
The irony indicates a lack of self-awareness on the epic scale Hugo would have appreciated. It also carries some important lessons about how we got here.
AS TRUMP WAS HEADING TO THE EVENT, a reporter asked him whether he identifies more with the story’s hero, Jean Valjean, or its main antagonist, Inspector Javert. He didn’t seem to understand the question and dodged answering it:
“That’s a tough one, I don’t know. That’s tough, you better answer that one honey,” he responded, turning to Melania. She remained silent.
His lack of answer is surprising given the fact that he has seen the play “a number of times,” by his own admission.
Trump is not known for the quality of his reading comprehension, so it’s possible he simply does not remember even the most basic content of the show. Yet that in itself is revealing.
By the way, if you don’t know the story, either, this is easily rectified—and highly recommended. Both the musical and the book are classics for a reason. If you can’t make it to a live production—it’s been running forever in London, and the Kennedy Center performance is the beginning of a new U.S. tour—go to YouTube and watch the tenth anniversary concert version with the original cast, which preserves the story and even carries over some of the staging. Or see the excellent 2012 film adaptation with Hugh Jackman. Trust me, you won’t regret it.
In the meantime, a brief overview of the story’s themes and plot will help us understand why Trump’s interest in Les Mis is so mystifying.
It’s safe to say Victor Hugo did not share Trump’s politics. The International Socialist Review finds him to be “a bourgeois revolutionary and a reformist at heart”—so not really a socialist, by their lights—“but he was a reformist in an age when revolutions were often needed to win reforms.”
Hugo would be recognizable in contemporary American terms as an earnest liberal, and he stated his thematic aspirations in the book’s preface:
So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth and complicates a destiny that is divine with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.
Yet Les Misérables is much more than a work of social commentary, and it is beloved by many who don’t share Hugo’s exact politics, which were vague to begin with and kept even more vague in the musical. Hugo, whose politics emanated from his spirituality rather than the other way around, had a larger theme in mind.
His hero, Jean Valjean, is a poor man jailed for stealing a loaf of bread. When he is paroled from prison nineteen years later, he has been transformed into a hardened criminal, driven by hatred for what he understandably regards as a hostile world. An encounter with a saintly and compassionate priest, however, causes him to make a wrenching conversion.
He sets out to renounce hatred and become a good man, and for the first ten years, he is rewarded for it. He becomes a successful businessman, a generous philanthropist, and the mayor of his town. But then he discovers that another man has been arrested, accused of being the fugitive ex-convict Valjean, and will be sent to prison in his place.
So far, he has become a good man while also being respectable. To keep being a good man, he must reveal his true identity and become an outcast and a fugitive.
This is the pattern for the rest of the story, as Valjean struggles to keep doing the right thing no matter what the cost, in the face of dangers, obstacles, and dilemmas. A passage in Hugo’s narration explains what he set out to accomplish in the story:
There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul.
To write the poem of the human conscience, were it only of a single man, were it only of the most infamous of men, would be to swallow up all epics in a superior and final epic. . . . At certain hours, penetrate within the livid face of a human being who reflects, and look at what lies behind; look into that soul, look into that obscurity. There, beneath the external silence, there are combats of giants as in Homer, melees of dragons and hydras, and clouds of phantoms as in Milton, ghostly labyrinths as in Dante. What a gloom enwraps that infinite which each man bears within himself, and by which he measures in despair the desires of his will, and the actions of his life!
Valjean is Hugo’s single man, and Les Misérables is his superior and definitive epic, his “poem of the human conscience.”
The underlying theme of Les Misérables—and of all of Hugo’s work—is an earnest idealism. This is the common thread among most of the characters in the sprawling novel: a despairing mother, a pair of young lovers, the revolutionaries on the barricades—even Javert. A policeman who relentlessly pursues Valjean over the years, Inspector Javert is the novel’s antagonist—but he is not a villain. He, too, is motivated by his dedication to an ideal, expressed in the musical in the song “Stars,” where he compares earthly law and order to the cosmic order of the heavens.
The very end of the musical reprises the revolutionaries’ anthem, and its signature line, “Will you join in our crusade?” is sung by all of the characters, even Javert. The “crusade” is not a narrow political cause, but dedication to an ideal.
THERE IS ANOTHER, MORE SPECIFIC THEME that Hugo had in mind, one that makes Trump’s interest in the show all the more baffling. Hugo very deliberately chose to make his hero a fugitive ex-convict. He picked the least, the lowest, the most despised man by the respectable standards of his time and set out to show his potential for greatness. This is the deepest theme of Les Misérables: that the least can become the greatest.
Hard-core Hugo fans—those who have read the giant essay on the Battle of Waterloo that Hugo inserts into the middle of the novel—will recognize this as the significance of Cambronne’s word. This theme is also reflected in the other characters of the novel, particular in Gavroche, a ragged street urchin with the soul of a giant. In the musical, he expresses the idea in the song “Little People,” warning us not to underestimate the downtrodden poor of Paris, no matter how weak and wretched they might seem.
Most poignantly, it is expressed in the character Fantine, a desperate woman forced to resort to prostitution in a struggle to save her daughter. Again, Hugo is picking the lowest, most despised rungs of society and asking us to see in their lives a desperate, even heroic struggle.
To English speakers, the title of the novel and the musical can be misleading. In a French context, it refers to the oppressed or the downtrodden and might be more accurately rendered in English as “the dispossessed” or “the outsiders.”
In that context, we can fully appreciate Trump’s epic lack of self-awareness. If Hugo were alive today, he undoubtedly would have made at least one of his main characters an illegal immigrant, championing as he always did the cause and the heroic potential of the poor and despised. But this is quite obviously a perspective Trump is not capable of achieving—which makes him a very different kind of character in Hugo’s universe.
WHEN THE REPORTER ASKED TRUMP whether he identifies more with Valjean or Javert, she was probably hoping Trump would name Javert, the stern policeman deaf to the pleas of compassion. But that doesn’t really fit. Javert’s vision of justice may be narrow and dogmatic, too dismissive of the possibility of redemption. But he believes it sincerely, and at several points in the story, he shows that he is willing to hold himself to his own demanding standards, whatever the cost. Does that sound like Trump?
Trump’s inability even to answer the question—his ignorance and indifference—raises a possibility that fans of Hugo are likely to find far more plausible. Trump is neither Valjean nor Javert, but a third character: the chiseling, dishonest innkeeper Thenardier.
It’s not just that Thenardier is also in the hospitality industry and also has a penchant for, as he sings in the musical, “rooking the guests and cooking the books.” It’s also his profound spiritual blindness, his focus on power and petty gain above everything else. Thenardier is not really Valjean’s antagonist, because he is not a grand enough character; he is more of a nuisance than a threat. But he is the story’s one true villain, because he is a man untouched by any vision of the ideal. In the song “Dog Eats Dog,” Thenardier explains his zero-sum view of a world in which we are all dogs fighting for bones in the street. He is a man with no concern for “the interior of the human soul,” and if he were able to view the story in which he takes part, he might also, like Trump, be uninterested in drawing any greater meaning from it.
This is why Trump is not only unable to grasp the message of Les Misérables but also unable to grasp any irony in his failure to do so.
HOW, THEN, DO WE EXPLAIN the inexplicable Trumpworld interest in Les Misérables, a story whose message and spirit seem so much the opposite of what Trump represents?
For Trump, it is perhaps a reflection of his interest in theater and showmanship, which is certainly reflected in his career in business and politics. He may like Les Mis simply because it is a big, dramatic spectacle that gets everybody talking about it, and he doesn’t feel the need to appreciate it on any deeper level. As one Trump-supporting fan of Les Mis put it, “I just love a crescendo.”
Yet I expect that many rank-and-file Trump supporters may be drawn to the story of a struggle between good and evil. However implausibly, they think of themselves as “Les Deplorables,” downtrodden and underappreciated by the “elites.” Then they chose as their champion a man who has no appreciation for that struggle and seems not to have any faculty capable of perceiving the interior of the human soul.
This is an important explanation of the Trump phenomenon. Yes, he often appeals to his supporters’ basest motives, to their fear, hatred, and ignorance. But for some, he also appeals to their sense of loyalty and their longing to “make America great.” Yet he convinces them to pour that devotion into a vessel that is itself empty of any such sense of loyalty to higher values.
It’s a human tragedy on a scale that would require a writer like Victor Hugo to capture.
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