If Trump was ever sincere, his election has proven that one person simply cannot fight this corrupt system, this horrid swamp. Trump the reformer, the unlikeliest of knights in shining armor, is gone. The renegade billionaire striking fear into the heart of the establishment lasted a brief shining moment, like Camelot. — Donald Jeffries

These are the concluding words of an article listing Donald Trump’s sellouts since January 20, 2017. There have been a lot of them.

I think he is correct about his association of Trump with Camelot. Trump is a lot more like Camelot then Jeffries imagines.

JFK AS KING ARTHUR

We associate Jack Kennedy’s presidency with the 1960 musical that was totally mythical: Camelot.

Why do we do this? What possible connection does the presidency of John F. Kennedy have to King Arthur?

Time to buy old US gold coins

We do it because Jackie Kennedy was one of the great PR masters of the 20th century. Shortly after the assassination, she saw an advantage like only one other in American political history: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln became mythic in retrospect. It was fake news at its most implausible, but it worked.

She literally designed the whole campaign to connect her husband’s presidency with a mythical King Arthur, taking advantage of the enormous popularity of the musical.

It took 50 years for this story to become public. It still is not well known, but here are some mainstream media articles that tell the story. See here, here, and here.

The posthumous legend of JFK was entirely mythical. It was tacked on top of a musical that was entirely mythical. The musical was tacked on top of a book that was entirely mythical. The book that was entirely mythical was based on one of the most popular literary myths in English literature. Virtually nothing is known of Arthur.

It was myth layered upon myth that would lead anybody to believe that JFK was anything more than a superficial, verbally gifted, speed reading, James Bond loving, serial adulterer. He got us into Vietnam, and he is to blame for having done so. He led Lyndon Johnson into the big muddy, from which Johnson never emerged. Neither did Nixon.

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