“He had very ugly hair” and “small hard eyes, with flabby pouches beneath them.” He “talked without stopping—but only in vague, boastful, self-advertising phrases.” He was “cocksure” and “irritable,” and he dealt sarcastically with those who crossed him. Billed as an “entertainer” and “magician,” he turned out to be a powerful hypnotist, and he embarrassed and humiliated people while the audience applauded him and laughed at his victims. He was, in short, a “dreadful” person of mysterious abilities, yet he also embodied “all the peculiar evilness of the situation as a whole.”



This character may sound familiar to Americans today, but the descriptions above appear in Thomas Mann’s prophetic tale “Mario and the Magician.” The German novelist got most of its details from an ill-starred summer holiday that he and his family spent on the Italian seashore in 1926. Benito Mussolini had come to power, and the signs of early fascism were clear even in a provincial resort, including a prickly belief in making Italy “great” again, a resentment of foreigners and a slavish respect for leaders—especially il Duce, the Leader himself. In 1929, Mann turned the experience into a novella devoted mainly to one of the magician’s shows. Later that year, Mann read aloud from it when he received the Nobel Prize for literature. It was his first public attack on the world’s new nationalists and their cults of personality.

The story is worth revisiting in our current situation, as nationalists seize the spotlight in several countries and as Donald Trump casts his spell over millions of Americans. Trump’s critics sometimes call him a fascist on account of policies such as banning Muslims and building a wall on the Mexican border. But Trump hasn’t just revived some of the bad prescriptions of the twentieth century’s dictators; his whole manner and psyche seem attuned to theirs, as suggested most uncannily in Mann’s account of an entertainer and his hapless followers, of an increasingly frightening magic show that ends in disaster.

The magician’s name is Cipolla, and his show is preceded by a flurry of cheap publicity. When Cipolla himself appears on stage, he spouts a lot of blather about his grand reputation and, after ingratiating himself and reading a few minds, he makes it clear that he leads and commands, while others willingly follow and obey. But could he make a gentleman who challenged him dance foolishly even against his will? “‘Even against your will,’ answered Cipolla, in unforgettable accents.”



Trump, similarly, has bragged that “everybody loves me” and that people do what he tells them to do. “I’m a leader,” he told an interviewer who asked what might happen if America’s military refused to obey President Trump’s order to torture terrorists or carpet-bomb civilians. “I’ve always been a leader. I’ve never had any problem leading people. If I say do it, they’re going to do it.”