In Joseph Conrad’s great short story, “The Secret Sharer,” the captain of a ship comes to harbor a secret. A murderer named Leggatt slips on board in the night, and the captain, without exactly knowing why, chooses to hide him in his cabin. Desperate to save the man, and safeguard his deception, the captain almost drives the ship aground as he steers it close enough to shore for the killer to plunge into the water and escape.

The captain, new to the ship, asks himself a question at the outset: “I wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one’s own personality every man sets up for himself secretly.” Yet, faced by events that seem to awaken some personal demon, he is unmoored. “It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a somber and immense mirror.”

What does the captain see reflected that leads him to an almost fatal compromise? It could be a personal memory of some act of violence; it could be Leggatt’s desperate humanity; it could even be that he draws this doppelgänger out of his subconscious, an apparition, as he anxiously embarks on a ship to which he is a stranger, with a crew he does not know.

I have been thinking of “The Secret Sharer” as I contemplate the American carnage of the Trump administration after 13 months. Everybody who serves President Trump is faced with his or her “own reflection in the depths of a somber and immense mirror.” Everyone is compromised, whether fatally or not. How could it be otherwise serving a man who does not know the difference between reality and make-believe?