The mouse that roared

When I was still a kid, I went with my family to a movie called “The Mouse That Roared.”

It was a British satire about a tiny European nation that declares war on the United States over a knock-off pinot noir. It starred Peter Sellers and Jean Seberg.

As a pre-teenager I fully had the hots for the Iowa-born Seberg (who also starred in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless”), which is the only reason the movie stuck with me.

I had not thought about “The Mouse That Roared” since my infatuation passed a couple weeks later. But it came back to mind recently when Disney denied pressure from the president and his minions to take a late-night comedian off the air.

The mouse roared once more.

At last, I thought, somebody is putting up a fight.

“The president of the United States made it very clear he wants to see me and the hundreds of people who work here fired from our jobs,” said Jimmy Kimmel in his return monologue. “Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can’t take a joke.”

It struck me then that Trump is also an entertainer — famous for firing people — and has developed a similar skill of finding the punchy words and combining them with a good delivery. So it is natural that he would see other entertainers as his most effective opponents, because of that combination of skills lacking in most politicians.

The defeat for the administration in its push to get Disney to knuckle under seemed important, not so much as a turning point but as a time when his ability to push everybody around ran into an opponent — The Mouse — willing to stand his ground.

That scuffle came in tight with another pair of events that all taken together felt like a change in the overall momentum of the administration.

The second incident was the speech to the representatives of the entire world at the United Nations, an address that made Trump seem way out there on his own planet. Calling climate change “the greatest con job” and telling the assembled representatives their nations are “going to hell,” while going on about the travertine used in the building versus the marble he would have installed — I thought of western leaders watching that and shaking their heads.

I don’t know how you would see the person making that speech as a rational leader. From that prattle forward, a foreign leader would regard Trump as powerful but not someone to work with, someone to wait out while taking contingency measures.

A third incident, also right around then, involved the president’s medical advice about Tylenol and autism. It recalled his strange Covid bromides, but the field is complicated. A 2021 study of more than 2 million children in Sweden found no connection. That said, use of an endocrine disruptor such as Tylenol may cause other developmental problems, according to a consensus opinion of scientists and doctors also published four years ago.

So, with those three events in mind, I looked at the end-of-September soundings on the president’s popularity published by the Times. A graph shows two lines that cross like a sideways X. When he is inaugurated, about 52% approve and 43% disapprove.

The approve line quickly crosses the disapprove line two months later. In mid-March, he is running even. And then the gap very gradually widens to the present where the numbers are roughly reversed: 43% approve and 54% disapprove.

Looking at news events the way one might look at Tarot cards, I see the numbers widening just a bit more to something like 41% approving and 56% disapproving. And there we would be stuck.

Along with our nation. Much of the government is now at a standstill. The entire concept of a representative government that binds the disparate parts of the population through common policies is in stasis, stuck, frozen.

And indeed, another Times/Siena poll this month finds that 64% of the people now believe the nation is so divided there is no hope of solving its problems.

And that is the most telling and devastating effect of the political movement led by the president — the loss of hope.