Pushing The Button For Trump: Why Deals With The Devil Always Go Wrong
There’s a clear moral lesson here.
It’s temping to place the blame for America’s descent into fascism solely on Donald Trump. However, Trump only has power because people like Ryleigh Cooper gave it to him.
Last week, The Washington Post published a tearjerker (if you’re someone easily jerked around) about the 24-year-old Forest Service employee from Michigan who says she voted for Trump because he promised to make IVF treatments free. Instead, she lost her job as part of Trump’s federal workforce purge. She’ll also lose her health insurance and other solid federal benefits. She couldn’t afford a pregnancy now even if Trump came through with the free IVF, which he won’t.
Many liberals have mocked Cooper’s gullibility, and others have painted her as the victim of a mainstream media that treated a convicted felon, adjudicated rapist, and known liar as a fair broker on policy.
Ultimately, though, Cooper made a classic deal with the Devil. There’s a reason those never work out.
‘He’d pillage heaven for its brightest star’
Deals with the Devil in fiction usually operate on the premise “you can’t con an honest person.” Yes, the Devil eventually cheats his willing mark, but he preys upon their arrogance or short-sighted greed. Goethe’s Faust believes he can control the Devil and profit from their arrangement without any negative consequences. Republicans have maintained their own faustian bargain with Donald Trump, as though they never bothered reading the end of that story.
In The Twilight Zone episode “Escape Clause,” the Devil (Thomas Gomez) offers eternal life to vain, self-obsessed Walter Bedeker (David Wayne). All he asks for in exchange is his soul. When Bedeker murders his long-suffering wife, he assumes he’ll just shrug off the electric chair, but instead he’s sentenced to life in prison. He activates the escape clause in his contract with the Devil and dies immediately. This is of course all on Bedeker. The Devil never deceives him.
The Devil (Julie Newmar) is more openly manipulative in “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville.” Corrupt robber baron William Feathersmith (Albert Salmi) wants to relive his glory days, amassing his fortune for a second time. The Devil informs him that she already has his soul, so she’ll just stick with cash upfront, thank you very much. Feathersmith thinks he’s smarter than the lady Devil and can negotiate the perfect deal, but it all goes to hell. The Devil never outright lies but never delivers more than the most literal interpretation of their arrangement.
Of course, Trump isn’t the honest businessman these Devils were. He never had any intention of providing free IVF treatments. Whenever Trump opens his mouth, he “speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” Ryleigh Cooper chose to believe those lies, just like her high school teacher who regularly shared Elon Musk’s propaganda on social media (e.g. “Any government employee who is afraid of transparency is a criminal!”).
‘King of Fools’
The Washington Post story focuses on how Ryleigh Cooper directly suffers from her vote for Donald Trump. There’s no mention of mass deportations or the transgender Americans Trump is persecuting. However, the free IVF treatments and 1980s-era grocery prices don’t exist in a vacuum removed from everything else Trump was selling.
The larger moral question then becomes whether you should sacrifice other people for your own personal gain. In one of the best Superman: The Animated Series episodes, gangster Bruno Mannheim (Bruce Weitz) eagerly helps Satan stand-in Darkseid (Michael Ironside) prepare Earth for an alien invasion. Darkseid had promised Mannheim that he’d make him a “king” for his service, but when he leaves him to die, he clarifies that he meant a “king of fools.” (Someday, Trump will probably have a similar conversation with Vladimir Putin, and although that would likely mean the start of World War III, I’ll still savor the moment.)
Cooper’s defenders will argue that she didn’t set out to hurt anyone, and liberals shouldn’t minimize the financial and personal desperation that led her to vote for Trump. That’s reasonable on the surface, but it reminds me of an especially apt deal with the Devil from the 1986 Twilight Zone episode “Button, Button.”
Arthur and Norma Lewis (Brad Davis and Mare Willingham) are nothing like Walter Bedeker, William Feathersmith, and Bruno Mannheim. They’re not bored narcissists or petty thugs. They are “real Americans,” which in 1986 as well as now, is most often defined as struggling white people. One day, they receive a box with a button on top. Later, a mysterious Mr. Steward (Basil Hoffman) arrives and explains that if Norma pushes the button, someone she doesn’t know will instantly die, but she’ll personally receive $200,000 (about $575,000 today or a few dozen eggs).
F. Scott Fitzgerald argued that only the wealthy were capable of true moral choice because they could get away with anything. I see his point, but I think it’s easier for the wealthy and privileged to do the right thing. It’s the poor and desperate whose moral code must endure life’s constant stress tests.
Norma eventually pushes the button. People die every day, after all. Mr. Steward returns and gives Norma her money. However, he takes the box with him, which he informs her he plans to give to someone … she doesn’t know. (In Richard Matheson’s original short story, Norma receives the money after her husband dies in an accident. I appreciate the “she never truly knew her husband” twist, but it’s still a little too “Monkey’s Paw” for me.)
As my mother said when we first saw the episode, “She should’ve seen this coming,” but Ryleigh Cooper is real-life evidence that people will push the button without considering that they might wind up on the receiving end. Maybe Cooper truly believed that no one would suffer when she pushed the button for Trump, but ignorance is not a compelling excuse in legal matters and is even less so morally.
Unlike the fictional Devils, Trump won’t keep his end of the bargain, but that assumes the IVF treatments were the actual reason Cooper voted for Trump and not, on a subconscious level, her way of rationalizing that decision. Her family, like so many in America, has fully embraced MAGA cruelty. They were happy to see federal workers lose their jobs. Her family insists that the many women who’ve accused Trump of sexual assault “had either made it up or deserved it.” (Cooper was sexually assaulted when she was 16.)
If Cooper could just push the button, she’d join the 62 percent of voters in her county who supported Trump. It was a comforting lie, one that I don’t think even a more aggressive media could’ve defeated. Anyone who could push the button for Trump was just looking for an excuse to do so.
That’s the problem, though, with faustian bargains. Even if the Devil delivers, you’ve already surrendered your soul, and there’s no getting it back.
Stephen - I saw this very conventionally attractive 24 y/o White woman share her "tragic" story of voting for Donald Trump because he promised to make IVF "free". I don't care that he said that (he did) or said that he was the "Father" of IVF (he did) or how many targeted FB ads or partisan bots or IG influencers repeated that "Trumpism" to her. She got conned because a conman told her she was special and he would accomodate her special needs (which he was forced to do b/c his horrible anti-abortion Supreme Court judges enabled state restrictions on abortion led to "fetal personhood" laws that would have ended IVF availability AND THAT WAS VERY VERY UNPOPULAR WITH PEOPLE LIKE RYLEIGH WHOSE BOTES HE NEEDED). I tried to put myself in the shoes of a 24 y/o who had decided that she was entitled to be impregnated with a biological child and that the government should make it possible for her to become pregnant and that her fertilized egg would develop perfectly during an uncomplicated pregnancy and that she would not miscarry and need abortion care during the pregnancy or that if she did she would receive it in a timely and safe manner that would preserve her life and fertility in order to try again with "free" IVF to conceive and carry to term and give birth to a healthy baby. I could not do it. Is infertility a painful reality for some people? Yes. Do I know people personally who have struggled with the emotional rollercoaster and financial nightmare of trying to conceive by "assisted" means? Yes. Do I want people who want a family to be able to raise a child or children? Yes. And I am sorry for the loss of their dream of having a biological child? Yes. That does NOT mean they cannot have a "family" and raise children. If the point of all this is to bring a child to love and nurture and raise into your home, Ryleigh could still do that, with or without government-funded IVF. SHE IS 24 YEARS OLD. Does she want a perfect life and perfect child? Get the fuck over it. Children are a huge crapshoot and enormous financial and emotional risk and I have worked with all kinds of kids from all over and I love and care about all the kids I have ever met to bits. Every one of them deserves and needs a loving family. Boo hoo for Ryleigh. She LET HERSELF be conned by a man who openly proclaimed he was a conman, who openly operated HIS WHOLE LIFE as a lying, self-serving criminal and conman, whose whole existence was a giant lie and series of abusive cons and ripoffs and BETRAYALS, and if his campaign conjob to avoid accountability and prison sentences hadn't meant Ryleigh's personal job loss and healthcare coverage loss and no free fertility treatments for her to conceive imaginary blue-eyed, blonde biological children, she sure seems like she would have been perfectly FINE with millions of schoolchildren going hungry every day and veterans losing their medical care and public schools being bled dry for private profits and penniless seniors thrown out into the streets to die and rural hospitals going bankrupt and pandemic diseases killing and disabling hundreds of thousands and inflation spiralling out of control with unemployment surging and a thousand other evils as we witness the kleptocratic destruction of our democracy and reckless dismantling of the government built with our money to try to serve our collective hopes and needs and dreams...as long as SHE had a perfect little blonde, blue-eyed White baby sharing her and her husband's DNA to cradle in her arms. FUCK HER AND EVERYONE LIKE HER FOR CHERRYPICKING A POOPED OUT BAUBLE FROM THE ROTTING COMPOST PILE OF EMPTY LIES THAT IS TWICE-IMPEACHED, DRAFT DODGING, ACCUSED MONEY-LAUNDERER, CORRUPT CONTRACT-BREAKER, MULTIPLY ACCUSED AND ADJUDICATED FRAUDSTER, ADJUDICATED SEXUAL ABUSER/DEFAMER, ACCUSED SERIAL SEXUAL ASSAULTER, SERIAL ADULTERER, ELECTION LAW VIOLATOR, HUCKSTER AND CONVICTED FELON 34, DONALD FUCKING TRUMP. It's not like we had "no warning" who he was.
Whew boy this was a neat angle I didn't expect. Once again you can learn a lot from so much media we've gotten to see, even as kids!
And the whole thing about IVF reminded me of the people who tried having their cake and eating it too by voting for abortion initiatives in certain states but not voting for the pro-choice ticket...and then they end up screwed because there's always a way (especially in unreconstructed states) to defy the will of the people. It's usually just used for voter suppression but destroying voter initiatives works too.