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Over two hundred years ago, a teenage girl entered into a contest to see who could tell the best ghost story.  Taking up this challenge set by Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, set to work on what would become the novel Frankenstein.  Shelley, however, transformed a mere ghost story into a meditation on the very nature of evil.  As in the works of Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, and Melville, Shelley’s novel offered profound insights into the haunted soul of a monster but, far more importantly, into the twisted being that was his maker: the vain and hubristic Victor Frankenstein.  He’s the one responsible for creating the monster and then abandoning him, thus setting into motion the monster’s carnage.  His attempt at assuming the role of God fails miserably, and he’s left with self-loathing, fear, and ultimately the driving thirst for revenge on his own creation.  Shelley didn’t call the novel The Monster (the focus of most American film adaptations since Thomas Edison’s 1910 version), but rather Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus for good reason.  It is, after all, the monster’s creator, Victor Frankenstein, whom she holds predominately liable for all the misery and chaos that ensues in the novel.

I recently reread Shelley’s prescient novel and found some startling comparisons to our own MAGA era.  If, for a moment, we take Trump to be the created monster, who then is his creator?  Who is this modern Trumpenstein (with this name I’ve intentionally conflated creator with the monster he created, because Shelley’s monster, as a thinking, self-reflecting being filled with hatred and a will for vengeance, is hardly blameless for all of the pain and suffering he causes, nor, certainly, is Trump)?  It’s clear to me that we Americans, taken collectively, had more than a hand in creating this monster we now have to deal with.  We are the monster-makers, who, for one reason or another, failed to see this would be our collective nightmare and, as Victor Frankenstein laments, we would “suffer under his malice.”  Like Victor Frankenstein, we Americans have formed–limb by limb, accepted lie by accepted lie, cruelty by cruelty, Apprenticeepisode by Apprentice episode–our very own version of a monster.  All of us may debate our relative share of guilt, but none of us is blameless.

Mary Shelley provides us with a blueprint of the situation we find ourselves in today, that is, the dangerous nature of “monster-making.”  In the figure of Victor Frankenstein, we see it all: the excessive hubris, the yearning for power and glory, the mendacity and self-mendacity, the desire for revenge, the cruelty, the disloyalty, and finally, the turning of a blind eye to things Frankenstein would rather not see.  Early in the novel, Frankenstein says, “Alas! I had turned loose into the world a depraved wretch, whose delight was in carnage and misery.”  It’s fairly easy to see that the depraved wretch in my analogy is of course Trump.  What’s a little harder to admit is our own culpability in his making.  Though I and my liberal friends try to deny our own involvement in this messy business, Trump is as American as baseball, apple pie, and oligarchies.  He’s 100% made-in-America–and as such we won’t even be charged a tariff on what we’ll eventually have to pay.  And like Frankenstein, pay we will.

If we look at Trump’s first inaugural, the American carnage speech, he clearly sets out an America that is, to him anyway, a landscape of crime and gangs, drugs and shootings, a dystopian world as bleak and barren as the Arctic expanses across which Frankenstein pursues—too late–his creation.  Trump described not so much the country we lived in but the one we could expect under his leadership.  He told us clearly what he was going to do, and we Americans went right along with it.  In fact, we were vain enough to elect him not once but twice.  What does this say about an America that’s willing to churn out a monster like Trump and then deny we are responsible for making him.

In the novel Shelley offers us many warnings about the dangers of monster-making, warnings that Victor Frankenstein doesn’t heed until it’s too late.  What follows are just a few of the cautions from Shelley’s novel that America’s tens of millions of Trumpensteins should take to heart before it’s too late.

• Glorification of power: Early on in the novel, Victor Frankenstein has a moment of moral clarity.  “My life might have been passed in ease and luxury; but I preferred glory.”  And later he warns Captain Walton to “seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition.”  Instead of leading a happy and tranquil life, Frankenstein wishes for raw power, and for the veneration and glory that comes with it.  He desires for no less than god-like, promethean authority.  Similarly, we see this yearning for power in the monster that is Trump but also in the multitudes that both made and sustained him.  Across America, to these millions of Trumpensteins, ambition and unchecked power is viewed not as something to be wary of in a democracy, but to be exalted, to be copied and imitated, as something that is a goal in and of itself.  As a nation we have never been so divided economically, with the gap between working-class and wealthy growing faster than ever before, and with it a greater power discrepancy.  Yet we do nothing.  In fact, we Americans actually glorify the attainment of unbridled wealth at all costs and the power that it brings.  It was Scalia’s court that enshrined this very notion into law in the 2012 Citizens United, four years before Trump, and paving the way for even more oligarchs using their power to affect votes.  Trump’s base, most of whom are not well-off economically, also believe in the American myth of the attainment of wealth and power.  Before the 2016 election, I recall a working-class Trump supporter on TV being asked by a reporter why he was voting for Trump even though Trump’s policies wouldn’t better his life at all.  The man said that Trump has lots of money, big cars and houses, and beautiful women—as if merely in voting for him they would all be his as well.  Why did The Apprentice become such a huge hit for so many Americans–and begin our first tentative steps toward the making of our own monster?  The Apprentice was little more than a glitzy exercise in raw power, the power to succeed, which is at the heart of the American dream—or depending on how you see it, nightmare.  But the show was also a Darwinian exercise in the power to banish those who are too weak to succeed.  Like Romans at the Coliseum, we Americans watched by the millions to see someone get fired and humiliated on a weekly basis.  As Victor Frankenstein says of his pursuit of ultimate power, “One man’s life or death were but a small price to pay for the acquirement of the knowledge which I sought, for the dominion I should acquire.” Look, too, at all the billionaires—the Musks, Mercers, and McMahons–whose money and influence helped to shape and build Trump.  Like Victor Frankenstein, these power brokers figured that in creating the monster Trump, they too would gain power and wealth and admiration (picture the child-like joy of Musk as he cavorted around the stage, delighted at how his millions spent on Trump bought him this new-found glory).  As well, consider the multitude of Trump followers, both in congress and across the country who supported him so as to be, in turn, rewarded with power and enrichment, with fame and triumph.  We are a country that venerates the wealthy and powerful like no other on earth.  Like Frankenstein, we adore the powerful who are above the laws and restrictions of mere commoners.
• Narcissism: Connected to this glorification of power comes the evils of narcissism, an excess of love for oneself. The DSM characterizes a narcissistic personality as one that combines patterns of grandiosity, the need for admiration, and a lack of empathy.  Victor Frankenstein certainly has all these traits.  “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.”  Later, when his servant Justine is wrongly condemned to death for a murder perpetrated by the monster, Frankenstein remains silent.  Instead he thinks, “The tortures of the accused did not equal mine; she was sustained by innocence, but the fangs of remorse tore my bosom, and would not forego their hold.” His lack of empathy for Justine’s approaching death sentence and his need to be the victim at the center of every drama trumps (sorry!) all other people’s fates and feelings.  Everything must be about him.  Of course these characteristics of narcissism fit Trump to a tee.  But those who made him are equally cursed with narcissistic behavior.  One of Trump’s spiritual advisors (an oxymoron if ever there was one) said that America was God’s “perfect gift.”  What other country has such thoughts of grandiosity and self-love as to consider itself “the shining city on the hill”?  What other country has, particularly since the rise of Trumpism, been so often lacking in the slightest empathy?  To name just three of the thousands of examples: the child separation policy at the border; Senator Mike Lee’s recent, horrific comments about the murdered Minnesota congresswoman and her husband; and the 2025 Project that was created before Trump took office for the second time.
• Disloyalty: Frankenstein spends years dedicating himself to creating his obsession and then, at the very moment of success, he turns his back on the creature he made. “How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form?”  He makes this rash judgment solely on the external attributes of his creation, not on what the creature is inside, his soul or character.  Yet Frankenstein rejects his metaphorical child and the responsibility that should come with it and flees into the night.  Americans have a long and checkered track record of creating chaos, both here and abroad, and then running from our responsibilities, from the monsters we made.  How often have we turned our back on people we should’ve helped and been loyal to?  We signed treaty after treaty with Native Americans only to break most of them.  We fought a war to free the slaves and then quickly handed them back over to those who had enslaved them, to suffer for yet another century.  We kept most Jews during the Holocaust from entering our country, and we stabbed in the back the Vietnamese or Afghans or Iraqis who had helped us during their respective wars.  Like Frankenstein looking down on his creation, we as a country too often have abandoned our responsibilities and fled into the night.
• Revenge: There is obviously the monster’s thirst for revenge, but that only comes about because of Frankenstein’s dismal treatment of his creation.  After the murders of Victor Frankenstein’s loved ones, it’s about his own quest for revenge.  He is willing to go, literally, to the ends of the earth to destroy his creation, to satisfy his revenge.  As Victor Frankenstein says after the murder of his brother and adopted sister, “When I reflected on his (the monster’s) crimes and malice, my hatred and revenge burst all bounds of moderation. I would have made a pilgrimage to the highest peak of the Andes, could I when there have precipitated him to their base. I wished to see him again, that I might wreak the utmost extent of abhorrence on his head and avenge the deaths of William and Justine.”  This isn’t justice, it’s revenge, a uniquely American vigilante sort of justice that is a central characteristic of our culture.  We see this sort of lone-wolf, taking-into-one’s-hands revenge theme in countless American movies, books, and on the nightly news.  In no other country but ours is someone always bringing a gun to work, to school, to church, or to an ex’s house to administer their own twisted sense of justice.   Where do we think Trump got this eye-for-an-eye vigilantism, his “I am your retribution.”  This need for American vengeance often descends into utter cruelty.  What was Trump’s The Apprentice other than a chance for millions of Americans to cheer on the end of a person via his or her being fired.  While of course Trump is always seeking “retribution” of real or perceived slights, consider all those around him who seek revenge or enact cruelty for its own sake.  For example, his many advisers in the current administration, people like Thomas Homan or Stephen Miller (the architects of the child separation policy at the border), or the many Jim Jordans or Marjorie Taylor Greens in congress willing to do his dirty work, or the Alex Jones in and outside the administration (Jones’ cruelty began well before the creation of Trump).  And let’s not forget the dog-killing governor Kristi Noem who had to execute her pet because it wouldn’t obey her.  My own example of this need for revenge took place just after Trump’s first victory.  I was at the gym when I heard two older men and a woman saying they’d wanted Trump to win just because it will “make the liberals’ heads explode.”  They all laughed with glee at the prospect of exploded liberal brains all over the place.  They voted for Trump out of a need both for revenge and cruelty, and by voting for him helped to shape their own monster, who would in turn seek vengeance for them.
• Self-deception: The following quotes by Victor Frankenstein suggest that his blindness to his situation is inherent in his personality: “But, as if possessed of magic powers, the monster had blinded me to his real intentions” and “No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness.” Victor is indeed blinded, but it isn’t so much by the monster as by his own self-delusions. His mistake isn’t in choosing evil disguised as happiness but in choosing his own desire for glory and fame.  His ego blinds him to the dangers of his quest for God-like power.  Victor’s bride Elizabeth Frankenstein says, “When falsehood can look so like the truth, who can assure themselves of certain happiness.”  This quote brings to mind Kelly Ann Conway’s now infamous, “We feel compelled to go out . . . and put alternative facts out there.”  In the same way, America allows itself to be deluded in countless ways—by fake news, by Fox and similar right-wing propagandists, by Info Wars, and by on-line conspiracy theories that pass for truth.  Many Americans, too, are blinded by their own desire for wealth, power, status, or their need for vengeance against those whom they feel have denied them these things.  Why look inward for your own failure when there are so many telling you that others are to blame.   It is only later on that Victor finally sees his own culpability in making his monster: “Cursed (although I curse myself) be the hands that formed you,” and “I, not in deed, but in effect, was the true murderer.”  Indeed he was.  As indeed we are blameworthy for making our monster.

Early on, Shelley alerts us to the “monster-maker’s” culpability.  Soon after Victor gazes upon his finished creation, he cries, “Unable to endure the aspect of the being I had created, I rushed out of the room, and continued a long time traversing my bed-chamber, unable to compose my mind to sleep.”  While I’m hardly dishing out equal blame for our national monster, make no mistake, he is ours; many of my liberal friends as well as myself have also fled or closed our eyes or turned our backs; some of us have shut off our TV’s and shunned the news, vowing that our New Year’s resolution will be to avoid politics entirely, and spend more time on self-improvement, doing meditation, traveling abroad, or, like me, tending my garden.  To be honest, during his first campaign, I actually hoped that Trump would be nominated.  I arrogantly thought that no one could take such an ignorant buffoon seriously to vote from him.  How wrong I was.

But such avoidance and denial hardly worked for Victor Frankenstein, did it?  As he says after the death of his wife, “As the memory of past misfortunes pressed upon me, I began to reflect upon their cause—the monster whom I had created, the miserable daemon whom I had sent abroad into the world.”  Only then, when taking full responsibility for his actions, does he understand that his and his loved-ones’ suffering is self-made.  His monster is not just “out there,” but “in here”—in his own narcissistic and vainglorious mind.  We Americans are the monster creator and we must share the blame.

One last point: the monster that Victor Frankenstein created does have some redeeming qualities, unlike the one we made.   As the monster himself says, “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend.  Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.”  Frankenstein’s creature wants merely to love and to be loved.  He is also deeply introspective and extremely self-conscious.  Our monster, on the other hand, has no moral life, no empathy, no ability to self-reflect, no capacity to love his neighbor as himself.  Our monster is a complete and utter narcissist.  So what does that make us?