Donald Trump’s Great White Whale

On Melville's 198th birthday anniversary, it's Obamacare.

I.W. Taber, The Final Chase of Moby Dick

Repealing the Affordable Care Act wasn’t Donald Trump’s reason for pursuing the presidency, nor was it the principal plank in his platform for making America great again. It was the obsession of the Republicans in Congress, who had spent more than six years on their fruitless quest before he took charge of the ship of state.

But in the seven months since then, the Affordable Care Act has become Trump’s Moby-Dick. Today is Herman Melville’s 198th birthday anniversary, so let me explain.


The story, you’ll recall, is of a sea captain who sets sail with the sole purpose of revenging himself on the white sperm whale that bit off one of his legs on his previous voyage. It is a quest that horrifies his pious first mate:

“Vengeance on a dumb brute!” cried Starbuck, “that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous.”

But Ahab sees it differently. To him, Moby-Dick is the mask, the visible manifestation of an inscrutable, malicious, “reasoning thing” that he hates, and he is determined to “wreak that hate” upon the whale:

Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations.

Behind the mask of the ACA is, of course, Barack Obama — the inscrutable, reasoning sun who famously insulted him at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. That insult has rankled him for almost as long as Obamacare has been the law of the land.

Obama’s signature creation was supposed to be struck down within days of the inauguration, and when the House of Representatives failed on its first pass three months later, Trump shamed it into passing a sorry bill that he celebrated in the Rose Garden as if the deed were done.

After Obamacare eluded destruction in the Senate last week, he tried again, tweeting, “Unless the Republican Senators are total quitters, Repeal & Replace is not dead! Demand another vote before voting on any other bill!” But his demand appeared to fall on deaf ears.

In the end, Moby-Dick, like an angry God, staves in the ship (“strangely vibrating his predestinating head”), confirming Ahab’s conviction of its “eternal malice.” As the Pequod sinks, he hurls a harpoon into his nemesis, the line fouls, twists around his neck, and drags him down into the depths behind the diving whale.

Whether or not the Russia investigation destroys his presidency, what seems fated to forever swim before Donald Trump is Obamacare — in Melville’s words, “as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.”


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