June 14
By 
A certain Germanophile, whose name I do not wish to remember, came to my house that day. Standing in the doorway, he announced the dreadful news: the Nazi armies had occupied Paris. I felt a confusion of sadness, disgust, malaise. Then it occurred to me that his insolent joy did not explain the stentorian voice or the abrupt proclamation. He added that the German troops would soon be in London. Any opposition was useless, nothing could prevent their victory. That was when I knew that he, too, was terrified. . . .
Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena’s hell. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, wound and kill for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I shall risk this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated. Hitler is blindly collaborating with the inevitable armies that will annihilate him, as the metal vultures and the dragon (which must have known that they were monsters) collaborated, mysteriously, with Hercules.
Jorge Luis Borges on the liberation of Paris, August 23, 1944.
The day Paris fell to the Nazi armies also happens to be Donald Trump’s birthday, I shall take this apparent coincidence — two convergent chronological facts concocted in the depths of time by the author of all things — as an occasion to make the following claim: Donald Trump, too, wants to be defeated.
To everyone outside his cult of worshipers, Trump’s narcissism is flagrant and obvious. What’s perhaps less obvious is his masochism. The American political and legal system is trying with the most desperate urgency not to punish him, but he refuses its repeated implicit offer again and again. Trump’s lifetime of frantic grifting is that of a man who wants to be caught, to be exposed, to be humiliated, to be revealed to everyone as the worthless child, unlovable and unloved, that his parents knew him to be.
He is never going to stop until we finally give him what he has always wanted.