In a recent New York Times column, Maureen Dowd describes Donald Trump as an "American monster." This is an entirely reasonable view, but American society is mired in such a state of malignant normality that this monster has tens of millions of followers, who worship his greed, criminality and cruelty.
Dowd contrasts Trump to the monster in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein," who begins with "elegance of mind and sweetness of temperament, reading Goethe's 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' and gathering firewood for a poor family." But then his creator, Victor Frankenstein, abandons and rejects him, refusing to make him a mate:
