The Age of Trump is also the age of the Faustian bargain. Time and time again, commentators declare that individuals or groups who throw in with Trump are making a deal with the devil. A Google search quickly reveals any number of takers for this demonic bargain. From the moment Trump came on the political scene, there have been frequent references to the Faustian bargain made by the Republican Party, which gained short-term power in exchange for subjecting itself to Trump’s whims, or evangelical Christians, who traded the defeat of Roe v. Wade for the loss of their moral credibility. More recently, commentators have detected a similarly short-sighted deal on the part of Big Tech, whose lockstep support for Trump has not won them a reprieve from his arbitrary demands. Even the crypto industry—itself hardly an angelic group—has been warned that it will ultimately come to regret its close alliance with Trump. As these examples reveal, by drawing on the Faust legend, commentators do not intend solely to point out the president’s wicked nature. Instead, they are claiming that, just as Faust pledged his eternal soul to Mephistopheles for the promise of worldly power, all the apparent beneficiaries of Trump’s ascendancy are trading short-term gain for long-term perdition.
Interestingly, the Faust trope appears to have been much less frequently used for members of Trump’s own administration. In his first term, this was presumably because the assumption was that any establishment figures participating in his cabinet were a moderating influence, hence on the side of the angels. In the second, by contrast, everyone seems to recognize that joining Trump’s team means abandoning any independent agency—so that even Marco Rubio, a former rival whom some expected to provide a counterweight to Trump’s extreme and erratic foreign policy, has acted as little more than a rubber stamp for the president’s demands. Far from selling their souls, they are simply abandoning them in exchange for nothing.
There is one exception to this rule: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Virtually alone among Trump’s appointees, Kennedy has an independent base of support and an independent agenda, which he rebranded as “Make America Healthy Again” to synchronize with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement. This following gave him leverage to make a deal: his appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services was his reward for abandoning his third-party presidential campaign and throwing his support behind Trump. And since taking office, Kennedy’s actions and public statements have been so bizarre that, under any other administration, one would be tempted to say that the president had made a Faustian bargain with him. Within his sphere of influence, Kennedy has been more aggressive than Trump himself, purging dissenters and forcing through his extreme policies. Both agendas converged in his legally dubious attempt to fire the head of the CDC—a controversial, and typically underqualified, Trump appointee who had been confirmed by the Senate only a month prior—for insufficient fealty to his anti-vaxx agenda. Despite dealing with this complex issue, however, the health secretary has nonetheless found time to diagnose lethargic young people with “mitochondrial challenges,” apparently at a glance.
Clearly, Kennedy views himself as the same kind of savant that Faust is portrayed as in nearly every iteration of his legend. In the opening lines of Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, for instance, he claims to have mastered the subject matter of all four faculties of the university—theology, philosophy, medicine, and law—and to have found them all wanting. None, he claims, is worthwhile because none is capable of granting him the power to produce a miracle. In his much later, and much longer, version, Goethe introduces a new twist on this theme. Instead of craving some higher knowledge or power, Goethe’s Faust laments that he has frittered his life away on meaningless knowledge, but neglected the task of actually living. When Mephistopheles offers him his notorious bargain, Goethe’s Faust does not ask for the supernatural knowledge and power that Marlowe’s Faust craves. Instead, he asks for a kind of raw, unmediated experience that transcends knowledge—and even seems to defy logic:
To dizzying, painful joy I dedicate
Myself, to refreshing frustration, loving hate!
I’ve purged the lust for knowledge from my soul;
Now the full range of suffering it shall face,
And in my inner self I will embrace
The experience allotted to the whole
Race of mankind; my mind shall grasp the heights
And depths, my heart know all their sorrows and delights.
Thus I’ll expand myself, and their self I shall be,
And perish in the end, like all humanity. (Faust, Part 1, ll.1766-1775; all quotations drawn from David Luke’s translation)
The main action of the play’s first part follows Faust’s first attempt to tap into the intense experiences through a tragic love affair with a young, innocent woman named Gretchen.
Both the love story and the paradoxical demand it tries and fails to fulfill were Goethe’s own additions to the Faust legend. Elsewhere, he made more subtle changes—and reading Goethe’s play with Kennedy’s agenda to “Make America Healthy Again” in mind, it is striking how many of them involve medicine. Where earlier versions of Faust cast him as an orphan, Goethe gives him a physician father, whom the young Faust assisted as he attempted to fight a plague. While the general public remains grateful for his aid, Faust proclaims to his assistant Wagner that it was all a lie. His father was an alchemist, whose haphazard guesswork led him to create a medicine Faust now views as actively harmful:
Still the sick would die,
But no one asked why none got well again.
So in these valleys and these villages,
With those hell-sirups as our remedies,
We, worse than any plague, raged far and wide.
I myself poisoned thousands, I saw how
They all wasted away and perished—now
Men praise that cynical mass-homicide. (Part 1, ll. 1048-1055)
This passage now sounds like an uncanny anticipation of anti-vaccination rhetoric, not only in relation to our recent plague, but in the widespread claims, fervently amplified by Kennedy, that long-standing routine vaccinations cause diseases such as autism. When Wagner replies, quite sensibly, that Faust and his father cannot be blamed for doing the best they could with the knowledge they had, Faust does not concede that medical science has advanced since his father’s day, but launches into a tirade against scientific knowledge itself: “The very thing one needs one does not know, / and what one knows is needless information.” (Part 1, ll. 1066-67)
Later, when Mephistopheles poses as Faust to advise a university student as to which faculty he should focus on, he reserves his greatest cynicism for the field of medicine. Where the other three fields (theology, philosophy, and law) are presented as simply meaningless, medicine is a pretext for actual abuse. Predicting that the student will discover that “your far-flung scientific fantasies / are vain” (Part 1, ll. 2015-2016), Mephistopheles suggests that the student should project confidence, and use his medical examinations as an opportunity to “grope past years of other men’s delay” by taking advantage of his women patients sexually (Part 1, l. 2032). Here we might discern an anticipation of contemporary homophobic or transphobic rhetoric about medical professionals contributing to the “grooming” of young people or, shifting beyond the specifically sexual context, the widespread refrain that anything put out by “Big Pharma” must be a pure cash-grab with no actual medical value. Ironically, later in the play, Faust winds up following Mephistopheles’s advice to his student, using his presumed medical knowledge to convince Gretchen to give her mother a potion so that he and Gretchen can consummate their relationship. While he claims that it will temporarily put her to sleep, Gretchen’s mother dies, setting in train Gretchen’s ostracization from the community. As a child, Faust had naively trusted his father’s knowledge and unwittingly harmed others. Now as an adult, he is consciously and willfully using inaccurate medical knowledge solely for his own gain, heedless of the consequences for Gretchen’s mother—or Gretchen herself, who becomes pregnant in the absence of any attempt at birth control.
The bitter irony here is that Faust sought out Gretchen as a way of escaping all that he was, of returning to a youthful innocence. In an exceptionally creepy scene where he sneaks into her bedroom while she’s away, Faust emphasizes her childlikeness, and during their courtship he tries to connect with her on that level, for instance, by playing the “he loves me, he loves me not” game with her. But Faust is not a child and can never become one again. Even if Mephistopheles has arranged for his elderly body to be magically de-aged—here the notably leathery Kennedy is surely jealous! —Faust is still very much an adult man, who uses his considerable expertise (in theology, philosophy, and law as well as medicine) to manipulate and seduce Gretchen. Faust was seeking an alternative to knowledge, a type of raw experience that would somehow transcend it, and his quest led him only to misuse the knowledge he did have.
There is a similar contradiction at work in the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, the most powerful and malign of the growing number of movements that have promised to return us to a “natural” approach to health, unpolluted by modern science. Yet Kennedy cannot help but make quasi-scientific claims even as he rejects scientific standards. As Ross Douthat puts it in his much-too-sympathetic account of the contradictions in the MAHA movement, Kennedy always inflates his claims, for instance about vaccines, beyond what the data can support, which “suggests a deep instinct that vaccination in general is just too unnatural to be trusted.” But instead of offering an alternative to the scientific perspective, Kennedy and his acolytes have offered only “alternative science,”which is to say, made-up, manipulative science. That shoddy science is spread through what is surely the most unnatural technology ever developed, algorithmic social media, which allows health influencers to accumulate a kind of authority through virality. Chief among them is Kennedy himself, who always to assume that “real” science will ultimately align with his gut instincts, as though he and he alone is in touch with the real, natural sources of health. Yet, I somehow doubt that even Kennedy himself would claim that he has succeeded in enhancing the health of any individual American. Instead, his achievement has been purely negative—firing experts, defunding necessary research plans, and perhaps even destroying the whole CDC.
There are indications, though, that simply removing health supports without supplying any alternative may be, in Kennedy’s mind, the most natural outcome of all, because it lets loose the forces of natural selection on humanity. From this perspective, the childhood diseases prevented by vaccination, for example, become a test that only the strong survive. Far from an alternative to science, this is the most noxious pseudo-science ever developed: namely, eugenics. And here again, we find an uncanny parallel to Goethe’s Faust, this time to the unloved part 2. The main plot of this strange and allegorical work centers on Faust’s attempt to reclaim land from the sea—a massive project that requires him to engage in economic, political, and military manipulation on a grand scale. When he, like Kennedy, succeeds in his plot to gain a fiefdom where he can operate with a free hand, Faust looks out over his nearly completed work and congratulates himself for building a land whose inhabitants will “not be safe, but active, free at last” (Part 2, l. 11565). In Faust’s utopia:
There shall be an inland paradise:
Outside, the sea, as high as it can reach,
May rage and gnaw; and yet a common will,
Should it intrude, will act to close the breach.
Yes! to this vision I am wedded still,
And this as wisdom’s final word I teach:
Only that man earns freedom, merits life,
Who must reconquer both in constant daily strife.
In such a place, by danger still surrounded,
Youth, manhood, age, their brave new world have founded. (Part 2, ll. 11569-11576)
This is the culmination of Goethe’s version of Faust’s deal with the devil—the ability to create a blank slate full of self-imposed dangers, where each must continually earn their freedom and prove that they merit their life. When I teach this passage, I always point out to students how much Faust’s rhetoric echoes common American ideology. But I never would have predicted that our own home-grown Faust would one day be in a position to make this dubious dream a reality.
