In Praise of Folly

In 1511, Erasmus of Rotterdam published The Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium), an oration that Folly herself delivers in the first person and in which she casts herself, without a shred of modesty, as the deity who gladdens gods and men. The proof she offers lies in the faces of the assembly, which had seemed to be returning, heavy and pensive, from consulting an oracle and which lit up with a new delight the instant she rose to speak, before she had said a word. Folly considers it only natural to sing her own praises, and she remarks further on that the more ambitious listeners applaud, with a smile, the foreign words they cannot follow and wag their ears like a donkey, so as to seem to understand more than their neighbors. Erasmus needed a goddess to confess that an audience applauds before it listens, because in his day a real king would have had the good sense to keep quiet.

A little more than five centuries later, on Saturday, October 10th, Folly found, at the F&M Bank Arena in Clarksville, Tennessee, a speaker willing to dispense with allegory and speak in his own name. Donald Trump told the story of a friend who suffers from stage fright, an ailment the President knows only by hearsay, described the love he felt from up on the stage, and concluded that he could say the stupidest things and the audience would clap. The audience laughed and clapped on the spot, which spared the speaker the trouble of proving his thesis. Trump then imitated the lovestruck fan with a swoon in his voice, assured everyone that it was true, and added that he and his people did not say stupid things, that they said things of common sense, such as wanting a border, low taxes, and a strong military. The common sense arrived after the applause, and the order of events faithfully reproduced the scene in Erasmus’s book, where the faces of the assembly light up before the first word. Trump’s defenders are right to point out that the President was joking, and the joke had the candor of a man who knows that an audience applauds before it listens and governs accordingly.

Two days later, on Monday, October 12th, Trump was speaking at the Covelli Centre in Youngstown, Ohio, when a woman stood up in a T-shirt that demanded the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, and at least two men fell upon her. One of them punched her in the face, dragged her by the hair, and locked an arm around her neck, while the stands chanted U.S.A. in unison. Trump remarked into the microphone that this was a paid protester sent by the left to destroy the country, called him scum, announced that the protester was going back home to mom, mocked his weight, and prescribed an urgent diet, every word of it in the masculine, because from the stage he could see in the stands only someone who was not applauding. He also asked the audience whether they didn’t love law enforcement, at the very moment when sheriff’s deputies were leading the woman down the stairs and leaving in their seats the men who had attacked her.

The T-shirt called for the enforcement of a law that the House of Representatives had passed on November 18, 2025, by a vote of four hundred and twenty-seven to one, that the Senate had approved by unanimous consent a few hours later, and that Trump had signed the next day, after months of resistance. In the statement he issued on signing it, Trump had credited the near-unanimity to a request he himself had made, and not even Erasmus’s Folly could have sung her own praises better. The lone dissenting vote had come from Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican and fervent Trump loyalist, and there is no record of anyone pulling his hair. The woman in Youngstown was beaten, then, for insisting that the signature of the man who called her scum be honored. Jon Husted was on the stage as the Republican Senate candidate Trump had come to support, and a few days later, commenting on the assault, he declared that people who interrupt a political event face consequences. As of this week, no charges have been filed against the men who attacked the woman, and the consequences have fallen only on the person who took the punches.

A President who boasts of a law and calls scum anyone who asks that it be enforced is running a government of the absurd, and an arena that chants U.S.A. while a woman is being beaten applauds, with a smile, what it does not understand and wags its ears like Erasmus’s donkey.

I would like to look at these two rallies the way one looks at the customs of a foreign land, but our own audience denies me that comfort, because among us, too, Folly has found speakers willing to talk in her name and a public that applauds before it listens. On October 27th we choose the hundred and twenty who will make up the Knesset’s audience, and I confess to the reader that among those asking for my vote I am looking for people capable of staying seated when a powerful minister says the stupidest things, however much of the house rises to its feet in praise.