Dahlia Lithwick, on Slate,
Mary Trump’s Book Shows How Donald Trump Gets Away With It
The problem with a fraud as big as this president is that once you start collaborating with him, it’s impossible to get out.
--doesn't use the words “black hole” to describe Donald Trump himself, but rather the abyss into which his brother, Freddy, fell. Nevertheless, her article is a prolonged metaphor—a conceit—about the black hole that is Donald Trump. Try to read this (boldface mine) and try not to think of a black hole:
Trump’s superpower isn’t great vision or great leadership but rather that he is so tiny. Taking him on for transactional purposes may seem like not that big a deal at first, but the moment you put him in your pocket, you become his slave. It is impossible to escape his orbit without having to admit a spectacular failure in moral and strategic judgment, which almost no one can stomach. Donald Trump’s emptiness is simply a mirror of the emptiness of everyone who propped him up. It’s that reflection that becomes unendurable. This pattern, as Mary writes, “guaranteed a cascade of increasingly consequential failures that would ultimately render all of us collateral damage.” Nobody, not even Mary, who signed on briefly to ghostwrite one of his books, ends up just a little bit beholden to Donald Trump and that includes his rapturous supporters who still queue up, maskless, to look upon his greatness. As she concludes, his sociopathy “reminds me that Donald isn’t really the problem at all.” That makes hers something other than the 15th book about the fathoms-deep pathologies of Donald Trump: It is the first real reckoning with all those who “caused the darkness.”
Other people have referred to Trump with reference to this metaphor (just google “Trump as black hole”), but Lithwick does it more expertly than most, though not so explicitly. In any event, she is always worth reading.
I don’t know if all the information (taxes, fraud, corruption, etc, etc.) that fell into this black hole can ever come out. I don’t know if the people who fell in regret that they did not first meet a wall of fire.
Anyway: I recommend Lithwick’s article. Also, Alice and Bob Meet the Wall of Fire--the book and the title article (the latter available on Quanta).
Please extend the metaphor in the comments. Thanks!