The Tyrant's Plea

So spake the fiend, and with necessity,
(The tyrant's plea,) excus'd his devilish deeds.

-John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV, Lines 393-394

A good book is one of my escapes from the clamor of the 24-hour news cycle. I can read and forget for a while that the President of the United States rants like a spoiled toddler on his social media platform. I can forget that he has his own social media platform. I can almost forget that the man in White House has a long history of philandering and fraud and that he used to hang out with a guy whose name has become synonymous with the sexual abuse of girls. (There are far too many such names.)

So, when I recently picked up Paradise Lost, it wasn’t with any intent to mine John Milton’s epic poem for passages reminiscent of Donald Trump.

However, Satan is a major character in the story. I knew that going in, so I should have anticipated the parallels. I’m not saying that the President is the Devil. Satan would have more subtlety and style. If I did make such a claim, I would do so via a very bad impression of Kathy Bates as Mama Boucher—probably the role of which she is most proud—in The Waterboy.¹

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Everything is the devil to Mama Boucher, who sounds a bit like a combination of Trump and his “spiritual advisor,” Paula White-Cain.² My favorite Kathy Bates moment is not from The Waterboy, but my favorite Kathy Bates moment in that movie is when she responds to her son’s question about Ben Franklin with, “That's nonsense, I invented electricity. Ben Franklin is the Devil!” Substitute “was a loser” for “is the Devil” and you’ve got a quote you could not easily dismiss as not attributable to Donald Trump.

I also knew that the Puritan John Milton was no fan of monarchs.³ He lived during the reign of King James I, of King James Bible fame, and his son Charles I, both of whom were proponents of the divine right of kings, a doctrine that claimed that a monarch’s authority came from God.⁴ Charles I dissolved Parliament several times, something Donald Trump doesn’t have to do to Congress because Republican senators and representatives (and some Democrats) have voluntarily dissolved their own spines. The courts have fared better, but the Supreme Court seems inclined to hand the President a scepter and crown.

(Milton, by the way, later wrote more than once in defense of Charles I’s beheading.)

The quote from Paradise Lost at the beginning of this piece is from early in story—there are twelve books, or chapters—when Satan is plotting the fall of man. He tells himself that he would normally abhor such a thing, but it has to be done.

That’s what we have heard about every careless, destructive thing that has happened since January 20th. Haphazard DOGE cuts had to be done because of the runaway deficit, which the Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act has since accelerated. Pocket recissions, which are an illegal usurpation of Congress’s authority, had to be done. It was an emergency. Tariffs had to be done because we were being treated so unfairly. Blue cities are crime-ridden hell holes, so we must send in the National Guard. A Turkish graduate student had to be abducted and sent to a Louisiana prison because she wrote, with others, a mild rebuke of the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza. That is the new definition of antisemitism, from the guy who pardoned a January 6 insurrectionist who wore a “Camp Auschwitz” hoodie over his Nazi t-shirt as he toured the Capitol that day. This false definition of antisemitism is now the reason given for defunding universities and filing lawsuits against.

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Necessity is, indeed, the tyrant’s plea. We are seeing it used over and over with ever more flimsy justification. The good news is that we know the Devil when we see him, and he’s not the guy flying a kite in a thunderstorm.⁵