In an undisclosed Intensive Care Unit, an expert panel of English professors, grammarians, lexicalists, and word scholars stood around the bed of an unresponsive metaphor. In a unanimous decision, the panel declared the metaphor dead.
Rodney Kennedy
I will argue for the continued life of one metaphor previously declared dead and buried. Rising from the ashes as a language sphinx, I declare, “Dead, buried, and yet alive” — “Where’s there smoke, there’s fire.”
Nietzsche famously characterized “truth” as an “army of metaphors.” Truth is a hotly contested act of interpretation attempting to slay the dragon of lies, misinformation, and falsehood. I dare affirm one such metaphor: “Where’s there’s smoke there’s fire” possesses the epistemological power to slay the dragon of our political morass.
Harold Bloom suggested a metaphor was not merely a stylistic ornament, but a linguistic strategy used by a rhetor to overcome his or her sense of belatedness. He then argued any meaning occurs as a struggle with previous meaning. We, all of us, are up to our steeples in a struggle for the truth.
I believe the moment of truth has arrived for “where there is smoke there is fire.” In the tedious attempt to keep track of all the indictments, trials, fines, and convictions of Donald Trump, his defenders have unleashed an army of questionable tropes, a veritable “army of metaphors.” “Demon Democrats” are persecuting Trump. The trials are a “witch hunt.” What an interesting confluence — “trials” and “witch hunt” as a double reminder of the Salem witch hunts and trials. In the New York “hush money” case (another loose metaphor because the indictment was not about hush money) “sham trial” made frequent appearances.
Conservatives, usually more literal with their epistemology, sometimes struggle when they start slinging metaphors. I don’t trust conservatives with metaphors. Evangelicals have flooded the media world with kaleidoscopic metaphors of Trump as Cyrus, David, Solomon, Samson, and even Jesus.
Trump himself has pushed the idea of liberals persecuting him the way Jesus was persecuted. Trump and MAGA glory in their special privilege (not shared even by the angels) of being persecuted like Christ, of bearing his scars (the ear bandage has become a Trumpian icon), recalling that it is only by God’s grace Trump was spared the assassin’s deadly intention. MAGA adherents now speak in reverential tones, “He was wounded for our transgressions.”
Now, in total identification with one another, they are permitted to participate in Christ’s mystery of redemption, and thereby save democracy from the Democrats. What a metaphorical conceit. Some would say blasphemy.
At the Republican Convention, defenders of Trump were infatuated with “Trump is a lion” as their favorite trope. They conjured pictures of Jesus and the heroic lion in Chronicles of Narnia.
Don Jr. claimed his father faced danger with “the heart of a lion.” Lara Trump offered Proverbs 28:1 from the International Standard Version: “The wicked flee, though no one pursues. But the righteous are as bold as a lion.” Senator Tim Scott soliloquized, “On Saturday the devil came to Pennsylvania holding a rifle. But an American lion got back up on his feet and he roared.”
Maureen Dowd wrote that Trump is more “lyin” than “lion.” “The message of Narnia was that good bested bad. But now it was a chronic liar and felon, a man also held liable for sexual abuse, who was getting cast as the sacred lion.”
One can sympathize with how hard it is to make Scar look like Simba when it comes to Trump “the lying-est” politician in our nation’s history.
The Republicans, positively intoxicated with Trump’s presumed innocence, have tried so hard to treat each Trump trial as an independent and stand-alone event. Steve Marshall, the attorney general of Alabama claims, “This reeks of desperation from a party that has clearly lost all confidence in its nominee, but even this circus won’t distract Americans from recognizing the failures of this administration.”
Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio and Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida both pulled out the metaphor of “kangaroo court” to defend Trump. “Kangaroo court” is a pejorative term for an illegal, thrown-together trial by a group having no official standing in the territory.
Mike Davis, a former chief counsel to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), claims criticism of X-president Trump smacks of hypocrisy: “The same Democrats who impeached President Trump twice for nonsense, indicted him four times for non-crimes, tried to bankrupt his business, illegally gagged him twice, and are using a bogus legal theory to disqualify him from state ballots are suddenly concerned about a weaponized justice system?” Davis said.
Franklin Graham weighed in with a self-righteous graveness only he can conjure: “The democracy that we have known and cherished in this nation is now threatened.”
Photo by Thomas Stephan on Unsplash
Trump swears he is “a very innocent man,” but “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” connects all the trials and tribulations of Trump. I’m struck by the frenzied escalation of the frequency of Trump’s lies and the metaphorical defense of him by his supporters. The indiscretions, the missteps, the criminal activity, and the lies keep adding more fuel to the fire. Stack all Trump’s trials in a row and allow “Where there’s smoke there’s fire” to wage war as a solitary warrior for truth.
No one should be more at home in a courtroom than Trump. Former federal prosecutor and author James D. Zirin illuminates more than 45 years of Trump’s legal disputes in his 2019 book, Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits. While Trump once famously quoted 2 Corinthians at Liberty University, he and his evangelical followers seem to have never heard the question of St. Paul in I Corinthians 6:1 — “When any of you has a grievance against another, do you dare to take it to court before the unrighteous, instead of taking it before the saints?”
San Francisco and New York: Trump University
In 2017, several civil lawsuits were settled over Trump University defrauding students. Trump agreed to pay $25 million to put an end to the cases.
Manhattan: Defamation and Sexual Assault
Trump lost two civil cases to E. Jean Carroll. A jury ruled in January that Trump must pay Carroll $83.3 million in damages for defamation. It was the second verdict in favor of Carroll against Trump. In May, he was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming her. She was awarded $5 million in damages.
The judge in the Carroll case, Lewis A. Kaplan said, “The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Kaplan wrote.
He added: “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.” “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.”
Manhattan: “Hush Money”
Trump was convicted on all 34 counts in the “hush money” trial. The media hangs on to inaccurate metaphors like a dog with a bone.
Trump supporters have correctly pointed out that paying hush money to a porn star is not illegal. They ignore that Trump wasn’t charged with hush money payments. He was charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a $130,000 payment that Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen made to Stormy Daniels, whose given name is Stephanie Clifford. The payment was made in the waning days of the 2016 campaign in exchange for her silence about a sexual encounter she says she had with Trump a decade earlier, prosecutors said.
New York State: Fraud
Attorney General Letitia James of New York brought suit that Mr. Trump had conspired to manipulate his net worth and lied about the value of his properties to receive more favorable terms on loans. Trump was ordered to pay a $454 million judgment in the ruling handed down by Justice Arthur F. Erdogan.
Department of Justice: Mar-a-Lago Documents
Prosecutors say Trump engaged in the illegal retention of classified documents at his Florida estate after leaving the White House in 2021. Trump was charged in an indictment with 37 criminal counts for charges including violations of the Espionage Act, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and making false statements to investigators. The most serious charges are 31 counts brought under the Espionage Act, which criminalizes the unauthorized possession of national defense information.
Fulton County: Election Subversion
Trump has been indicted on racketeering, conspiracy, and other charges by a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia. The more than two-year investigation by District Attorney Fani Willis into potential 2020 election interference has added to Trump’s legal woes.
Trump and eighteen other people are accused of attempting to unlawfully change the outcome of the election.
Department of Justice: Election Subversion
On January 6, 2021, Trump gave a fiery speech whose result was an insurrection by thousands of Trump supporters.
- He stands accused of defrauding the United States with his repeated and widespread efforts to spread false claims about the November 2020 election while knowing they were not true and for allegedly attempting to illegally discount legitimate votes all with the goal of overturning the 2020 election.
- He is charged with the obstruction of an official proceeding in the attempt to disrupt the electoral vote’s certification in January 2021.
- He is charged with a conspiracy against rights in his alleged attempts to “oppress, threaten, and intimidate” people in their right to vote in an election.
When There’s Fire, the Fire Department Shows Up
Trump now has only two escape routes. One, the Supreme Court can, at some point, throw out all the Trump convictions, fines, and guilty verdicts. Two, he can win the 2024 presidential election. In both cases, we have a new metaphor that is just as damning for Trump: “When there’s a fire, the fire department shows up.” The U.S. Senator, Judge Cannon, and the Supreme Court have all come to a partial rescue of Trump.
But he is not out of the woods yet. There’s still smoke in the air. There’s the smell of guilt burning in Atlanta, Miami, New York, and Washington, D.C.
The American people nourish dead metaphors for such times as this. People have continued to believe “where there’s smoke there’s fire.” And it may be the final word in the Trump saga.
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div. from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. The pastor of 7 Southern Baptist churches over the course of 20 years, he pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton, Ohio — which is an American Baptist Church — for 13 years. He is currently professor of homiletics at Palmer Theological Seminary, and interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, New York. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, is out now from Cascade Books.
