In a tweet, Harry Potter author J.K Rowling, compared the president's lack of logic to the silliness in the novel “Through the Looking Glass” by Lewis Carroll: “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.” While Rowling's tweet sounds like she fell down a rabbit hole as Alice in Wonderland did, her tweet isn't as fanciful as it may seem.

Upside down

Trump routinely makes up-is-down statements when he tries to defend his positions, as in his tweet of July 31: “Collusion is not a crime, but that doesn't matter.

Because there was no collusion, except by crooked Hillary and the Democrats.” When accused of not heeding his advisers, he said in a speech in Greenville, South Carolina on Feb. 2016, “I do listen to people. I hire experts. I hire top people. And I do listen.” But then only a month later on MSNBC, he said, “I'm speaking with myself, No. 1, because I have a very good brain and I've said a lot of things. My primary consultant is myself.”

Life copies art

With Trump talking like Tweedledee, it's clear that life copies art. Oscar Wilde said it first in his “The Decay of Lying” just 20 years after Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland: “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.” Another example is Leon Golub's 1950painting 'Dionysiac,' which unwittingly illustrates Trump's harsh border security measures.

What you see are tense bodies, nerves at full stretch, but in pieces, the way one must feel held at gunpoint or caged. Rain streaks the canvas like tears and you imagine a sign held high in the air with a one-word message: “HELP.”

Life for those seeking asylum on our southern border copies the art of Golub's picture-making just like Trump apes Tweedledee.

When you watch the news of the day at the border, you might well imagine you hear shouts like “go back where you came from,” and may even the click of a gun hammer being cocked. You may not know it, but you're also picturing how Golub painted the oppression of racism, smeared on giant un-stretched canvases – again, an illustration of Wilde's old maxim: “life imitates art far more than art imitates life.”

Dark woods

And Rowling's tweet quoting Tweedledee pops into the mind again: “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't.

That's logic.” Trump came up with his zero-tolerance border policy to pressure the Democrats to do his will - not the immigrants. In an interview with Golub about his anti-racist paintings three decades ago, he told me, “This is the way things are going. They're contradictory things.” And the words of Alice come to mind when she politely said, “Which is the best way out of this wood: it's getting so dark. Would you tell me, please?”
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