Sun King Playlists

“To faint was a fault past hope of pardon,” wrote the Duke of Saint-Simon in his Memoirs of Louis XIV, an insider’s account of battlefield debacles, antechamber intrigues and bedroom assignations during the reign of the Sun King. Yet the Duke recounts several fainting spells at court, including that of Madame de Montespan, the sovereign’s most beloved mistress.

One afternoon at Versailles in 1669, the Duke of Lauzun hid himself under Montespan’s bed before one of her regularly scheduled afternoon trysts with Louis in her grand apartments. The sexual maneuverings were followed by political ones. Both were heard by the surreptitious intruder. After Louis had “dressed himself again” and departed, the peeping Duke confronted Montespan with her backstabbing lies against him.

Soon after this encounter, Montespan hastened to the rehearsal of a ballet that both she and the King, famed for his dancing, were to appear in. She was so overwrought from the confrontation with the eavesdropper that when she arrived at the ballroom and saw Louis, she fainted. “The King, in great fright, came to her,” writes Saint-Simon, and “it was not without much trouble that she was restored to herself.” Those whom Louis loved could be allowed to faint.

And so it was on Monday, not in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles for a royal ballet, but in the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center in Oaks, Pennsylvania for a Trump Town Hall.

The heat inside what Trump repeatedly called a “really big room,” was stifling, but it was the presence of the MAGA Monarch that must have contributed greatly to not one, but two loyal subjects swooning after just thirty minutes of obsequious questions.

Summoning doctors to the aid of the stricken, Trump showed rare traces of understanding and thoughtfulness. Had he displayed these characteristics during the pandemic, he would have ensured his re-election in 2020 and not now be mired in the current campaign, one seemingly more protracted than the aged Louis’s adventures in the War of the Spanish Succession. Yet even after Trump’s almost touching show of something that might possibly have been sympathy, he couldn’t help himself from taunting the crowd: “Anyone else want to faint?” Or have a bite of brioche, he might have added à la Marie Antoinette.

The commentariat made great sport of what followed in the second half of the Town Hall, (im)moderated with acid elegance by that Great Lady from the outer reaches of the MAGA realm, Kristi Noem, Governor of South Dakota. The ambient heat was intensified by the hot-air responses to the petitions that were immediately resolved by fiat in advance of the irksome election: his Royal Trumpness would cut energy bills in half in the first week of his next reign, end the war in Ukraine even before his coronation on January 20th.

After the second victim fell, Trump decreed that the remainder of the evening’s entertainment be turned into a public airing of his favorite music. The ensuing listening party and one-man dance show was promptly derided by critics as unhinged geriatric self-indulgence.

This was not a humiliating spectacle but an apotheosis, an updated reenactment of the divine-right doings of the Sun King. Trump is no longer merely post- and pre-presidential. On Monday evening he became definitively regal.

In spite of various updates in tastes, postures, and choreography, the parallels between the Trumpian present and the French royal past are too obvious to ignore, whether the ruler in question is clad in ermine robes or Brioni suits.

Louis didn’t start wearing a wig until his hair began thinning in his mid-thirties. Also full-bottomed, Trump has his own style of big hair. Even if less abundant than the Sun King’s, Trump’s is no less carefully artificed, no less eye-catchingly opulent.

Mar-a-Lago is the Sunshine-State Sun King’s Versailles not just in its geographical remove from court life in Washington, DC and New York City, but in the seaside palace’s “Louis XIV” décor—its gold-framed portraits of the reigning monarch, its baroque furnishings, its vast receiving and banqueting halls, and ballroom where courtiers gather. The golf course is the royal garden.

The exchange of sycophantic petitions and grandiose proclamations of modern-day town hall events mimic the audiences held by the Sun King. Resemblances are greater still to the carefully orchestrated intimacy of the royal rituals of waking and retiring. For the Grande Levée Louis’s personal attendants helped him wash, shave, and dress before the entire court assembled beyond the gilded balustrade that marked off the monarch’s sacred space of his bedchamber.

Trump’s one-time Mar-a-Lago butler, Anthony Senecal, the man who notoriously called for the assassination of Barack Obama, would greet him every morning at the arched entrance to his Mar-a-Lago quarters with a stack of newspapers. If, when Trump reappeared hours later, he wore a white golf hat, his courtiers understood that he was in good mood. A red hat meant grumpy Trumpy.

Like so many of his routines, Louis’s daily rising required musical accompaniment—a soundtrack. The king didn’t have to ask his entourage to cue up his top tunes. Always at the ready, much of the royal repertoire had been composed and curated by another bigwig, Jean-Baptiste Lully, most remembered in music history for dying from gangrene after slamming his foot with the staff he used to beat time in front of his orchestra. Many are those who have wished a similar fate on Trump should he bash his shin with a sand wedge.

After a long day at court, Louis was lavished with music again as he went to bed.

The echoes of Versailles can be heard in the proud tendresse of Trump’s musical airings, outsourced to Spotify rather than delivered, as at Louis’s court, by live musicians in full-bottomed wigs. Both instrumental music and vocal works were lofted to entertain and praise the Sun King, and so too for Trump. True, Lully’s Trios pour le coucher du Roi were quiet and calming, though not without moments of animated resolve.

By contrast Monday evening, Trump kept shouting for the opening number, an instrumental version of Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” to be louder. Just one hearing of this over-roasted chestnut was not enough for Trump. After Schubert’s arpeggios descended to their final repose, Trump ordered a vocal performance of the same song. After some backstage scurrying by his playlisters, Trump smiled beatifically as Pavarotti began bel canto-ing through the hymn to the Virgin.

Governor Noem tried to steer things back to the Qs & As, but to no avail. By then Trump was lost in reverie, bewitched by his playlist, conducting in the air as if alone in his throne room. He was a sovereign transported, his eyes narrowing as if to focus on distant sonic visions conjured by blatantly monarchic misappropriations such as Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” sung by Rufus Wainwright, as well as by rabid republican fare like Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond.”

There is ample precedent for Trump’s musical cullings and covetings. Louis XIV never asked for permission to hear the compositions that he decreed should be instant classics; many remained in public circulation until the Revolution.

When he was a teenager, Louis appeared in the Royal Ballet of the Night as Apollo. After that great success as a dancer, the young ruler chose the sun as his symbol—or as Trump might put it, his logo. Louis’s costume as the Sung God was crowned by a halo of orange rays—the autocratic antecedent of the radiant coif of Trump’s late years. To his buffet of court music, Trump danced in his own inimitable style, feet glued to the stage, body swaying like one of his heavily leveraged skyscrapers on a windy day.

Come evening, Louis might have retired to the sounds of a mournful sarabande. When the sun went down, the Sun King favored elegant dances marked by their elegiac, poise—each day a life, each night a rehearsal for death.

Trump denies not just election results, but the final, irrevocable loss that comes with mortality itself. On Monday in Oaks, PA he withdrew for the night to the sound of the Village People’s “YMCA.” By then he’d set down his microphone, that combo orb-and-scepter of the Town Hall potentate. As the diverse men—cop, cowboy, soldier, construction worker, Black Indian Chief—of Trump’s youthful disco exploits sang “pick yourself off the ground” in unwitting reference to the evening’s early fainters, Trump clenched his fists in front him and started to boogie his way. Unlike elegant Louis, dancing for Donald was a struggle, a fight, and he wanted to win.