Wikimedia Commons / Gage Skidmore (left) and Pantheon Books edition of Divine Comedy (right)
At left: Serial liar Donald Trump; at right: liars attacked by serpents in Dante's eighth circle of Hell.
If you're like me and only pretended to read the Italian poet Dante Alighieri's Inferno in high school, good news: a recent four-hour documentary on PBS breathes new life into the musty classic.
Though seven centuries separate us, Dante's work remains tragically relevant for us today. His Florence of the 1300s was a city rotten with misrule and graft, embroiled in intractable polarization and civil strife. How can we sophisticates in the 21st century possibly relate?
Flippancy aside, you might be as surprised as I was to learn that those guilty of fraud reside on a lower ring of Hell compared to those guilty of fornicating or assault. In the series, Dante scholar Catherine Adoyo elaborated on "the ethical organization" of who ends up where. Nearest the surface are sins of "incontinence" — ungoverned passions such as carnal lust and gluttony. Next down are sins of brute force — physically hurting others or oneself.
"But the third — the deepest, the gravest — category of sin is fraud," Adoyo explained. "Fraud is when one exercises their intellect, which is the greatest gift, to undermine the well-being of another."
This stands in stark contrast to how our legal systems typically rank criminal offenses. So-called white-collar crimes such as insider trading or tax evasion receive lesser, often probationary, sentences while theft, rape and murder receive the severest punishment, including state execution.
The reasoning behind Dante's hierarchy involves how fraud is perpetrated.
"Through the word," Adoyo explains. "You tell somebody one thing that you know not to be true with the understanding that the other person will believe you, so you have their trust and you violate that trust by communicating to them a big lie."
What's worse than gaslighting and betrayal?
Take Donald Trump. (Please!)
Trump was the purveyor of the Big Lie that election-rigging cost him the presidency in 2020. According to Dante's beautiful dark and twisted fantasy, this premeditated "sowing of discord" would fix the former president securely in the eight or ninth circles of the underworld, far below those who commit crimes of passion in the heat of the moment. After all, what's a single act of violence juxtaposed to instigating a violent mob or betraying one's country?
Yet to hear Trump tell it, despite his umpteen felony charges, he's the blameless victim of a weaponized justice system cracking down on political rivals. The term "lawfare" has been intermittently trending for weeks on social media, thanks to what Georgetown historian Thomas Zimmer called right-wing elites' "remarkable persecution complex even while holding disproportionate power."
MAGA Republicans' selective endorsement of law and order would spin Dante in his grave.
"We have violent criminals who are murdering people, killing people, we have drug dealers all over the place, and they go free, and they can do whatever they want," Trump on March 25, told the press after one his many court dates. "But they go after Trump where there's not even a crime."
In point of fact, claiming one's assets are worth one thing when you're applying for a bank loan and worth far less when the tax collector comes around is indeed a crime — to the tune of an estimated $454 million in Trump's case, counting the interest. The developer and former reality-show star also allegedly tripled the reported size of Trump Tower Penthouse.
And as Dante's punishment suggests, there are real consequences for others as result of deceit.
"A loan that goes to the liar doesn't go to someone who's giving a more honest evaluation," the thankfully resurrected Jon Stewart explained on The Daily Show. "So the system becomes incentivized for corruption."
Stewart ran a montage of far-right TV pundits complaining about food stamp recipients and shoplifters, exposing the obvious hypocrisy: why are impoverished welfare cheats vilified while tax cheats like Trump are praised for their supposedly "victimless" creative financing?
"Most people just can't commit fraud and expect to face no repercussions even if everyone's doing it," Stewart continued. "Try getting a car loan by saying you have 10 times as much money as you really do. Or claim 20 dependents when you have no children. Or say you make slightly less money to qualify for food assistance. I will guarantee you, there are not just financial consequences for those lies, but criminal ones. But don't tell that to the investment community. Because in their minds, in pursuit of profit, there is no rule that cannot be bent. There is no principle that cannot be undercut as long as you and your fucking friends are making money."
Stewart aptly summed up the ethic of late capitalism: "Stealing is only justified when you already have too much."
Dante wrote his era-defining poem in exile from his beloved Florence, a place in which he would never set foot again before his death. That's genuine persecution.
Adoyo described how the writer rose to his calling: "I will be doing a disservice to posterity if I don't dare speak out against the corruption and the greed and the malice that I've witnessed." Dante longed for a city of justice and inspired the democratic revolutionaries of not only a unified Italy but also the United States.
Trump, on the contrary, played the fiddle while his dittoheads ransacked the Capitol. He's a traitor, full stop. With our own Judgement Day scheduled for November 5, paradise is clearly not on the ballot, but the choice between another descent into madness versus keeping at the arduous climb through purgatory may well be.
Those inclined to vote for Trump, or worse canonize him, should revisit their Dante instead.
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