Hollow Men: The Republican Party is Nothing More Than a Host for the Malignancies of Donald Trump

In “House Taken Over,” a curious short story by Julio Cortázar from 1946, the rooms of a brother and sister’s ancestral manor are invaded by an inexplicable presence. The narrator and his sibling, Irene, normally live alone, but one night, when the brother heads to the kitchen to brew maté, he hears noises nearby—furniture knocked over, “the muffled buzzing of a conversation.”

“I’ll always have a clear memory of it because it happened so simply and without fuss,” he says. The sounds approach a door in the passage he’s in. He rushes to lock it before the presence can reach the hall. “[T]hey’ve taken over the back part,” he tells Irene when he brings her the maté.

They accept this sudden loss without question, even as they bemoan the possessions they can no longer access in those conquered passages. But it doesn’t stop there. In little time, the sounds appear elsewhere. The siblings lose ever-larger portions of their home to these inexplicable invaders, until the entire house is, as in the title, taken over. There’s a sort of dread inevitability to the invasion, a sense that the inexplicable is inescapable. It happened, after all, so simply, so without fuss.

A few weeks ago, I found myself thinking again of this sense of inevitable invasion when I read The Body Snatchers, Jack Finney’s iconic 1954 science-fiction novel about an extraterrestrial invasion in which humans in California counties are quietly transformed into what later adaptations call “pod people”: clone-like aliens virtually indistinguishable from the human originals. As in Cortázar’s story, it happens suddenly, so suddenly that it almost feels more unavoidable than sinister. Published eight years after “House Taken Over,” I immediately felt they were subtly linked, each portraying a world of alarming, almost capricious instability.

Yet while Cortázar lets his protagonists retain their individuality while they cede their belongings, Finney takes it further. His aliens steal much more. The extraterrestrials, who arrive in seedlike pods from outer space, don’t simply clone or take over some host’s body; they quite literally turn into the humans their pods are placed near, absorbing the humans’ atoms while they sleep, until the human body disappears and the pod has become something that looks and sounds and has memories just like them, something, for all intents and purposes, the same as the once-slumbering people.

Except, as Finney reveals in a disquieting twist, they will only survive for a few years, and the body-snatching process inherently removes the capacity to feel emotions. The pod peoples’ laughs and smiles are imitations, their memories dense with feelings they will never actually feel. They are husks, gray as the fluff left behind in the assimilation process, gray as the sands of depression.

Since Donald Trump’s 2024 election countless political figures—most notably Republicans—have seemingly changed, adopting stances they had just recently opposed.

It would be tragic, were it not for the fact that the aliens’ invasion doesn’t stop at humans; they will eventually assimilate every organism on Earth, eradicating their emotions, then their lives, before the parasites’ pods drift to another planet, leaving Earth barren and bleached as the moon. (The moon, one alien tellingly notes, once teemed with life.)

It is a kind of planetary vampirism, an invasion less of body-snatchers than soul-snatchers—and, chillingly, only some will notice in time.

Finney’s novel, of course, is literally about aliens, yet it is an apt metaphor for times of sudden change, times when people we thought we knew seem subtly yet irrevocably altered.

I’ve found myself mulling this metaphor of “pod people” since Donald Trump’s 2024 election, as countless political figures—most notably Republicans—have seemingly changed, adopting stances they had just recently opposed, acting in ways so quietly weird that you almost start to feel gaslit, start to feel trapped in a kind of existential funhouse maze. And it’s all happened quickly and without fuss, as in both stories.

I think about it when I consider how when Russia invaded Ukraine, virtually every elected Republican at the time condemned Putin and supported Zelenskyy’s David-versus-Goliath struggle to keep his country sovereign and surviving, how today, when asked about this same conflict, the majority of Republicans now condemn Zelenskyy, now wish to deny him aid, and even propose that it was Ukraine that invaded Russia.

I think about it when I consider that just a few years ago, Donald Trump’s own Vice-President, J.D. Vance, called Trump “a cynical asshole” and repugnant to his Christian values and even “America’s Hitler”; now, I see a J.D. Vance who speaks of Trump as if he is the Second Coming of Christ, who argues that “the survival of America depends on” the man he once compared to last century’s most infamous dictator.

I think about it when I consider how the party of “fiscal responsibility” just voted overwhelmingly to increase the debt ceiling as part of Trump’s agenda. I think about it when I consider how frequently Republicans have claimed to favor meritocracy, opposing people getting jobs they are unqualified for; now, when Donald Trump nominates a braindead misogynistic news anchor, Pete Hegseth, as Secretary of Defense despite having no organization-running experience, nearly every Republican votes to confirm him.

I think about it when I consider how Republicans have long defined themselves as the party that supports veterans; today, as Trump and Elon Musk—via his mathematically illiterate Department of Governmental Efficiency—fire more veterans than any administration in history and gut their benefits, countless elected Republicans sit by in silence.

And so on, and so on.

When you see this phenomenon week after week, it starts to feel unutterably strange, as if up is slowly becoming down, as if Philip K. Dick’s reality-altering Ubik is transmogrifying the past. They are still the politicians I know, yes, yet they also are not.

During Trump’s first term, some elected Republicans stood against him; now, the idea of opposing Trump is virtually unthinkable.

People and values, of course, change. Vance claimed in 2021 that he had simply been “wrong about” Trump when he called him a “moral disaster” just four years earlier. It would be naïve to assume that some of this isn’t just political and personal evolution, or the unblinking hypocrisy that the MAGA movement’s adherents so frequently demonstrate, like MAGA pundits arguing that liberals wish to censor speech they do not like while celebrating conservative school districts banning books containing speech they do not like, or endorsing Trump banning scientific research vaguely connected to the nebulous notion of “DEI” and banning words in federal documents they do not like, like “transgender.”

But this isn’t just that. It feels larger, more leviathan, more legion. It feels like a massive fear response, a numbness, the numbness of a wild animal that senses its potential death, a freezing-in-place that has hit them all at once out of their all-consuming fear of retribution from Trump and Elon Musk if they deviate from Trump and Musk’s positions.

During Trump’s first term, some elected Republicans stood against him; now, the idea of opposing Trump is virtually unthinkable, for it is obvious that he will publicly attack you, fund primaries against you, or even, perhaps, pressure you into stepping down. Consequently, anything he says goes—including things they almost certainly would have condemned if any other president had done them.

If Biden had created a Department of Governmental Efficiency run by an unelected billionaire, hired young inexperienced staffers via social media (at least one of whom was virulently racist), and then fired other governmental employees en masse and dismantled entire departments in the name of fiscal responsibility while presenting financial figures that quite literally did not add up, well, Republicans would almost certainly have voted to impeach him within days; the same Republicans sit by while this very thing happens under Trump, not simply out of hypocrisy, but out of the fact that they have lost all motivation to speak up, have accepted their positions as members of a huddled hive-minded horde that does little more than sit by while a country begins to die.

The house is indeed taken over, congressional and metaphorical alike, and it is difficult to know what to do, dealing, as we seem to be, with the banality of evil.

It’s that sitting by, really, that gets to me. Unscrupulous politicians have always ridden political winds, becoming whoever they think they need to be at any moment rather than clinging to bedrock principles, and this is certainly true here, their fealty to and fear of Trump causing them to, with few exceptions, do whatever their Great Leader desires. Yet they also simply feel different, feel soulless, vacuumed out, empty of life as the moon. Their numbness is palpable, as if they, like the pod people, have been bleached of all motivation, bleached of all emotional connection to any real world around them, bleached of any sense that their very plans are bleaching the world of its life in so many ways like those alien parasites.

There is something existentially terrifying about this numbness when so much of the world, you see, is at stake, from our climate to the survival of endangered species to our ability to get funding for scientific studies to my very legal existence as a transgender person.

I never expect Republicans to help me in these domains, yet I expect them to fight, to fill the world with a childish sound and fury. I hear a sort of stifled silence instead, a sense that stories Trump dislikes will simply be revised to his liking, a sense that nothing matters if it does not matter to the Dear Leader, a sense of self-annihilation akin to the parasites’ awareness of their own post-assimilation mortality.

The house is indeed taken over, congressional and metaphorical alike, and it is difficult to know what to do, dealing, as we seem to be, with the banality of evil, with some rough beast slouching towards us that our leaders let through with the empty smiles of Eliot’s hollow men, welcoming, without emotion, a world that does not end even with bang or whimper, but simply, sadly fades away.

*

Near the end of The Body Snatchers, Miles and Becky, two of our as-yet-unassimilated protagonists, flee their California county, realizing it has been totally taken over, like Cortázar’s house. They travel through forest and fields towards a highway, until they stumble upon a farmhouse filled with the aliens’ seed pods, waiting to be transported to some other county. The narrator lights them on fire. He knows it’s too little, too late. But there is something in the act of fiery defiance, something strangely beautiful in seeing those pods whitely incandesce in the night.

We need the diversity that interrupts the norm, the stellar bloom that interrupts the void.

To Miles and Becky’s surprise, they then see pods rising into the air as far as they can see. They rise, then dissolve. The body-snatchers, Miles realizes, are leaving an inhospitable planet. Small as their act of resistance felt, it must have been one of many across the state, each perhaps assuming it would be too little, too late—and yet, collectively, their resistance does matter, does win the day.

I used the term evil above, but Finney’s aliens are not evil, per se. Moral judgments have no bearing on them, for they are simply another species trying, briefly, to survive, as we all are, a cosmic nature red in tooth and claw. I cannot fault the flux of the cosmos for being what it is. But it is quite a thing, all the same, to assimilate and, by your brief lifespans, assassinate an entire planet, and it is difficult, for obvious reasons, not to root for our planet’s survival.

If Cortázar’s unsettling story portrays some eldritch encroachment we can do nothing but briefly stave off, Finney’s novel, for all its philosophical dread about the cosmic banality of such invasions, is more optimistic, arguing for the power of little acts of defiance. Sure, it may feel like a pat narrative solution to let the humans escape, and it sort of is, one, perhaps, of many craft issues—undeveloped characters, sexism—in the novel.

But in a cultural moment when elected Republicans are acting less like autonomous humans than body-snatched husks and all too many Democrats seem paralyzed by their uncertainty about how to respond to MAGA in the wake of their 2024 loss, I need some defiance, some life. I need that reminder of the power of doing, of the power of flame to alchemize pod into flickering light, to change the trajectory of an invasion.

I need the sense that liberals will be the humans in this story if the Republicans refuse to be. I need the sense that we will not stand by while a country’s foundational institutions are dismantled by a moronic mafioso fascist and his pod-people sycophants who soullessly smile and shift their positions to reflect that fascist’s latest whimsies.

I need to know which story we are in.

We can choose, you see, between Cortázar’s and Finney’s outcomes: to get out while we can, to at least survive if our home is conquered, to escape if escape is possible; or to try, small as our efforts seem, to not go gently into this long night of a country, to set the night sky softly ablaze with a message.

Both are valid; considering that Trump is now suppressing protest itself, rounding up legal immigrants for speech he does not like, and trying to remove trans people like me from past, present, and future alike, I understand the desire to flee, understand, even, I am sad to say, the numbness response of those Republicans.

But I also want that message incandescent in the night. I want to be ready to protest, as should be our right, in a country increasingly intent on illegalizing that very right, a country slowly transforming, under MAGA, into some parody of the 1950s, only more dictatorial, and, as a consequence, more banal, more falsely and forcibly homogenous. No. We need the diversity that interrupts the norm, the stellar bloom that interrupts the void.

Let us fill this long night, then, with some new stars, no matter how small and brief their glows may seem. It will matter. We may not, after all, have many more chances before our own numbness sets in.