In his short satirical tale “Zadig,” Voltaire describes the fictitious great lord Irax as “not bad at bottom but … corrupted by vanity and voluptuousness [who] breathed in nothing but false glory and false pleasures.” Zadig, the prime minister of the kingdom, undertakes to rectify the bad behavior. He does this with the cooperation of a vast entourage of the court's sycophants and via such an uninterrupted litany of fulsome praise for Irax, “expressly for all the good qualities he lacked,” that after five days, Irax, exhausted and chastened, begged for it to stop.
Would this strategy work with Trump?
