When I was a small child, I sometimes visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art to see the permanent works there as well as exhibitions on temporary display. Today, of course, for the millions who have never been to that facility, it is probably most famous for its place in the Rocky legend, most especially for the steps leading up to the museum when Rocky triumphally raced up them in training.

But decades before Sylvester Stallone even began to type his first script, I was already captured by a painting hanging in that museum, painted by the great Flemish artist, Peter Paul Rubens (with the help of Frans Snyders). It pictured Prometheus, condemned by the gods to be chained to a mountain while an eagle picked at his liver — forever. Prometheus was being punished for having had the temerity to pass along the secrets of fire (and thus the elements of civilisation and technology) to humankind, wisdom heretofore hoarded by the gods.

I could always stand in front of that painting, fascinated by the image — as well as the story behind it. Eventually, I became acquainted with the deeper meanings of Prometheus and his sacrifice on behalf of humanity.

Some years ago, economic historian David Landes had written his award-winning book, Prometheus Unbound, drawing on that image to describe the technological explosion of the Industrial Revolution of Western Europe and Great Britain. It is a potent image.

More recently, novelist Philip Roth had written a novel, Zuckerman Unbound, a work that paralleled his own real-life experiences (with Portnoy’s Complaint) in liberating his fiction from its near-Jamesian complexity as he moved on to unabashedly erotic adventures instead. That “unbound” metaphor can get a real workout. And now we have a “Donald Trump Unbound”. And it seems that so far at least, there is no tormenting eagle working away at its divinely assigned task.

Instead, in the first week of February, Donald Trump seems to have had a particularly good run, at least from his perspective. It was almost as if Prometheus had managed to break free of his chains, catch that eagle, and then pluck the tail and flight feathers from the very bird that had, heretofore, been torturing him.

On Monday, 3 February, the Democrats demonstrated an extraordinary level of public disarray in the Iowa caucus voting. The results presented the surprise of Democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders and the young, former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, in a virtual tie, while all the rest of the contenders, even including former Vice President Joe Biden, languished well behind the two leaders. But it was the inability of the Iowa Democratic Party to produce complete results for days afterwards that became the story. That came with the inevitable Trumpian tweets that denigrated the Democrats’ visible ineptitude.

Then, the next day, the president delivered his third “State of the Union” speech, before Congress and the world, visibly snubbing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (and being insulted in return by her tearing up her copy of the speech). Showboating his way through the speech with reality television riffs like giving the nation’s Medal of Freedom to the conspiracy theory-loving, race-baiting broadcaster, Rush Limbaugh, in the middle of the speech, the president went on to deliver one baseless claim after another, before finally wrapping up his rant.

Republican congressional supporters chanted “four more years”, almost as if alien body snatchers had landed on Capitol Hill, forcing those politicians to follow the robotic instructions beamed to them from Alpha Centauri.

Then, on Wednesday, the Senate finally took up the final business of the president’s impeachment trial, following weeks of investigations and then the debate in the Senate over the president’s culpability. Inevitably, save for a ringing demonstration by Utah Senator Mitt Romney of his choosing principle over mindless party loyalty (echoing his religious faith as well as, implicitly, the injunction articulated by Edmund Burke back at the end of the 18th century over the requirement of legislators to favour principle and conscience over blind, partisan loyalty), Republican senators all voted to acquit the president of the two charges that had been lodged against him.

The next day, in two separate speaking events, the annual congressional prayer breakfast and then at a celebratory gathering in the White House, Trump struck back. No biblical-style “vengeance is the Lord’s” for Trump.

Excoriating all of his opponents, Trump roared and swore at them all, insisting they were faux-religious frauds, liars, conniving scum, and anything else he could conjure up from some dark place in what passes for his soul. Personally, I can say I never heard a sitting president call anything his opponents said or did “bullshit”. But this one loves to do so.

But he was still not finished. In true authoritarian style, he began the purge of unreliable elements. Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Vindman (and his brother) were virtually frogmarched from the White House and their posts in the National Security Council staff. They and Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland all got the chop for testifying truthfully under oath, pursuant to congressional subpoenas — rather than singing the unadulterated Trumpian tune. Still, others are reportedly at risk for their failure to sing The Trumpian tune enthusiastically enough.

Yes, the president deserves the right to appoint staffers who are loyal, but the humiliating way this has been done was surely designed to serve as a warning for anybody else contemplating the slightest demurral of what the president seems to want. Cross that line and you are dead, the message says.

Now, against this background of Trump’s successes, the Democrats are facing an increasingly bitter intra-party struggle to gain pride of place for their presidential nomination. Following the results from their problematic Iowa caucus, Democrats are roughly divided along their traditional fissure: moderate traditional democrats on the one hand and their radical wing on the other.

In some ways, this current struggle even evokes the way prairie economic radicals, led by the then-36-year-old “boy orator” William Jennings Bryan, a congressman from Nebraska, took over the party with his nomination in 1896. The radicals had fought on behalf of small-scale farmers and a nascent labour movement, in opposition to the more comfortable, familiar party leadership.

In the peroration of his speech at the nominating convention that secured his nomination, Bryan had said:

“You shall not press down on the brow of labour this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold”.

The speech was a plea to end the strict adherence to a currency only backed by gold, rather than the more available silver — thus in favour of a kind of a pro-inflationary economic policy that would devalue the debts held by farmers and other debtors.

Of course, there never was a President Bryan, that year or later. (An irony of that 1896 election was that Bryan’s shellacking by Republican William McKinley eventually led to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt when McKinley was assassinated in 1901. Roosevelt’s presidency ushered in the Progressive Era, including many of the government reforms pushed by the more radical Democrats.)

The Democratic contest in 2020 also pits a very young candidate — Pete Buttigieg — who is attempting to seize the nomination, but as a moderate leader for all Americans, in opposition to an avowedly more radical candidate in the person of Bernie Sanders — a man who claims an agenda of American-style radical economic transformation, and who is, just by the way, a man twice Buttigieg’s age.

Behind these two men are, alternately, moderate-realists, including Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, plus entrepreneurs like Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer on the one hand and Elizabeth Warren on the other.

But hovering behind all the campaigning so far is the singular figure of Michael Bloomberg, the multibillionaire former mayor of New York City. While his name is not on the ballot in New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, he is putting his eggs in the major basket of the Super-Tuesday primaries on 3 March, and then on to the rest of the primaries in March.

As The Economist noted in its current issue, “… As the Iowa circus flew into the New Hampshire morning, none [of the candidates] with more than a dozen or so delegates, Mike Bloomberg was on a rather longer flight from California, which has 415 delegates up for grabs on Super Tuesday, to Michigan, where the primary a week later will decide the loyalties of a further 125. All told, the polls on March 3rd and 10th will provide 43% of the pledged delegates, more than 10 times as many as those that can be won in all the primaries and caucuses of February. Taking this into account, Mr Bloomberg, a media entrepreneur and former (Republican) mayor of New York, is building his campaign for the Democratic nomination on the idea that running in the early states is not necessary if you are really rich.

“This makes him, for now, literally unbeatable — how can you beat someone who isn’t there?…” even if his gamble remains a long shot.

Looking ahead, then, a key question for Democrats — besides concerns about age, experience, or the abstruse provisions of their respective proposals on taxation — is this internal party debate about whether their ultimate candidate will be espousing radical changes in society and the economy or will be preferring a programme of civic calm and reforms around the edges — and a return to a more normal time for American life, complete with civility and serenity.

Any bets on who cherry-picks the first images from William Jennings Bryan’s campaign (or elements of Theodore Roosevelt’s reformist administration for that matter) as a texture for their campaign, now that the race is truly on? DM