Is Donald Trump A Cuckoo?

by Ralph Benko, Contributing Author: Right now the Republican Party appears as being subjected to what ornithologists call “brood parasitism.” More colloquially: behold the spectacle of one bird -- Donald Trump, think cuckoo -- laying eggs in the nests of other species, thereby sticking others – think magpies or crows – with the work of feeding and raising their progeny.

Cuckoos routinely carry out a kind of, so to speak, Ransom of Red Chief reverse-kidnapping. Cuckoo parents stick others with their child-rearing duties. It is an extraordinary and amazing spectacle, one studied by fascinated scientists for centuries. The lessons derived therefrom may give us important clues in decoding President Trump. Follow along.

Donald Trump resembles the cuckoo in its ornithological, rather than sanity-pejorative, sense. Trump presents as "crazy like a fox.” Or "cuckoo like a cuckoo."

You progressive Homo Sapiens (and us conservative Neanderthals) may be more than animals. Yet there is much to learn from our kin. The New Oxford American Dictionary secondarily defines ethology as "the study of human behavior and social organization from a biological perspective."

As reprinted at Scientific American from The Conversation:
If you come across a young cuckoo this summer, you’ll be witness to one of the most bizarre sights in nature. Cuckoo chicks are interlopers in the nests of other species, and can be seen being frantically fed by their unwitting foster parent, despite often being clearly many times larger than their hosts. It makes you wonder: why on earth does this bird expend so much energy raising such clearly unrelated offspring? The clue comes from thinking about this puzzle in terms of costs and benefits.

Raising a cuckoo chick often occurs at the expense of host chicks. …

But parasitism may not always be costly. Great spotted cuckoos are also parasitical on carrion crows, but as crow chicks are much larger than cuckoos they are never out-competed and crow parents always manage to raise a few young of their own. For magpies, parasitism by cuckoos is costly, for crows it is less so.

So while magpies drive cuckoos away from their nest, or recognise foreign eggs and remove them, crows do not. But surely, even when costs are low, there is an evolutionary advantage to avoiding raising someone else’s chick.

In the late 18th century the German ornithologist Johann Bechstein presented a different idea. Instead of hosts being taken advantage of, he proposed that they were “beside themselves for joy” at the opportunity to raise a cuckoo chick. It was “an honour” to care for it. Modern biologists pooh-pooh this notion, because self-interest, not generosity, is the currency of evolution by natural selection. However, the results of a 16-year study published in the journal Science suggests he might have been on to something.

By looking at the relationship between these species differently, the study, led by Daniela Canestrari, reveals that crows do not defend themselves because they actually benefit from having a cuckoo in the nest. …

When disturbed, great spotted cuckoo chicks emit copious amounts of a sticky, smelly substance. The authors tested the novel hypothesis that this stinky substance deters predators from the nest.We seem to have before our very eyes a ready-made fable worthy of Aesop. It is one about President Trump, the Grand Old Party and Washington.

Donald Trump is not of Washington and not natively a Republican. He has switched his party affiliation at least five times since the late 1980s. Donald Trump is the cat who walks by himself and all places are alike to him.

At the moment, Trump has -- with some striking successes -- laid his political eggs in the Republican nest.

The #NeverTrump conservatives are the magpies. The #AmericanGreatness/#DaddyWillSaveUs/#MAGAs are the crows, the larger, hardier birds more likely than the magpies to prosper by raising the cuckoo’s progeny.

And, of course, the predators – progressives and Democrats -- are indeed madly repelled by the copious amounts of Trump's “sticky, smelly” excretions. Trump's excretions, especially his tweets, are a predator-repelling feature. Not a bug.

The "cuckoo’s nest" metaphor is not unknown to our culture. That said, it is more an artifact of the counterculture to which I belonged in my delightfully misspent Hippie youth.

The late, great Ken Kesey, the protagonist of Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, wrote two great countercultural novels. (And sired some amazing progeny: shoutout to his son Zane Kesey.)

Per Wikipedia, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest:
Set in an Oregon psychiatric hospital, the narrative serves as a study of the institutional processes and the human mind as well as a critique of behaviorism and a celebration of humanistic principles. It was adapted into the Broadway play One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Dale Wasserman in 1963. Bo Goldman adapted the novel into a 1975 film directed by Miloš Forman, which won five Academy Awards.

… [The] tale focuses mainly on the antics of the rebellious Randle Patrick McMurphy, who faked insanity to serve his sentence for battery and gambling in the hospital rather than at a prison work farm. The head administrative nurse, Nurse Ratched, rules the ward with absolute authority and little medical oversight. …

McMurphy constantly antagonizes Nurse Ratched and upsets the routines of the ward, leading to endless power struggles between the inmate and the nurse. He runs a card table, captains the ward's basketball team, comments on Nurse Ratched's figure …

One night, after bribing the night orderly, McMurphy smuggles two prostitute girlfriends with liquor onto the ward and breaks into the pharmacy for codeine cough syrup, and later unnamed psychiatric medications. McMurphy persuades one of the women to seduce Billy Bibbit, a timid, boyish patient with a terrible stutter and little experience with women, so he can lose his virginity. Although McMurphy plans to escape before the morning shift starts, he and the other patients instead fall asleep without cleaning up the mess of the group’s antics, and the morning staff discovers the ward in complete disarray.Any imagined likeness between Inmate McMurphy and President Trump is, of course, purely coincidental. And yet...

The title of ne Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is derived, again per Wikipedia, from a nursery rhyme:
Vintery, mintery, cutery, corn,
Apple seed and apple thorn,
Wire, briar, limber lock
Three geese in a flock
One flew East
One flew West
And one flew over the cuckoo's nest.To reiterate: Trump, in his partisan history -- and his doctrinal, let's charitably say, flexibility -- is not reliably a Republican. This does not cast aspersions on his sanity. Perhaps it raises questions about the sanity, if any remains, of me and my fellow Republicans.

If you observe closely through an ornithological lens you just might see Donald Trump turning Washington into a cuckoo’s nest.

Harrowing, perhaps. Yet, really, who can cheer the alternative regime of Nurse Ratched?

And this we can say with confidence:
Wire, briar, limber lock
Three geese in a flock

One flew East
One flew West

And one flew over the cuckoo's nest.----------------------
Ralph Benko is an advisor to nonprofit and advocacy organizations, is a member of the Conservative Action Project, a contributor to the ARRA News Service. Founder of The Prosperity Caucus, he was a member of the Jack Kemp supply-side team, served in an unrelated area as a deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House. The article which first appeared in Forbes.

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