In “The Caine Mutiny,” our first hint that Queeg is unbalanced comes when he tries to cover up a serious mistake — running over a towline in a gunnery drill. Later, when the Caine has to participate in an invasion of a Pacific island, Queeg cuts and runs and then demands his officers support his decision. They choose instead to keep silent.

We have many such similarities with Trump. Maybe the most psychologically egregious occurred right after the inauguration when he sent out Sean Spicer to lie about the size of the crowd. This was seemingly a small matter, but the inability to distinguish between the trivial and the consequential is, we now know, a Trump character malfunction.

In Queeg’s case, the telling incident has to do with some missing strawberries. The captain orders an investigation and has the ship laboriously searched for a nonexistent duplicate refrigerator key. “They laughed at me and made jokes, but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, with geometric logic, that a duplicate key to the ward room icebox did exist,” Queeg says when he takes the stand at the court-martial of his mutinous officers.

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