The reality is that his party is falling apart week by week, not because he is telling some untellable truth, but because so many of them are caught lying.
Many people felt that, with his passing, our world would come apart at the seams and expose us to untellable woes.
Both are broken loners isolated by unshared agendas and untellable secrets.
The well-known dedication of J. D. Salinger's "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction" reads: "If there is an amateur reader still left in the world — or anybody who just reads and runs — I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children".
The future is untellable: futurology is an unintentionally comic pseudo-science, hardly more reliable than haruspication of entrails or counting magpies, and economists nearly always get it wrong: Chancellors passim; Keynes's confident blindness to investment in real estate.
Coming to Gladiator as I did five years too late, I felt like Joaquin Phoenix's Commodus, all perfumed and fresh and maquillé, galloping up to his father Marcus Aurelius moments after the great greasy blackened brutes of Germania's army have been routed by the Romans at untellable expense of life and limb.
It works creatively because it tries to tell something that has long been considered untellable.
It is a film about the essential strangeness of something society insists is the benchmark of normality: the family, a walled city state with its own autocratic rule and untellable secrets.
So the prospect of America's hitherto untravelled president going abroad, at taxpayers' expense, on an adventure of untold, untellable cost, comes at a singularly bad moment for the individual states - and especially for Washington, whose New Economy tax-base has been steadily shrivelling over the last two years.
There are horrors so heavy that they seem untellable.
And it is, at its core, something untellable and irreducible.
