When Trump careened onto the political stage seemingly out of nowhere in 2015, rode down that escalator in typical theatrical Trump fashion, smashed the GOP establishment in the mouth in the primaries, dominated, and went on in the general to upset arguably the cringest D.C. swamp creature of all time — which is no small distinction — in a historic political upset of David vs. Goliath proportions, it was all golden.
Feminists cried. Cable news anchors melted down. New York Democrat Party apparachiks held their mouths. It was truly, truly a savory moment in American political history. Sometimes I get nostalgic and go back to watch tasty montages of that fateful night on YouTube.
When, on Nov. 9, 2016, as night turned to day and the hangover of the last night’s carnage was shone in the sober morning light, and I took the occasion to process what had just transpired, I instinctively knew then that nothing in American politics would ever be the same again. A new era had dawned, ushered in by the orange man.
But, for all the catharsis, Trump wasn’t any hero of mine then, and he’s not now.
What he was, to my eye, was pure ego with an unparalleled marketing flair — impossible to ignore and confounding to his opponents. Normal politicians, although predominantly psychopathic and dead inside, are nonetheless trained to emote human feelings as part of their occupational duties. They are conditioned to shame their opponents and to respond rhetorically defensively to shaming in kind. Trump received no such training because he was never the same breed as the professional-managerial class of the Gavin Newsom or Lindsey Graham variety.
When his opponents ran the shame game on him — like when Hillary brought up his rape accuser — Trump had the ace of spades and he played his hand masterfully. He never played defense once; instead, he invited Bill’s accusers to sit front-row at their debate.
It was pure domination. He singlehandedly upended social convention like a bull in a china shop.
But he’s not a hero. His inflated ego and stubbornness make for a double-edged sword. He’s not saving anything or anyone but himself, and he has no loyalty. There is no ideal, just materialism and egotism. He’s an adult child with severe untreated trauma, probably because his father made him that way. To hear insiders tell the story, his brother got bullied by their father, didn’t develop the scaly exterior that Donald did, and killed himself with alcohol. Donald proved tougher, adapting to his circumstances, or at least that’s my armchair psychology take.
In Tombstone, one of the most excellent character-heavy films of all time, Wyatt Earp asks Doc Holliday on his deathbed what makes a man like Ringo, the villain and Earp’s rival, the way he is.
“A man like Ringo has got a great big hole, right in the middle of him. He can never kill enough, or steal enough, or inflict enough pain to ever fill it,” Holliday responds.
Ringo tried to fill that hole with killing, but it was never enough. Trump tried with attention and social climbing for ever-greater status, but it was also never enough to satisfy.
Call it liberal propaganda, whatever. I call it a plausible and repeatedly-documented pattern of behavior to satisfy psychological shortcomings. Again, that’s my psychological read. You can conclude whatever you want with the evidence you have.
Donald Trump is a man of low moral character, as evidenced in numerous ways. When Trump isn’t championing himself as an outsider standing up the political machine on behalf of legacy Americans, he’s reportedly stiffing them on construction contracts. At least 60 plaintiffs have filed lawsuits over the years to that effect. Perhaps 60 lawsuits is a liberal conspiracy, but the more plausible explanation is that he doesn’t pay hardworking Americans what he owes them for their honest work.
Numerous reports have indicated he cheats at golf, probably to tend to his fragile sense of self-worth. I don’t care that he cheats at golf, but it speaks to a desperate need for validation.
Trump does not take constructive criticism well, or actually at all.
The man is constitutionally incapable of leadership because he does not have a personality conducive to leadership. There was no consistent vision or strategy in the execution of his presidency because the entire enterprise was an exercise in ego-appeasement. Despite campaign rhetoric, when the rubber hit the road, his time in the executive branch was not about starting a true grassroots long-term movement with teeth. Beyond that, Trump displays an obvious lack of interest in learning how the U.S. government actually functions, which is an admittedly complicated phenomenon that requires a serious commitment.
Tucker Carlson and other influential thinkers on the right have alluded to Trump’s leadership deficiency many times but seldom explicitly lay it out, likely because they fear backlash from their audiences. “I don’t think he’s capable. I don’t think he’s capable of sustained focus. I don’t think he understands the system,” Carlson once said in a rare explicit public criticism of Trump.
Stylistically, and admittedly more shallowly, while Trump is hilarious at times in his bombast, he lacks a certain sense of taste that betrays his pampered Manhattan upbringing. I can’t trust a man who eats his steak well done with ketchup as Trump does. “It hurts me. I think that’s a window into his soul. Anyone who’s that indifferent to food is problematic for me,” as the departed Anthony Bourdain put it. Poetry doesn’t live in his soul. A man must know his limitations.
Trump’s fragile ego prevents him from ever assuming responsibility for any of his failures while simultaneously claiming credit for every political win, even when it wasn’t his doing.
If they win, I should get all the credit, if they lose, I shouldn’t get blamed, Trump says. He threw his own wife under the bus after the much-hyped midterm red wave fizzled, blaming her poor advice after he endorsed the loser Dr. Oz in Pennsylvania, who couldn’t manage to defeat an obvious stroke victim who literally couldn’t talk.
What kind of a man does such a thing? And it’s not a one-off event; this is exactly the kind of blame-shifting behavior that Trump has engaged in for the past several years. His fragile ego, again, is incapable of accepting blame for literally the slightest failing.
For these reasons and so many more, I can’t honestly call Trump a leader or a hero, as much as I might like to on account of who his enemies are because they are also mine.
—————–
I like my leaders, not to mention heroes, cut from a more genuine, brave, sincere cloth. Very few politicians make the cut — Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Marcus Aurelius, Thomas Paine. Not Trump.
So far, I’ve merely spoken to Trump’s character, rather than what’s most important — his policy during his time in office. A president doesn’t need to be a moral paragon to do good work, and I’m not a moralist in terms of his personal behavior.
The most substantial criticism of Trump, which is undeniable, is that he simply did not deliver on his main pledge to #draintheswamp, which is what got him elected as he rode the wave of populist anger.
Nothing much changed in how permanent Washington functions in Trump’s four years in office. He governed largely the same way as one would expect any RINO to govern. Of course, not all of it was his fault as an executive; his impotence was compounded by the fact that he surrounded himself with the worst kind of vermin like his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and famed chickenhawk John Bolton against the counsel of other, more insurgent members of his inner circle like Steve Bannon before he got pushed out. The neocons won the internal White House power struggle, to put it succinctly. And Trump either lacked the interest or the fortitude to stop it.
The final nail in the coffin for anyone in favor of human decency is Trump’s stubborn refusal to admit that, at best, he was duped into running Operation Warp Speed. At worst, he was indifferent to the inherent dangers of rushing unproven mRNA gene therapies to the market which, we know now, didn’t even work as promised.
“You know what? I believe totally in your freedoms. You got to do what you have to do, but I recommend: Take the vaccines. I did it – it’s good.”
—Donald Trump
That was August 2021.
This level of negligence if not outright malice is unforgivable. Trump here demonstrates extremely poor judgment and/or callous indifference to human suffering.
————————
I recognize that there is some portion of the right that will never abandon Trump because of loyalty, stubbornness, or to own the libs, which is fine.
This is, I swear to God, the last treatise I’ll ever write on Trump. Hopefully, he’ll fade gracefully into popular mythology and concede the future to something new on the right other than stale 2016-era Trumpism. So far, his 2024 bid looks like a low-energy reboot of the 2016 one.
He’s drawing from the same well, but it’s dry. Anyone who watched his sad Mar-a-Lago announcement speech can clearly see that he’s lost the magic.
Time will tell, but I can’t see that Trump will ever return to the pinnacle of power that he once occupied in the mid-to-late-2010s. But if things don’t go his way in the upcoming primary, he could definitely hobble the GOP out of spite, were he so inclined.
Where is the Trump train headed next? He spent the last two years, in lieu of advancing any true vision, complaining about having lost the election because getting expelled from the White House bruised his fragile ego, and he’ll likely spend the next two and beyond doing the same thing.
Unfortunately, it seems there will be no peaceful transfer of power within the GOP; Trump would rather destroy the populist movement he helped create than pass the torch.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member