Post #156: To Trump or Not To Trump

4 Nov. 2024

     It is not altogether a good thing when an election feels like a moment of truth. It does show, on the positive side, that people feel they have a real choice; but it also suggests, more negatively, that the stakes have risen so far that what is on the line is not only two candidates and political directions, but two ways of life. And that is very dangerous.

     Granted, the distinction between friends and enemies is implicit, according to Carl Schmitt, in any political distinction proper; but liberal-democratic politics is committed, as Schmitt himself pointed out and criticized, to defusing the distinction and turning political enemies into mere debating or sparring partners. What the U.S. will face tomorrow, with the world watching, is no mere end to a long, perhaps overlong debate, however: it is a showdown with a truly uncertain outcome. Let us hope that we may, despite everything, put our trust in the very nature of elections in a mature democracy, which is to limit the fighting to the ballot box and keep it from spilling out into the street. Therein, and not in the fancy window-dressing, lies the core value of democratic politics.

     I believe we can depend on Ms. Harris to concede if the count goes against her; that should go without saying, and the fact that it does not, for Mr. Trump, is a chief reason why I could not bring myself to vote for him (not that anyone is expecting me to). I have called his unwillingness to acknowledge defeat in 2020, and his corresponding willingness to play with the fires of sedition instead, an act of utter political irresponsibility akin to arson or well-poisoning, and I stand by that assessment (#122). I can think of few things more discreditable to a democratic politician, and as I will elaborate below, I believe it to be deeply rooted in Mr. Trump’s personality, which does not make room for graceful defeat, or any defeat at all. It is unthinkable to him, hard as that may be for a normally constituted person to wrap his head around.

     I do believe that his sidekick J.D. Vance is enough of a sportsman and political scientist to understand very well how unconscionable it is to undermine the rules of the democratic game for reasons of personal aggrandizement; but he also knows that it is not possible to disagree with his boss on any significant point and keep your job. Hence his tortured equivocations when he was asked three times in a New York Times interview recently whether or not Mr. Trump had lost the election in 2020—the only low point in the interview, since the interviewer must have known perfectly well that Mr. Vance could not possibly give a more forthright answer.

     The combination of being unwilling to concede elections and equally unwilling to tolerate disagreement in one’s inner circle, while being quite ready to monkey around with extra-constitutional means, and this not even with forethought, but spontaneously, so to speak, looks to me more at home in a tin-pot autocracy, some faraway banana republic, than the United States of America. It is on these grounds that I could never endorse Mr. Trump even at a distance, and with nobody taking note, no matter how sick I may be of the status quo, and notwithstanding even the fact that I can see—like Andrew Sullivan, who finds himself in a similar position*—how some good things might well come out of a second Trump term. The man is beyond the pale, so far as my fundamental political and character judgments go, and nothing I have tried, in an attempt to make myself see him in a more favorable light, has been able to change my deep, irreconcilable, and I think principled aversion, for what it is worth.

     I have mentioned before that I find listening to Mr. Trump unbearable because of how he cannot get through two sentences straight, as I put it, without doing grave violence to some key principle of what I would consider clear and responsible thinking, or any kind of mental hygiene at all (#148). I do not take him to be a liar, but a bullshitter, which, for reasons I explained in #147, I would consider even more dangerous. All this I have now laid out at more than sufficient length, especially since it has never given me the least pleasure to do so, only acute discomfort and anguish. But before you switch off, let me, the day before the shit may hit the fan for the second time, do something perhaps unexpected and offer a possible defense of President Trump II, based not on his qualities as a human being, but on the very rottenness I see.

     As a quick and tedious prelude, let me also dismiss all the usual leftist charges around the tired Procrustean bed of where someone supposedly stands on race, sex, and sexual orientation. This is so tedious an exercise that pushing back against it, almost at any cost, would itself be a powerful argument for voting Trump despite everything. So let’s get it over with quickly. I take Mr. Trump to be a deeply prejudiced man, but not in this sense. I see no evidence that race matters much to him. He is by no means a woman-hater, but a confirmed lady’s man. And he is no gay-basher either, as even Andrew Sullivan concedes, despite his distaste for the guy. These kinds of charges are not only tiresome, they just don’t fit here at all; out with them.

     On the other perennial obsession of the left (mirrored on the right with equal or even greater craziness), the abortion question, Mr. Trump is also not at all what he has perhaps appeared to be of late. Abortion is a convenient wedge issue for him, nothing more; if he could do better by staking out more liberal ground, he would do so without scruples. I would be willing to bet, even if I know nothing about it, that he was a ready party to abortions in the past, I mean those of women he got pregnant, but even if that were not the case, I don’t believe a word of Mr. Trump’s preaching on this issue. A practiced, principled abortion warrior would not stoop so low as to pretend that outright infanticide is not only condoned but widely practiced on the other side, as Mr. Trump did in his debate with Ms. Harris. This kind of madness is the result of his fundamental untruthfulness, his bullshitting mind, to which anything looks true and genuine if he only finds it useful in the moment. This has nothing to do with a real moral stance, of any kind, and his declared position, to leave the mess to the states to sort out, is perfectly credible.

     Mr. Trump’s rampant prejudices, I am convinced, run in a completely different direction. He does not give a crap whether you are black or white or green or pink, so long as you like, admire, and cheer him. Bend the knee and sing his praises, and he will embrace you, even commend and celebrate you in the most fulsome manner, especially if you also happen to be visibly attractive and successful, which is the second axis of his judgments. And that is already pretty much it: if you are with him and a success, you are wonderful, great, exceptional, and amazing. (This is why his rallies work so well: he is among his cheerleaders, and in a crowd of admirers he is at his happiest and best.) But if you are critical or you happen to disagree with him on anything at all, you are immediately demoted to scum, and your achievements or arguments count for zilch. His scheme of truth operates along analogous lines: whatever makes him right is true, whatever would make him wrong cannot possibly be. And that’s it! The rest is just boring details to him, and he has no patience with them at all.

     Now, it remains an important consideration that I don’t know the man up close, as I have said several times before, and that everything I am saying is based on seeing him on camera and hearing him talk in public. Those who would dismiss my diagnosis as nonsense therefore have a very easy way to shut me up. All they need to do is to show me a case or two where Mr. Trump had something good to say about someone who recently disagreed with him on a non-trivial issue, and a single instance when he has openly admitted to being wrong on anything of importance. I would be relieved to see it, but I have not been able to find anything of the sort.

     Given the truly depressing impression I have formed of Mr. Trump (I do so wish that I am wrong!), you may think that there could not possibly be anything more to say. Case closed: never-Trumper to the bones, a sufferer from anti-Trump derangement. I can see why you would think so, but hold on for just another minute, because I do have something else to add that is not insignificant. Namely that it is one of the most difficult and disturbing features of politics that good does not always come from good, and bad not always from bad, but that the wires not only sometimes can, but very often do get crossed. (I quote the famous passage to this effect from Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation” early on in #122.)

     This is not a political theory class, you may say, so what are you getting at? What I am saying, admitting really, is the strange possibility that the very features of Mr. Trump’s personality that strike me as so unsatisfactory, even potentially disastrous in a public figure, could also turn out to be advantageous in certain unexpected ways. I am not even thinking of his charisma here (it doesn’t work on me at all), of the famous “ability to connect” that in fact connects him to some of the most unsavory characters in all of human history. (Unlike they, however, he has been a celebrity all his adult life, and the cult around his person is probably not quite as deforming, if only because the damage was already done a long time ago.) What I am thinking is that precisely because he is such a bad apple, he has certain advantages over his betters. It is in the very nature of trumps to upend the rules; they do not by themselves make for a good game; but they can, at times, be just what the game calls for precisely because they are so anarchic (#88).

     Let me be more specific. First of all, it is one of the great temptations of the intelligent, the well-educated, and the well-intentioned, especially when all three come together, that they are dangerously prone to thinking that they should take charge of other people’s lives, formally or informally, because they imagine that they know better than others do. They may even be right to think so, to a point, but this mentality, which is exceedingly common on the left and among academics, will lead them into all manner of fatal conceits (as Hayek put it in the title of his last book) when it comes to paternalistic and otherwise overweening and excessive government. The good tend to have a hard time leaving people alone precisely because they are good; the bad only bother when there is an angle to exploit, and they tend to be more clear-sighted than the good about what they are up to.

     I owe to Mr. Sullivan the important insight that Mr. Trump appears to be quite uninterested in controlling others—truly a remarkable trait in any political figure. This is not at all a matter of libertarian principle, or of any virtuous restraint, but simply a function of Mr. Trump’s attention span and the limits of his patience for politics. He will not govern actively for the simple reason that he finds it boring to do so; it’s too much trouble, and even if he got into it for a bit, he would tire of it quickly and soon find something else to do that strokes his ego more reliably, preferably something that involves grandstanding before an adoring crowd. Strange as it may sound, this does act as a kind of safety valve, and it leaves Mr. Trump less dangerous, at the level of the pull towards over-government, than any run-of-the-mill professor of politics, anywhere in the world.** (At the level of power it is obviously a rather different story.)

     Second, for all his bluster on the public stage, Mr. Trump really does not like war. Not only is it bad for business and excessively costly, but more importantly still, it draws attention away from him, towards the soldiery and the generals, making him look less important, and far less impressive, as a result. Remember that here we have a guy who went to a military school and did not give the least indication that he had a soldier’s bone in his body, and who has boasted that military service in Vietnam would have been no more than a waste of his precious time. It is not surprising that distinguished military men, whose commitment to the national is beyond doubt, as Mr. Trump’s is not, are among his most scathing critics, not because they are less patriotic or conservative than he, but on the contrary, because they are far more so. (The Atlantic Monthly has run a series of articles on this theme that makes for disturbing reading indeed.)

     Needless to say, Mr. Trump’s taste for meddling superficially with major conflicts that he doesn’t begin to understand, partly because he doesn’t have the kind of mind it would take, partly because he’s not interested enough, combined with the fact that he is never wrong, is potentially very dangerous. I am not saying that he will succeed in keeping the U.S. out of war, only that he is genuinely disinclined—not out of humanitarian considerations, but for temperamental reasons. Like the luckless Wilhelm II, who was misunderstood as a warmonger on account of his often bellicose rhetoric, but who actually dreaded war and shrank from it (something I explore in my academic article on 1914), Mr. Trump may still get dragged into conflict, of course, or trigger an explosion inadvertently—but if so it won’t be out of loyalty to allies, as it was in Wilhelm’s case; to this Mr. Trump is fundamentally immune. Loyalty, with him, is a one-way street.

     At the same time, third, it remains conceivable that Mr. Trump might be able to knock heads together in a way that could work, precisely because he is anything but a diplomat, and anything but a nice man, as you will find out very quickly if you cross him in the least (and he deigns to notice you). It is worth considering that being so loose a gun and so shady a character as Mr. Trump might confer real advantages in dealing with the world’s autocrats and strongmen, who are, you guessed it, so often loose guns and shady characters as well. Of course nice, well-behaved, well-educated, and well-intentioned middle-class types like Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz will do inestimably better in a meeting with EU-leaders (so long as there is no need to engage Mr. Orban), but the trouble with nice people is that they do not usually “get” thugs and autocrats.

     Mr. Putin, to pick out just the most obvious and salient example, rose from the mean streets of Leningrad, let us remember, via the KGB, to a position of near-dictatorship (or as close as a modern state allows with becoming altogether totalitarian), though confirmed in power by dubious plebiscitary exercises that don’t rise to the dignity of free and fair elections. How Ms. Harris could possibly be taken seriously by someone of this bent, the ultimate godfather, long habituated to operating in a realm beyond effective legal constraint, is a question that can only be answered with a light heart if one is very naïve indeed. Ms. Merkel, a pastor’s daughter and a physicist, was no push-over, but she had a fear of dogs that Putin knew about. So he not only kept her plane waiting at the airport for hours, but made a point, when he received her, of bringing out one of his biggest beasts to have a good sniff. Coconut jokes have their charm, but to diffuse nasty situations in a lawless setting, one needs to bring a bit more nastiness of one’s own. (I’m not volunteering.)

     Having made his mark more or less legally in the notoriously murky world of New York real estate and New Jersey gambling, Mr. Trump cannot, perhaps, be called an outright thug; but he is someone with a natural connection to thuggish types. He may not be one of them, not quite, but he knows their kind and they know his, giving him an opening, I suspect, for getting through to them in ways that a more pleasant individual might not. They in their turn respect him, we may assume, for his billions and his bravado, and probably see a likeminded fellow in him. Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz, being respectable and decent human beings, would not only have great trouble getting taken seriously, they would be altogether out of their depth amidst this international mobocracy—for the best of reasons, granted, but sheep lost among the wolves anyway.

     It is by no means, I want to stress, that I credit Mr. Trump with being the great strategist and exceptional deal-maker that he takes himself to be. Anything overly complex would put him out of his depth; but I imagine that he can probably handle, as far as they can be handled, the rotten characters on the world stage. In the EU he would flop spectacularly, as before; but that matters less, because it is not they who are likely to start the next world war (even if they did, once, write the book on how to slide into one). And as every negotiator knows, while it is not helpful to come across as completely deranged, to be fundamentally unpredictable, on the brink of erratic, can be very useful indeed, though of course it also comes with the risk of serious miscarriages, something I am not ruling out.

     Fourth, if one could only bring oneself to see the whole Trump production as a kind of political comedy, the continuation of pseudo-reality TV by other means, mostly designed for entertainment and for the personal gratification of its leading man’s vanities, and certainly not meant to be taken too seriously, then everything would be fine. Certainly a Harris-Walz administration promises to be a very boring show indeed compared to what Mr. Trump puts on offer. The only problem with this line, the parodic interpretation as it were, is that approaching the U.S. presidency, of all things, in such a spirit of levity is quite a stretch considering what an office we are dealing with here, and the scale of the stakes not just for the Americans and their constitutional order, but for everyone else on our lonely planet.

     The American people may be on the verge, for the second time, of putting their constitutional order at the mercy of a disordered mind and a rogue character, as Andrew Sullivan puts it. They must have a great deal of confidence in their safety mechanisms, or a great deal of recklessness, to do so. Sullivan calls this “nuts,” and I am inclined to agree with him. Perhaps there are extreme circumstances that could justify such a correspondingly extreme gamble; but has the woke madness, much as it disturbs me, really brought things to quite such a pass? It is said that desperate times call for desperate measures; but as Thoreau pointed out in Walden, it is not the part of wisdom to do desperate things.

     I do so hope that what I am seeing is mere fantasies and phantoms, nothing real to worry about. I would like nothing better than for my fears to prove unfounded, be it in the form of a Mr. Trump who discovers in himself a late-flowering capacity for governing responsibly, or of a Ms. Harris who turns out, equally unexpectedly, an Iron Lady in pushing back against the loony left. May it be so. I am very tired of my nightmare visions; if only that were enough to prove them unfounded. And that is the best I can do; the rest is silence. God help us all.

*I am taking my impressions of Sullivan from his conversation with Freddie Sayers on UnHerd earlier this year (February 3rd). Some of us do take others at their word, and that is what Sullivan did in 2016 with Mr. Trump; he was unwilling to dismiss the wild talk as mere antics or entertainment, and he responded with corresponding alarm. He used the talk with Sayers to admit that much of what he feared then did not come to pass, and that he can now even see some real potential benefits to a second Trump presidency. Still the man does not look well put-together enough, either to Sullivan or to me, to warrant taking such chances on him. Laugh at his antics all you want, there is every reason to believe that Mr. Trump’s self-regard is so far off the charts that it is a real menace to the rule of law. Now as then, it does not look as if he could ever accept a defeat, under any circumstances, and it is beyond doubt that he does not feel that the law should be binding on him in his uniquely inspired greatness.

     Sam Harris too, in conversation with Bari Weiss and Ben Schapiro on The Free Press a week ago, presented an eloquent and nuanced argument for why he would be glad to vote for any responsible Republican this time around, and why Mr. Trump does not qualify. It is truly cause for concern that all but four of forty-four former top Trump appointees, who know best what he is like up close and under pressure, have been unwilling to endorse him this time—an entirely unprecedented state of affairs for a former president. Disloyal, says the Trump team. So they are, now, but who made them so, and why? Their sterling conservative credentials, or indeed their records by any other reasonable standard, are impressive; Trump picked them well, grant him that much; but then he alienated them, one by one, with his erratic, reckless, unworthy and unbecoming behavior. The other way around, they offended him by nothing worse than too high an independent profile, in some cases, and their daring to oppose him when he asked them to do things that they could not reconcile with their duties to the public and the Constitution.

     The picture that emerges from these inside accounts is not just troubling, it is borderline mad, or “deranged,” as Sullivan puts it. (Sullivan goes one step further and calls Mr. Trump “depraved,” based on his pronouncements around torture; I would not go so far, even if I am in full agreement that he should not be anywhere near such levers of power as those running together at the White House.) All that said, however, to warn that giving Mr. Trump another four years would be taking an unconscionable risk is not the same as to foresee some great conflagration. There are still good reasons to believe that most of the big talk will remain only talk, as before. The man’s worst instincts may well get checked, if not curbed, and the legal and institutional constraints may once more creak but hold. Perhaps some much-needed corrections will even be made, less by Mr. Trump himself than by those in his entourage, with common sense and a momentum that perhaps only such an extreme character could generate. Maybe so. Still a vote for Mr. Trump continues to look like striking matches near a powder-keg to me, and that should not be.

**Thomas Sowell, on Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson (9 May 2012), gave an unforgettable explanation for why “the vision of the anointed,” the idea that some are called to run society against people’s declared wishes, is such a persistent temptation for intellectuals: “Why are they so drawn to it? Because it gives them a much bigger role in the world! If you believe in free markets, then where does that leave all these folks who want to have ‘social justice’? People just go and make whatever deals they can with each other; they work things out and then go on their way. And meanwhile here is all this unused brilliance standing on the sidelines, watching with impotent rage!”