Post #157: The Day After

7 Nov. 2024

     The U.S. presidency has become far more than what the founders intended it to be (a decidedly modest executive hemmed in on all sides by institutional constraints): it stands, today, not only as a fountainhead of policy, and a symbol of political power (not only for Americans but for the entire world), but as an office so much in the public eye, and so exalted, that we are all wont to take it as a kind of personification of human pre-eminence, a kind of high priesthood of the possible, and sometimes the impossible.

     We read far too much into it, in other words, and we expect the office holder not only to do a job with strict limits, but we project unto the White House our ideal of what we believe an admirable human being should look like, define admirable as you wish. And there our visions differ very dramatically, as Mr. Trump’s example illustrates so vividly. The most salient fact of this strange phenomenon is surely just how much his supporters adore him, and how much his detractors revile him at the same time. Some bask in his light as if he were the Sun King himself; others have such a powerfully negative reaction to him that he makes their skin crawl and reduces them to exasperation with the human condition, or even to despair.

     The reader should know well by now just how wretchedly uncomfortable I am with the whole business (#122, 147, 148, 156), even if part of me wishes it weren’t so, in order that I might have a little more to look forward to these next four years. I have tried to find a more favorable angle, and I have failed repeatedly. It’s not even primarily a political thing for me; I just have great trouble finding anything to like about the guy.* My attempt to give him some credit by the back door in the last post is the most I can manage. It saddens me that I cannot do better for someone once again elected to be president, but there it is.

     It is not so much that I dread the practical outcomes that I expect from another four years of Trumpery. I really have no idea what they will be like; his talk is no very good guide to his actions, to say the least, and his previous record looks much more spotty and incoherent to me that to his admirers, to put it mildly. Nonetheless, some good may come of this; I’m not holding my breath, but I’m not ruling it out either, as I’ve said before. Most importantly of all, whatever I or anyone else thinks of him, the election results are very clear; the people have spoken, and while they are far from infallible, the verdict is in and now beyond appeal.

     I made it, in my previous posts, perhaps the most central and damning charge that had Mr. Trump lost, we could not have been sure that he would accept his defeat. I’ve spoken of “well poisoning” in this context (#122). But we have been spared that trial, at least, and the reverse argument now applies: if his monkeying around with the rules of the game is so damnable, then his accusers, including me, must now demonstrate, by contrast, that they will abide by the rules and give him his chance to show what he can do so long as he stays within the rule of law. In this he will be watched by millions, and I hope that it will be possible to constrain him. The Constitution was designed for it, and to believe that it will not hold for another four years is not to express a very high opinion of its merits. It is incumbent on those of us who dislike Trump most, who perhaps even despise him, to draw the line on our dreads and distinguish the fear and loathing that is still reasonable from outright hysteria.

     No, these will not be a fun four years, far from it. My own visceral reactions too are so soundly unfavorable that I will have to spend the next presidential time tuned out most of the time if I want to preserve any resemblance of sanity.** But even so, the heavens will not fall. The world is a grand old dame, and the American Republic mature and seasoned enough, despite everything, to withstand this a second time; neither is coming to an end any time soon. I hereby give it to you in writing. So relax and think of something else. Unless of course you absolutely insist on driving yourself crazy. Then spend the next four years with as much Trump coverage as possible. I wouldn’t dream of taking such a gamble on my mental health, such as it is; it would be more than enough to do in a stronger mind than mine.

     I am not retracting any of what I said before, but I propose a reset of sorts. For my own part, at least, I am willing to suspend my disbelief, for the time being, and give Mr. Trump his second chance, without undue prejudice, to prove himself the great man he claims to be. For years now he has been campaigning; let him show that he has benefited from these years and that he can now govern and not just talk big.

     As a good Hobbesian, I acknowledge a sanctity to the office that goes beyond the man, and I feel obliged to pay my respects. The U.S. President was explicitly not meant to be a king, but he retains and represents even today some of what Walter Bagehot called the dignified part of a constitution (“to excite and preserve the reverence of the population”), as against the  effective, which is concerned with the practical work of government.

     Living in a number of monarchies, especially in Bhutan, where I was lucky to experience what a one-on-one audience with a king actually feels like, taught me to see in a new light what I might before have considered a mere relic. (I trust that the monarch in question would not find me disloyal or disrespectful if I say in public that he is well aware of the archaic quality of his office, and that he would not deny it.) Monarchs who do not actively govern should, I believe, be shielded from criticism in a way that would not be appropriate in dealing with a democratically elected and politically effective president such as the American; but a touch of that reverence, for the office not the man, is still in order so far as I am concerned, and it impels me to pipe down in a way I did not feel compelled forty-eight hours ago.

     I am not repudiating anything; I am just noticing that on some intuitive level, my criticism no longer feels as appropriate to me as it did before, quite apart from the fact that although it had here and there a few original touches, it was not on the whole particularly original at all. My discomforts are those of an entire circle of those who are not comfortable with the Democratic Party in its current shape, and who yearn for a more traditionally respectable conservative alternative. Not all of us are even conservatives ourselves; I don’t think Sam Harris is, by most descriptions, and I wouldn’t say that I am either, at least not without major qualifications (#68). Nonetheless, almost any one of the high-level Trump appointees who have disavowed him would have satisfied me much better than the choice that was presented, as would the previous two Republican candidates, McCain and Romney, with flying colors. My lot are not asking the impossible; we just do not want the impossible, please. But there we are, we lost the argument, and the vote, and that must be accepted.

     Am I worried about falling afoul of Mr. Trump’s vindictive strain? Perhaps I would be, if I expected to find myself in the line of fire; but that would be to presume that he has any reason even to notice me, which is patently not the case. I don’t know what spot I might earn if he really keeps a black-list of his enemies for settling scores at opportune moments; but I would guess that if he does, and if I were on it, there would easily be a few million names ahead of mine. Do I perhaps not wish, then, to alienate those of my friends who have more Trumpist sympathies than I? Naturally I would much prefer not to alienate them, but I think they understand well enough where I am coming from, and I trust my friends to be understanding of our disagreements, even if they might occasionally get heated.

     What I have to say against Mr. Trump has been said millions of times, and better, by others, if not in identical terms, then in very similar ones. There is nothing special about my position: I would just like to see a more visibly good and decent, civilized and cultured, honest and truthful individual in so high and powerful an office. One’s ideal president would be too much to ask; but it would be nice if one could at least be spared one’s nightmare scenarios. There’s nothing for it, however, but to sigh and to accept that nightmares too are part of life, and that we usually get to wake up from them eventually.

     I do not expect these next few years to be fun because I cannot imagine Mr. Trump delivering on what he has been promising so fulsomely, but let him try and let us see. He has claimed that he would make peace in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office. I would very much like to see that. A week sufficed, we are told, for making the world, including a day’s rest, so I am willing to make that the first test: if by January 27th the guns do indeed fall silent, then all hail the chief! A Hobbesian like me puts peace, law, and order above almost everything else, at least as a starting point: so let’s see it returned to Ukraine. It may seem a little hypocritical to play fast-and-loose with another country’s territorial integrity while making so much of one’s own borders, but such is life for smaller countries, and just what Ukraine wants at this point with its Russian-speaking former eastern parts has always been a mystery to me. Sacred ground, I expect to be told; I’m afraid I am not very susceptible to the logic of blood and soil.

     Let Mr. Trump bring closure to what he has so ceaselessly agitated: let him show us how to secure the border properly under the rule of law. Let Russia and China be converted, with realist pressure and a suitable mix of sticks and carrots, into partners for the future, not just incipient enemies in a looming Cold War. Let the Europeans be reminded (why not) that they are old enough to be responsible for themselves—only let it be done without alienating or abandoning some of America’s oldest and most loyal allies. While we are at it, let our hero pacify the Middle East in an afternoon, maybe after having put the hideous djinn of theocracy in Iran at last back in the bottle in the morning. Just one detail: let it please be done without blowing everything up to high heaven, or rather, to the depths of hell. Such fireworks may be fascinating to watch from afar, but they are a lot less fun up close. (It’s not even that I would expect all this to be done without an egg broken along the way; that cannot be done by anyone. But give us the omelet, to make the pain worthwhile, not just some scrambled mess.)

     We have been promised, not least by the candidate himself, a man of superhuman stature. He is practically a wonder-worker, he tells us, so by all means, let’s see some miracles! Let’s see the woke madness magically give way to a sensible and harmonious dynamic between the races and the sexes. Let our deepest divisions be healed and our most bitter acrimony be soothed. Let’s see the red tape and the overbearing nanny state cut back to size, efficiently and intelligently. Let the tax system be transformed from a hideous labyrinth of gargantuan proportions into something simple, efficient, and reasonably fair, without any fatal conceits or hubristic pretenses about delivering “social justice” along the way. Let’s see the world reborn along more common-sensical lines, by all that is true and good and beautiful, let’s see it!

     The above list, I hasten to add, makes me tremble with vertigo, but then I am not a master of the universe, as Mr. Trump apparently is. Unlike He-Who-Never-Errs, I am only too aware of how many times I’ve been wrong in life, especially when it came to my political predictions. So go ahead, once and future President Trump, make a sadder, slightly wiser late-middle-aged man happy and hopeful: show him what is possible in this world, prove his skepticism and tragic sense wrong, and give us, truly, a great presidency! You don’t have to swing left to win me over, but know this, Sir: you’ll have to do some big fucking batting, not only your deafening jaw-jaw and haw-haw (even if it is infinitely better than war-war).

     Accomplish even a small portion of the above, and I will publicly confess that I misjudged you, that you are, after all, the political savior you pretend to be; I will not only bend the knee as so many former critics have done, I too will applaud you with enthusiasm and sing your praises. Until I have seen the miracle with my own eyes, however, I shall merely fall silent, out of respect not for your grandstanding, but for the greatness of the office that is about to be entrusted, and I emphasize, entrusted, to you once again. May God help you, and may God help us all. We need it.

*I do not respond well either to Mr. Trump’s mannerisms or to his looks, his voice, his attitude, or anything else about him except maybe his long overcoat (on a good day), a few of his more comical outbursts, and some of the wilder riffs that can pass, at their best, almost for American koans. Never mind watching him in action; I can’t even listen to him for long with the visuals switched off because of how he speaks. It may be that he’s not quite as egregiously dishonest and irrational as he appears, but if so it is only because he uses language in a drastically different way—not to describe reality as best we can, the way the rest of us are taught at school, but first, to boast, second to entertain, and third, to negotiate.

     On all three levels, extreme claims seem to be preferable, in his mind, to more finely calibrated ones. If the point is to make oneself look good, then why stop at the facts? Far-fetched or outright absurd statements are much likelier to be amusing or otherwise diverting. And as a matter of negotiation, Trump always seems to start with an outrageous demand or assertion, from which he can then back down as much as he needs to. His followers, it may be, have learnt this private language well enough that they hear something completely different from what others do who think that words have assigned meanings.

     The trouble with this manner of defending Mr. Trump is that it exonerates him at the expense of undermining language itself. Nothing that Trump says can simply be taken to mean what it appears to mean; it must first be translated. But who is to do this translating, when words don’t even keep their meaning from pronouncement to pronouncement? In the end, everything coming from Trump means whatever Trump or his followers want it to mean, and there is no reliable, consistent way of decoding it at all.

     The damage thus done may be worse than occasional lying or even persistent bullshitting (#147), because language itself is thereby emptied of robust meaning. If I am right, then it is no wonder that those who are especially committed, by calling and profession, to upholding and defending the integrity of the word (writers, teachers, philosophers, and the like) are driven to such paroxysms of despair over what Mr. Trump says and how he says it, since the rules of the spoken game could hardly be twisted and broken more egregiously than by him, if one still expects anything to get through to others at all. While the rest of us are expected to say what we mean, and mean what we say, under pain of often very severe social penalties, this one, not particularly worthy character gets a free pass to say whatever he damn well pleases, without regard for the rules governing speech for everyone else. (I don’t mean his flouting the protocols of political correctness, which I despise as much as anyone, but his complete disregard for the ordinary structures and strictures of truthful human language.)

     What one might call the common law of speech has evolved for a reason over the centuries and millennia; it enables us to communicate effectively. Exempting one person is not only pernicious so far as that one person goes, it also sets a very dangerous example for others, even if they may not be able to get away with as much as Mr. Trump. The fact that there is method to the madness doesn’t mean that it’s any less crazy, even if one can become habituated to it—indeed perhaps precisely because one can. That habituation is in many ways the worst thing of all. It is as if he and his enablers in this regard were unilaterally dismissing not only the vocabulary or the grammar in their own interest, but the very logic of language itself and thereby the whole framework of meaning that we need to make sense of things and share a common reality.

     Once again, what it all amounts to is a kind of poisoning of the common well—in this case, a common language that we must all draw from to make sense and make ourselves understood. Exceptions have always been made for comedians and court jesters, crazed despots and abandoned demagogues, and outright madmen too, but no legitimate head of government or state has ever claimed such a complete exemption before and received it in the form of such an unequivocal endorsement by the people. 2016 may have still been tentative, but 2023-24 (including the primaries) cannot be reasoned away, for better or for worse. We must all find a way to deal with that, like it or loathe it.

**Even if one were prepared to follow the argument by Victor Davis Hanson—in some ways the most remarkable Trump-defender of all—that things have been brought to such a pass, by the excesses of the past four years, that what is needed is nothing short of “chemotherapy” for the body politic, let’s please pause over what that image implies. I don’t just mean that he is likening the other side to a cancerous growth, which is not very nice; but kindly note what it means even for those who may take a relatively sanguine view of what salutary effects a second Trump presidency might bring. They too, by the logic of that astonishing metaphor, must expect to be reduced to such miseries along the way that at times they might wish they had died instead, never mind the fact that chemotherapy has scientific underpinnings that Trumpism sorely lacks, and that the image also suggests a very real chance of serious, possibly even fatal complications.