Trump Among the Great Men

The thing that strikes me most about Trump’s recent VP pick is that JD Vance is a genuine literary success. It’s a genuine shame that this aspect of Vance’s success has been overlooked because, ceteris paribus, you’d expect the rise of a scribbler to arouse a good deal of applause in our media. People who spend a lot of time reading and writing like to think that a good government should naturally be full of literary men, that this is the closest approach to government by philosopher-kings as we can imagine (it's why C. Hitchens supported Barack Obama, even when Obama's memoir was written by Bill Ayers). And how many literary successes have there been in the past eight years? I really don't know, I only read old books and books written by right-wing schizos.

But setting pretentiousness aside, it’s clear that the best leaders are doers, rather than writers. Lincoln is the greatest literary-leader to employ the English tongue, yet his biggest publishing feat was a poem from his youth. General Grant wrote the greatest military memoirs since Caesar, but only while being haunted by death and the prospect of a long destitute widowhood for his wife. Churchill is the 20th Century's literary light, but he learned the craft writing pulp novels during his wilderness years when he was (rightly) thought of as poison to his nation. 

Donald Trump has always been a doer, not a scribbler. This was always his persona, he was always a man of action. Even in men less prone to self-aggrandizement, the man of action always looks like a boor to the subtle and brooding intellect of the writer. Of course, when a man like Grant shows himself to be a superior writer to all the men who make it their trade, or a man like Nixon proves in his most vulnerable moments to have a more subtle soul than his refined critics, the scribbler can’t help but be embarrassed—he’s left scurrying back to the ivory tower and his useless games of juxtaposition he calls academic work. Our congenitally inferior intellectuals don't see the only men worth their attention.

Deep down, it’s nice to think this is the root of some of the animosity towards former president Trump. The man already has a claim to literary greatness, though his medium is Twitter posts, and it is hardly respectable. But true greatness is self-evident and self-imposing. Guys like me might lament the fact that he is dominant of a lower medium, a more barbaric language reflecting a constrained mode of thought, yet even we have to admit that his coinages have seemed into our psyches—many such cases.

But when Trump the Satirist is a quarter-inch from getting his brains blown out, you realize that at the very least he’s more than a scribbler or a standup act. Most jesters, so far as I know, gave up the bit when their hecklers threatened to murder them and impoverish their families. It has always been the habit of enlightened moderates and cynical scribblers to see him as a mere buffoon who finagled himself into the seat of the American Empire. But the facts don’t bear this out.

Then you realize that you don't really know Donald Trump at all. The usual GOP swill never made any sense with Trump. I've seen proof of it working with a certain (older) demographic, but Trump has thankfully never felt himself constrained to the image they got to stick onto Reagan and the dumbass-with-a-heart-of-gold they accepted for the second Bush. A larger problem in assessing Trump is that he is a caricature of his own self. This is not astonishing. He has been a public figure for forty years, and all men who act in public, whether politicians or lawyers or any other kind of professional become a heightened version of themselves in the public eye; it is simply impossible to be any kind of leader if those who look up to you don't have a mental conception of who you are. It is why, as Norm MacDonald pointed out, there have been no good satires of Trump. They are satirizing a figure who is already a semi-comic commentary on himself.

But even mockery doesn’t really do the trick. You can pretend to be aloof and noncommittal, especially given Trump’s persistent failures (of course, if you’re able to fail so often, you must be doing something right). You can learn more by studying Trump and the reactions to him than by any other method or heuristic for looking at the modern world. How will future historians look upon the claims that he was ushering in fascism when he was clowning on the whole system? But around true buffoons like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris he takes on the habit of straight-man. Trump as he exists would have no place in a political world dominated by men like Nixon and LBJ. It’s only around the empty vessels chosen to run our administrative empire that his act works. The revelations that Joe Biden doesn’t control his own social media accounts is no revelation if you paid attention the past eight years. 

But analyzing the psychology of a man from outward signs is even hard when you are not clear on what those outward signs really are. No one understands all that went on in 2020; it seems most have already forgotten the mass insanity of that year and those that have followed. When no one can understand his own place in history, why should we be confused when no one can understand Trump's role in it? He is more intelligent than all his enemies, he is more adept at chicanery than more practiced politicians, he is just plain more interesting than the legions of Washingtonians who have been grooming themselves since middle school to be active preppy cogs in our administrative state. 

He's the only man of the past decade who really matters. Sitting at the head of a technocratic empire, maybe personal primacy is an empty feat anyway. But as long as we are still captivated by physical courage, bare humanity still has some relevance to us. And that has always been Trump's appeal in the first place: A totally human and recognizable figure poised against the onslaught of multinational sludge and administrative dictatorship. 

Tucker Carlson named him the de facto leader of the country because of his physical courage he showed after the attempt on his life, noting it as a much greater feat than moral courage. Carlson is wrong in putting physical courage before moral courage, because physical courage is a prerequisite for moral courage. A man without the constitution to fight is never going to be able to conceive of a bold stand. The issue of physical courage is all the more paramount today, when a large part of the population reject physicality at all--sodomites, trannies, furries, college professors and the like—and see themselves like mental conceptions of themselves, totally free in intellect, totally free of nation, religion, creed—and so have formed the intellectual rot that allows for almost all the evils in the modern world. 

Anyway, that’s my opinion, not that it matters—throw it on top of a million other analyses of Trump. After eight years, it might be trite to keep asking, What does Trump’s victory mean? But the question still has meaning, because Trump isn’t some type that we can measure our state against, he is a man sui generis we can only really grok after the fact. Any other attitude is like an Englishman still calling Bonaparte ‘the little corporal’ after Jena, or a Roman senator bringing up Caesar’s past buggery after Pompey was gone. Right or wrong, the petty critics end up judged against the subject of their critique.

Maybe the selection of Vance is the first step towards lending a literary aspect to what is going on, of putting into words and therefore putting into sense what we are actually living through. I doubt any other people in history have been so confused about the state of their government or, on a more metaphysical plane, their state in the world. Trump stands as a kind of sureness amidst that chaos, a brazenly human force against evils beyond comprehension. It no longer matters how you feel about this fact, whether it’s apt or absurd. That kind of thing has to be weighed against Trump himself. The only higher judge is the One who turned Trump’s head.