One of the more bizarre elements of our ongoing national crisis is that we are beset by a president whose ultimate goals seem to be neither political nor ideological, at least not in any traditional sense, but instead fall under a more idiosyncratic desire to assert his own power. It is of course true that Donald Trump has found himself sympathetic to the furthest-right fringes of the political spectrum, and has also appealed to less extreme conservatives through a combination of economic nationalism and race-based appeals; but these seem more like means to an end, as opposed to someone like, say, Steve Bannon or Jeff Sessions, who seem to have well-though-out (if alternately despicable and discredited) ideas about race, politics, and the economy. The Hot Screen notes this as prelude to saying how remarkable it is that our greatest Constitutional challenge arguably since the Civil War is coming not through a president with a specific political agenda and ideology, but from one whose main goal is personal aggrandizement — both emotional and monetary — from the presidency.
At any rate: two recent pieces provide insightful assays at what motivates Donald Trump to do like he does. At long-time THS fave The Baffler, David Roth has penned a haughty and scathing essay, half-lackadaisacal and half-knife-so-sharp-you-don’t-know-you’ve-been-cut-until-your-head-falls-off. In "The President of Blank Sucking Nullity," Roth diagnoses the president as having a fairly common affliction, though one that’s been badly magnified by his ascent to power: Donald Trump, he asserts, is an asshole, with many consequences that transcend any particular political ideology flowing from this basic fact:
The most significant thing to know about Donald Trump’s politics or process, his beliefs or his calculations, is that he is an asshole; the only salient factor in any decision he makes is that he absolutely does not care about the interests of the parties involved except as they reflect upon him. Start with this, and you already know a lot [. . .] The rest of the world is an abstraction to him, a market to exploit; there is no other person in it who is real to him. They’re all supplicants or subjects, fans or haters, but their humanity is transparently not part of the equation.
Roth doesn’t simply leave matters at this basic assholic quality of self-absorption that characterizes Trump and his fellow bottom-dwellers, but identifies the specific ways the president's condition manifests itself:
It is not quite fair to say that Donald Trump lacks core beliefs, but to the extent that we can take apart these beliefs they amount to Give Donald Trump Your Money and Donald Trump Should Really Be on Television More. The only comprehensible throughline to his politics is that everything Trump says is something he’s said previously, with additional very’s and more-and-more’s appended over time; his worldview amounts to the sum of the dumb shit he saw on the cover of the New York Post in 1985, subjected to a few decades of rancid compounding interest and deteriorating mental aptitude.
Roth goes on to demonstrate (conclusively or not, we will leave to the reader; hint: the right answer is “conclusively”) that Trump’s asshole status makes quick work of various vexing questions, such as whether Donald Trump is a racist or a neo-Confederate:
There is no room for other people in the world that Trump has made for himself, and this is fundamental to the anxiety of watching him impose his claustrophobic and airless interior world on our own. Is Trump a racist? Yes, because that’s a default setting for stupid people; also, he transparently has no regard for other people at all. Does Trump care about the cheap-looking statue of Stonewall Jackson that some forgotten Dixiecrat placed in a shithole park somewhere he will never visit? Not really, but he so resents the fact that other people expect him to care that he develops a passionate contrary opinion out of spite. Does he even know about . . . Let me stop you there. The answer is no.
You may or may not agree with Roth’s singular diagnosis, but you have to admit that his is a determined engagement with the question of why our politics has so much come to revolve around the psyche of a single, clearly troubled person. THS believes that part of the mesmerism of Trump is a simultaneous dissonance/congruity between his singular, self-obsessed personality and the larger socio-political forces he’s tapped into; that is, there is something remarkable in the fact that a man so self-obsessed can be seen by so many to embody THEIR particular aspirations and grievances. Of course it has to add up, because there he is in the White House, and here we are as a stunned and harshly beset nation. Roth’s analysis gets at the truth of the matter, which is that on one side of the equation we are facing a general situation of the emperor having no clothes: the man ultimately is not the savior of the working class or even white America, but a huckster out to aggrandize numero uno. Helping anyone else is purely incidental.
(Lo and behold — it seems that at least one Republican is on board with Roth's diagnosis, though it seems he's reached the conclusion independently of Roth's essay. Speaking of President Trump, Congressman Duncan Hunter is said to have told colleagues recently, "He’s just like he is on TV. He’s an asshole, but he’s our asshole." Alrighty then.)
At New Republic, Jeet Heer has a piece out — titled “Cultural Warlord Trump Goes on the Offensive” — that looks at why Trump has adopted so many of the culturally conservative/malignant positions that arguably seemed not to interest him during the 2016 campaign. (Of course, the idea that he’d back off cultural fights never made much sense — you can’t back off a fight without tacitly supporting the currently winning side.) Heer suggests a theory that’s been offered by others in various permutations, writing:
[Trump backer billionaire] Peter Thiel (and those who shared his illusion) misjudged Trump because they thought the fact that he wasn’t personally invested in culture-war issues would mean that he would put them on the back-burner. What they ignored is that Trump has a fundamentally tribalistic approach to politics. He sees himself as the head of a tribe, whose main goal is to reward his supporters and punish his enemies.
In January 2016, Will Saletan wrote in Slate that “the Republican Party is a failed state, and Donald Trump is its warlord.” That metaphor deserves an update. Trump is now presiding over America as if it were a failed state, and he is its avenging cultural warlord. Trump is styling himself as the chieftain of the Straight White Christian Party who will defend his people against all enemies, be they Muslim terrorists or trans soldiers.
We might say that Heer’s argument is the complement of Roth’s: Trump, in his assholic emptiness, has become the vessel and defender of a broader white grievance, through some confluence of psychological propensity and alignment with the aggrievements of others — a sort of dizzyingly narcissistic selflessness. Armchair psychologizing aside, Heer’s characterization of Trump as “chieftain of the Straight White Christian Party who will defend his people against all enemies, be they Muslim terrorists or trans soldiers” resonates with us, and seems to contain not so much a grain of truth as a whole frickin’ nugget’s worth.
