On Donald Trump, the Person

“Throughout my writings on post-modern conservatism, I have generally avoided discussing President Donald Trump’s personality.”

“All the great dictatorial movements of our times were (and are) based on irrational authority. Its driving forces were the submissive individual’s feeling of powerlessness, fear, and admiration for the ‘leader.’ All the great and fruitful cultures are founded on the existence of rational authority: on people, who are able to muster the given functions intellectually and socially and have therefore no need to appeal to irrational desires. But I do not want to close without emphasizing that the individual’s goal must be to become his own authority; i.e. to have a consciousness in moral issues, conviction in questions of intellect, and fidelity in emotional matters. However, the individual can only have such an inner authority if he has matured enough to understand the world with reason and love. The development of these characteristics is the basis for one’s own authority and therefore the basis for political democracy.”

– Erich Fromm, The Authoritarian Personality

Throughout my writings on post-modern conservatism, I have generally avoided discussing President Donald Trump’s personality. The emptiness—indeed, the radical hollowness—of the man is so encompassing that it often made sense to interpret him less as an individual than as a persona: an empty signifier into which actual individuals channeled their animosities and resentments into a raging echo devoid of independent voice. Then-private citizen Trump almost seemed to admit as much in his 1987 book The Art of the Deal, in which he discussed the effectiveness of “truthful hyperbole.” As he put it, “I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.” Given this and the tendency of critics to become moralistic pathologists at the drop of a hat whenever President Trump speaks, it seemed better to focus on the big picture. This was also essential since I have always wanted to stress (and still do) that Trumpist post-modern conservatism is symptomatic of deeper ailments that we have been ignoring for too long. Moralism can very quickly become a reprieve from dealing with structural issues by blaming them all on a single individual or group.

On Joe Biden and Chris Wallace

The first presidential debate of this election cycle changed my mind by reminding me of what makes President Trump such a singularly repugnant person. This is not to let former Vice President Joe Biden or Chris Wallace off the hook, though. Vice President Biden no doubt won some converts by trying to display empathy and warmth in contrast to his opponent’s shrill and rather untruthful hyperbole. Against the odds, Vice President Biden managed to come across as competent and coherent, bucking accusations that he was fighting senility. Few of us would have been able to withstand the constant barrage of nonsense, conspiracy-mongering, and personal attacks President Trump leveled at him. But Vice President Biden was an imperfect candidate from the beginning, saddled with a long legacy of bad political decisions, limited charisma, and modest enthusiasm for his run. The debate showed him battered and seemingly exhausted by President Trump’s spitfire attacks, which should have been all too expected given the latter’s character. Vice President Biden’s own efforts to fight fire with fire by heckling President Trump seemed desperate and out of character.