A young person, someone I am very fond of and have known for many years, wrote me today with a harsh assessment of Donald Trump, surprised and disappointed that I would defend such a man against some of the charges recently leveled against him in the press. Mr. Trump, in my correspondent’s opinion, is “a horrible person – a wretched, vile, insidious, selfish, soul-blackened human.” There was much more. The gist was that Mr. Trump’s character rendered him unfit to be president.
Having nothing much else to write here today, I thought I’d post the letter I wrote in response. Here it is, in slightly edited form:
* * *
Dear ______,
I make no case that Donald Trump is any kind of a saint. He is enormously vain (as all presidents are, with the possible exception of Calvin Coolidge), he lacks dignity and gravitas, he calls people childish names, he can be vulgar (though surely no more so than LBJ, Clinton, and a host of others), he is a philanderer (though of course JFK and Clinton put him to shame in that department, with the latter likely being guilty of actual rape). He is, as you say, not one to show much in the way of humility (though of course he is a dwarf in that regard compared to his immediate predecessor, whom Mike Bloomberg — Mike Bloomberg! — called “the most arrogant man he’d ever met”).
He is, however, the duly elected president of the United States, elevated to office by a vast segment of the traditional American nation who rightly have felt despised and marginalized for a long time now by their globalist, “progressive” overlords — a scornful and condescending secular priesthood who occupy, by powerful means of enforcement, the commanding heights of media, academia, popular culture, and the enormous edifice of the unelected, administrative state. Donald Trump was seen by these “Deplorables” — and rightly so — as their last hope against a leftist juggernaut that sought to trample into dust all of the founding norms and traditions of the American nation, to throw open the borders, to distend and distort the Constitution into gelatinous goo, and to crush all resistance by a combination of judicial activism, executive fiat and suffocating social ostracism.
Trump’s voters understood that the First and Second Amendments, those great bulwarks of liberty, were under increasingly withering assault; they had to look no further than Canada, Britain, and Europe — where the people are forcibly disarmed, and criticism of government policy is now enough to land you in jail — to see what lay ahead if the eight-year catastrophe of the Obama administration were to be repeated by re-installing those despicable grifters the Clintons. They saw in Donald Trump, for all of his obvious flaws (and yes, they are just as obvious to me as they are to you), a man who genuinely loved the free and self-confident America of his youth, who saw the nation’s long story, though of course tainted by sin and error (as all national stories are), as a story of the triumph of the human spirit, guided by a set of transcendent principles rooted in the natural, God-given dignity of every human being, and given form by a Constitution unlike any ever seen in history: the product of the coming together at a unique moment in the development of mankind by men of genius (compared to whom, by the way, our current crop of “statesmen”, including both Trump and his predecessors, are intellectual gnats).
Donald Trump clearly, if only intuitively, understood the existential horror of this century-long acceleration of consolidating, totalizing statism, the effect of which is to reduce men to children, and to crush from existence the essential mediating layer of “civil society” — the great web of voluntary and independent association that forms the sinews and ligaments of healthy, organic societies — replacing it with an atomizing, vertical order in which every man and woman depends first and foremost upon the great State above, from which all blessings — and all guidance — must flow.
Alexis de Tocqueville understood this liability of the American system very clearly, as early as 1830. In Democracy in America he wrote an astonishingly prescient passage. Read it carefully — read it more than once — because it has come true in our time:
“I think, then, that the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything that ever before existed in the world; our contemporaries will find no prototype of it in their memories. I seek in vain for an expression that will accurately convey the whole of the idea I have formed of it; the old words despotism and tyranny are inappropriate: the thing itself is new, and since I cannot name, I must attempt to define it.
I seek to trace the novel features under which despotism may appear in the world. The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men, all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest; his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind. As for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he does not see them; he touches them, but he does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself. The principle of equality has prepared men for these things;it has predisposed men to endure them and often to look on them as benefits.
After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
I have always thought that servitude of the regular, quiet, and gentle kind which I have just described might be combined more easily than is commonly believed with some of the outward forms of freedom, and that it might even establish itself under the wing of the sovereignty of the people.”
For standing against all of this, Donald Trump has been the subject of a continuous conspiracy of what can only be called regicide ever since he came down that escalator, beginning with the former administration’s bringing to bear the power of the FBI, the intelligence agencies, and the FISA courts (on a fraudulent basis) to spy on his campaign and to entrap members of his team. Following on that was the years-long charade of the Mueller investigation, followed by a ridiculous (and obviously doomed) attempt at impeachment, while the media, throughout, did everything they could to whip up a hateful frenzy. It is to Trump’s credit that he did not crack or crumble under this relentless personal assault, and this cataract of false charges spanning years; I’m sure nearly anyone else would have. When the Wuhan virus first appeared, he took quick steps to restrict travel from China; for this he was excoriated as a “racist” (the Left’s all-purpose cudgel for anyone they hate). Who could blame a person for hitting back?
Finally I will say that Donald Trump, before becoming a target by becoming President, was generally admired for his charitable outreach, and his work to bridge racial divides. He was befriended by Jesse Jackson and many other influential black leaders. I know someone who has worked closely with Mr. Trump for many years and knows him intimately — and he says that you never met a nicer and more considerate guy, and that Trump doesn’t have a “racist” or anti-Semitic bone in his body. Mr. Trump is attracting unprecedented support among black voters — something like 35-40 percent! — because they have begun at last to understand that for all these years they have been used and hoodwinked by the Democratic machine, and taken for granted as reliable votes, despite the structure of black life having collapsed under decades on the Democrat plantation.
So: how can I choose to defend such a person? I’ll answer that with an anecdote:
During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, exasperated with the celebrated general George McClellan’s persistent reluctance to engage the enemy, finally appointed Ulysses S. Grant to command the Union army. McClellan was everything a Union general should be; he was a West Point star, a gentleman, a snappy dresser, and a widely admired theorist of war and strategy. Grant was everything McClellan was not: he was an ill-mannered drunkard, slovenly in his personal habits, careless of his appearance, and had in his past a long succession of personal failures. But he was willing to endure heavy casualties in order to keep the pressure on Lee, and had won some impressive victories.
His fellow officers couldn’t stand the man, though, for many of the same reasons that genteel conservatives can’t stand Trump (not least because he was not one of them). Finally, a group of senior officers went to the White House to demand that Lincoln fire him. Lincoln understood their grievances, but knew that Grant was his best hope of victory. He bowed his head and said:
“I cannot spare this man. He fights.”
And so it is with Donald Trump. For all his flaws, I cannot spare this man. He fights.
I hope this helps you understand how I see all of this. I hope you understand also that I do not see any of it in simplistic terms, that at almost 64 years old I have had a lot of time to study history and gain perspective, and that I have come to many of my present views completely against my will; it is simply that my growing understanding of human nature and human affairs has brought me here whether I like it or not. Like you, I only want what’s best for the country and its people: I want our people to be happy, to flourish, and to live in peace and freedom. Those things are not easily achieved — and what’s worse, once they have been achieved, it is very easy to become complacent about them: to imagine, after a long period of peace and prosperity, that they are the natural state of Man, a default state to which things will naturally revert. Nothing, though, could be farther from the truth. The conditions that give rise to order and liberty are terribly rare, and infinitely precious, and to tamper with them as carelessly as we have in America for the past several decades, in the expectation that by sufficient well-intentioned tweaking we can create an artificial Utopia, is folly on the grandest scale. The Gods of the Copybook Headings are never far away.
13 Comments
A fine reply.
It’s a good response. However in the same way that we should identify as unimportant and insignificant all those useless media outlets and their attacks on the president’s personality and vain disposition, we should completely ignore what Trump says. Instead we should focus on what he does. What becomes apparent once we do that is that instead of trying to help those who elected him as he promised, the dispossessed and those despised by the urban cosmopolitan elite, he has inexplicably worked to surround himself and appease one open borders globalist after another. He’s not a fraud because he’s vain and vulgar. He’s a fraud because from day one he has abandoned those who he promised to protect in favor of winning favor with our globalist overlords. As it turns out, he’s just a republican, which is to say he’s part of our traitorous uni-party political class.
Malcolm, your interlocutor is saying Trump is morally evil. You are replying yes, he has bad manners. That sounds like you are entirely missing the point. Your interlocutor buys into the Prog moral system. You do not, Trump does not, I do not. Therefore, we are from their perspective morally evil. Nobody gives half a shit about the manners of Trump, Biden, Obama or Bloomberg. The only thing that matters is which side they are fighting for.
He is calling Trump morally evil precisely because he is fighting against the Progs, you are replying “yes he has poor manners but the good thing is that he is fighting against the Progs”. That does not sound like a well-formed reply to me.
Good Lord…there is just no pleasing some commenters.
I’ve removed one comment for intemperate language. I don’t often do that, but now and then I will.
Solzhenitsyn,
Yes, Trump has been a disappointment in many ways, particularly on immigration. But as I said, you go to war with the army you have. Imagine where we’d be if Clinton had won.
Dividualist,
True in most cases, but here I think my correspondent was motivated more by distaste for the man himself than by policy.
https://freebeacon.com/policy/tom-cotton-debuts-plan-to-take-pharma-production-back-from-china/
“Trump is our murder weapon”
You guys remember that from 2016?
An entire color revolution happened because of that.
64 million dirt people are not wrong.
I attended the rally in Richmond on 1-20-2020.
50,000 armed-to-the-teeth dirt people.
It can not be appreciated without showing up.
I believe everything changed that day.
The Gods of The Copy Books indeed.
I believe it is what caused the enemies of my Liberty and it’s blessings to pull the plug.
They are people who understand an existential, indomitable, unstoppable, plurality, a present example legion, that discovered on that same day they are Legion.
Ever stood in the embrace of 50,000 armed-to-the-teeth men & women who decided in this amazing Zeitgeist, their paradigm moment, they will not comply, will not back down?
Highly recommend it of you love Liberty and the dignity of it.
I have no right to pass judgement, nor complain about President Trump. He certainly is not the corrupt domestic enemies of my way of life and freedoms past POTUS’s have been. Imagine a cold blood dripping psychopathic maniac in a pantsuit. America would be a twisted smoldering wreck by now.
Who am I? Besides he has done what his job description demands, look out for the interests of The People. It is in his oath of office. Name another who has and does honor he solemn oaths of office today? There certainly is no longer scripture as even a philosophical guiding imperative. Church & State don’t you know. God is mentioned exactly once on that piece of parchment, no lack of the root & seed of administrative and regulatory tyranny though. Makes one wonder, if conspiracy theory is not the history of these united states, and if not, why did Lincoln and his pre-Marx ideological farce marxists commit pogrom & genocide to retain the economic lucre they where strip mining via gross writs of attainder, violation of posse comitatus making the King George look like a saint, of the agrarian sovereign states who only wished to be left alone in the first place?
Calvin Coolidge isn’t alive to day either, to our great loss, but his words still reverberate.
I could never accomplish what Mr. Trump has. As much as I would like to. Honestly, I would have resorted to other means, of leaving the cause of ordered Liberty to God and my Rifle.
Excuse my vernacular, the guy is a Shitlord. Frankly you need a set of gonads that clank together when you strut if your going to accomplish positive change in this world against the unmitigated corrupt vile depraved fools running a global organized crime syndicate. Did they not give JFK the dirt nap?
The man’s love of everything American & Main Street First balances out and then some his faults as a man, from my perspective. How do they even matter in the larger scheme?
I too have watched over half a century men in suits destroy what men like me in denim contributed into for the sake of something better than myself, larger, greater, leave things just a mite better than I found them, something for my children and down thru dirt people history, something precious beyond counting.
I think at times, you really need to break the glass in case of emergency and let loose what was caged for later, just in case, when you need a man who just does not care one hoot what his enemies think, nor fear them. Never mind leaders who inspire others to do more than they believe they are capable of, thats a difference between Trump & Grant which matters. Not throwing more brave men into a meat grinder than the other guy.
Enemies of Trump and I so foul I still can not create the word salad properly descriptive of what and who they are.
These evil people do not appreciate, after Trump, if trhey don’t cut the insanity of greed and raw naked power it’s men who are willing, choose, to drink from the skulls of their enemies they are going to rue the day they defied 64 million Deplorable’s withdrawal of consent for them. Do they even understand I Won’t! and MYOB!, that BFYTW is the most powerful weapon ever devised by man?
I was a welder in coal mine, all I did for a trade, would not trade it for anything. Lot of thinking goes on down there, in dark so black it screams at you. Dark like you can not imagine if you have never been in it. Your minds eye is totally free in that kind of dark.
I’ll tell anyone this though, these ruthless people do not understand how mean us good folks get when you violate our codes. The advent of the Rifle in the hands of Freemen changed everything in ways that are still evolving along with ordered Liberty. I think to alongside that, we are going to come out the other side of this to accomplish things beyond our wildest dreams and imaginations. Prosperity, invention, creativity, prosperity, happiness, somebody has amazing plans for us and we have to pass a big-arse test.
Dirt people are the only ones who ever effect positive change in this world. Sure that takes leadership at some level, even if it’s grass roots open source leaderless, people inspire people by simply acting, by example, but, there are no others right now, can anyone name them who can effect positive change right now? I don’t see them. Even Mr. Trump, for better or worse, he ain’t what he is without us dirt people.
I suspect he understands that too. And that right there matters most in some way.
It really takes the little people to set things right, either by rivers of blood or means of revolutionary acts, or both. This Republic would not exist, only a lot of great lofty words by some really smart and gifted people, if that.
May be, that is a lesson your adored friend should understand somehow.
Beautiful missive Mr. Pollack. Appreciate you more than I can say for you sharing it.
Phil Carson,
Thank you very much indeed for that passionate comment. The grit and self-reliance, the brawny and indomitable love of liberty under God that built this nation, is still very much alive.
Note to readers: the terms “Dirt People” (mentioned by Phil Carson, supra) and “Cloud People” were coined, I think, by the blogger “ZMan” a few years ago. See, for example, here, here, and here.
No. My regards, Thank You.
I feel in my heart the elements of that indomitable spirit involves audacity and motive power of dirt people, which has no equal.
Ever read Eric Frank Russel’s 50’s SciFi short story ‘Then There Where None’, it’s about withdrawal of consent which he called the most powerful weapon ever devised by man?
It’s archived free on Abelard. Russel also wrote “Wasp” a hilarious, superb tongue in cheek, but deadly serious tale of how literally one determined man can bring an entire tyrannical world power to it’s knees without resorting to violent resistance. But by causing such a global oligarchy to ever more repressive acts, and the use of threat of force and application of violence to retain raw naked power. Every day brings both works into higher resonance of prologue.
Yeah, Z man’s critical thinking about the cloud people and dirt people is pretty revealing stuff. It sure struck a cord in me. In fact I started a blog and dedicated it to Z’s dictum, called dirt people. Telling how Prof. Angelo Codevilla, in his great piece “The Ruling Class and The Peril’s of Revolution, outlines Z’s dirt people verses the cloud people.
Instructional how Z’s dirt people is indeed a dangerous thing, bad think.
From the 1st day the trolls & SWJ who converged WordPress, my blog host, shadow banned dirt people, provided completely fake site data, made it download so slowly many gave up trying to click on, they disappeared whole posts, selective alt-agitrop I created, went in and edited my writing, the whole gamete of silicon troll thought policing and censorship, till finally one day last March they simply wiped dirt people clean from WordPress, the same day they disappeared Chateau Heartise, no warning or even lame NPC hive mind parsing like violation of community standards. Neo-bolsheviks do what they do.
Surprised by how the meme dirt people has failed some sort of viral traction even over time, once grokked it’s a badge of true dignity, courage, maybe it was the deliberate pejorative regarding Trump’s basket of Deplorable’s was so much more populist a badge of honor, deservedly so, but then, there was still an entire army of deep state agent provocateurs and trolls infesting so many alt-media blog comment threads working to subvert and undermine cognitive discourse, disrupt any thread past 2 comments to suppress dangerous thinking and truth. Maybe that was specifically an objective, to stop another case of elitist contempt for dirt people to cause more blowback.
I certainly spared no effort in rubbing their faces in that truth of them in every way I could come up with. Agotrop is a powerful medium. They have no defense against the truth of things, and they offer noting. A cake made of marxian madness feces is still a cake made of feces no matter how much you slather on the buttercream frosting.
There used to be quite a few really sneaky cunning troll’s among Mr Z mans commentariat, it was fun as all get out triggering them, especially the gamma’s, holy cow sometimes they would come unglued, let alone the brainwashed resistance is futile mentality of surrender before lord forbid even thinking of resistance to the statist-quo hegemony. Resistance is always Fertile. And Liberty is very dangerous. Not for the lazy either. I have come to think it scares the living crap out of a pretty large plurality of Murican’s!.
Oh Thou Concepts of Scripture where art thou?
It’s wonderful to see how the species 5th column academia & basement troglodyte troll have withered on the vine as the conduit of money from the swamp creatures and their bedfellows has dried up wrecking so much of muh woke resistance’s Clinton/Soros networks.
Payroll Patriots of a higher calling indeed.
Rhodes’ & Pulitzer’s Yellow Media legacy column for you.
They are indeed a most dangerous enemy of our Republic, they and their humanist, revisionists and alterers/disappears of our founding documented archival history.
Hey, you ever read Gary Norths masterpiece, Conspiracy in Philadelphia? His amazing outlier, he write after his theory about Political Polytheism?
There’s a really nice fellow, runs his Revised History Blog, Al Benson Jr, the guy wrote a tiny masterpiece of his own on North’s CinP,
https://revisedhistory.wordpress.com/2014/11/10/if-liberty-was-the-object-why-did-they-give-us-centralism/
It’s a dandy in my book.
Al, and the incredibly indomitable Gary Hunt,
http://outpost-of-freedom.com/blog/
(one of the finest true citizen investigative journalists in existence, Julian Assange has nothing on Gary, and that is given in entirely complimentary intent in every facet), dare’s where not many go but for the Grace of God, like the men who stepped of LCI’s on Omaha beach. Gary was “dieseled” for two weeks back and forth across the lower 48, to shut him up in his coverage of the witch trial, by the Oregon obama sycophant district court, even though he lived in California, had a gag order placed on him and Fed agents sent to pick him up, talk about attainders of writ, old Soviet type police state stuff, during the weaponized DOJ politikal obot show trial after the Mauler Wildlife Refuge protest, the survivor’s of the Clinton ordered hit to stop the dissemination of their crime syndicate’s part in Uranium One, FBI’s ambuscade & execution of LeVoy Finnicum and failure to murder the rest in LeVoy’s caravan on their way to handover the documentary evidence they found on the refuge’s BLM’s computers, detailing the lengths they had been going to eliminating the cattle ranchers ancestral grazing/water rights along with destitution tactics, to bankrupt them thru judicial extortion in order to clear them off their lands so the mining rights where clear to give to the Russians, like how they have persecuted Gen. Flynn, stopping LeVoy literally dead in his tracks in a snow bank, on the way to the Sheriff of the next county over from Burns.
Trump has maintained continuously these scum are unbelievably stone cold corrupt, and how so much of America is just not ready to accept the truth of how evil the globohomo syndicate is.
Look at Malig-Nancy, and her swamp creature faction, these last couple days, this is stuff phsyco’s do.
Not Sociopaths.
Psychopaths.
As in Zero compassion or empathy, not lack of it, total absence of it.
The ultimate in having no prudence. Probably the greatest issue of our time.
That, for my part for what it’s worth, Prudence in all things, how I was raised, how it’s not so much grit, it’s the imperative of us White Christian Men of The West, our survival, our codes, culture of 2000 years of Athenian/Greco/Roman history, the hard won long learned virtues of avoiding the fate of the premature dirt nap of our civilization, depends on that great thing called Prudence.
It’s the victim stance, a most powerful one, it’s inherent absence of the human extinction movement of prudence is so destructive.
They only have to be lucky once. Us Men of The West have to be lucky every day.
The great thing I think about Mr. Trump, the really great thing, is he doesn’t loose his nerve, has amazingly avoided wrastling the alligators in the swamp. Thats a prime element of success when you go to war with what you have. Not To Loose Your Cool. They can’t win, can’t beat us if we keep our nerve.
As Andrew Breitbart stated so sublimely, “our culture is upstream of poltiks”, indeedy deed, I miss the guy so much, what a warrior, I believe they killed him because he was natural a leader, he was too happy, they held him in such vile contempt for it, had their numbers too, he had acquired too much open source grass roots power, power these tyrants can only dream of having, and their growing crisis of legitimacy is causing panic, as Andrew also said, “they can’t win, they can only win the rhetorical war, and we have guns, lots of guns….I’m not joking”
Lets Win!
I found your blog post by searching Google for the quote “you go to war with the army you have” in trying to formulate a response to a friend who cannot understand how I could possibly have decided to vote for Donald Trump in November despite…. everything. Well, I just sent him your post with a pull-out quote from your shorthand anecdote response. It says all I ever wanted to say on the subject. Thanks!