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.
