Donald Trump is a Great Man of History
“…A year ago, Trump was finished. The swank people who tell us what to think had written him off. There he was, staggering under scores of indictments in at least four separate jurisdictions. Would he not be bankrupted, incarcerated, swept ignominiously into the dustbin of history?
Somehow, Trump not only survived but thrived. Did he merely ride the cresting wave of the Zeitgeist or also help define it? The same question might be asked of Caesar, Napoleon, FDR, or Ronald Reagan.
There are still some flaccid, hand-ringing mutterers who can’t absorb the reality of what Donald Trump represents. He represents beneficent change. The anti-Trump whiners congregate in their faculty lounges, their DEI workshops, their climate-change seminars in Aspen. Here and there one finds pods of sad people like Chris Mayes, the Attorney General of Arizona, who has vowed to resist aspects of Trump’s immigration efforts. One might as well vow to resist a tornado.
Elsewhere, in the real world, what had been an anti-Trump consensus is disintegrating. Even Politico has absorbed an inkling of the truth. Trump is, a recent column tells us, “someone with an ability to perceive opportunities that most politicians do not and forge powerful, sustained connections with large swaths of people in ways that no contemporary can match. In other words: He is a force of history.”
The title of that column is revealing. “Time to Admit It: Trump Is a Great President. He’s Still Trying To Be a Good One.” The charge that has most often been levelled against Trump is that he is a man of “bad character”. Even the patently absurd claims that Trump is a “fascist” (General Mark Milley reportedly called him that) or “literally Hitler” follow from the judgment that Trump is just too naff for words, an aesthetic determination that quickly shades into moral obloquy.
I think there are two things to be said about this. Let me turn to Horace Walpole for the first. “No country was ever saved by good men,” Walpole once observed, “because good men will not go to the length that may be necessary”…”