In
the worst President ever category, Donald J. Trump, despite
44 predecessors, easily outstripped the competition. He was
the least organized, the least knowledgeable, the least honest,
the least gracious, least dignified, least democratic, the
most self-absorbed, most impeached. Though no longer in office,
the list continues to grow; both civil and criminal
charges are pending, including insurance and
tax fraud, and falsifying business records.
During his unprecedentedly controversial presidency, what
hasn't been entered into the public domain, and as such is
a curious oversight by both devotees and detractors, is that
Trump is the least edited, or in philosophic terms, the most
(by sheer inadvertence) authentic President in history. One
reason Trump is so loathed -- he left office with the lowest
approval rating (29%) in the history of the
presidency -- is that he has revealed more of his true character,
multiple warts and all, than any other President. And since
he paid dearly for it, one must wonder why, over and against
the counsel of his closest advisors and confidants, he refused
to make any concession to being liked, to keeping his demons
on tight leash?
In
all of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s remarkable novels -- The
Idiot, Crime and Punishment and Brothers Karamazov --
we repeatedly encounter characters who suddenly, inexplicably,
do or say something that goes totally against their self-
interest.
Whether during courtship, a business affair, a wedding party
or family reunion, for no apparent reason, a character will
reveal an outrageously negative aspect of himself regarding
manners, pride, vulgarity or envy, and in a single, uncalculated
stroke destroy an outcome he may have been patiently nurturing
over a considerable period of time. But counter intuitively,
the character doesn't suffer in the reader's estimation because
he has dared to reveal himself as he truly is; stripped of
all pretence and dissimulation.
Whether
we like him or not, or voted for him or not, we all feel we
know who is 'the real' Donald J. Trump, especially compared
to all past presidents. Paraphrasing Montaigne, every time
he opens his mouth he is confessing who he is: the good, and
the considerable bad and the ugly.
And
what we learned most from Trump's impromptu confessions during
his presidency was how raw and unabating was his craving for
absolute power, a craving that was consummated in the January
6th (2021) attempt to overturn a democratically vouchsafed
election result. But it would be a mistake to regard the mindset
that informed Trump's -- as the left would have it -- call
to insurrection as unique or aberrant.
There
is no one, and that includes democratically elected leaders,
who, once in possession of power and influence, wants to relinquish
it. Competing for power, its privileges and exemptions, is
a primordial drive that governs the animal world which includes
the king of the beasts. There doesn't exist a leader in the
world who wouldn't rather rule by fiat than have to submit
to a protracted consultative process, the end result of which
can be produced by a simple authoritarian command.
If
every democratically elected leader suffers in secret from
dictator envy, no one has illuminated that condition more
than Trump, who, after 226 years of safekeeping, yanked it
out of the closet and shoved it into our faces for 1,460 days.
Whether it can be put back under lock and key where it belongs,
whether democracy in America will ever again be the same,
remains to be seen.
What
is common to all dictators, despots and tyrants -- with the
blessings of human nature -- is their insistence on absolute
loyalty. Who among us doesn't want to be surrounded and protected
by a circle of loyal friends, advisors and confidants?
What
sets apart the family unit from all other forms of assembly
are its terms of unconditionality. To our own, we unconditionally
offer succour and support regardless of merit. What distinguished
Trump from all other presidents is that he made no secret
that he wanted to be surrounded by loyalists, a team of YesSirs,
beginning with family and friends who could be counted on
to toe the President's line regardless of what was in the
best interest of the nation. From the very outset of his rule,
he replaced competent office holders with mostly incompetent
or unqualified loyalists. According to the Brookings Institution,
the turnover rate during Trump's four year term was an astounding
92%. That America suffered nationally and internationally
mattered not a whit to Trump for whom loyalty trumped all
other considerations. And he didn't hide his priorities, that
is he did not disingenuously pay lip service to the oath of
office (to serve the nation) and centuries-deep principles
of American democracy for which he had no practical use.
Making
America great counted for nothing next to his obsession with
the greatness he wanted for himself. And yet his frankness,
his God-given artlessness was apparently so refreshing (inspiring)
that it resonated and still resonates with millions of Americans
who in 2016 announced that they had had enough of duplicitous
Presidents who say one thing and do the opposite, who vow
to level the playing field but continue to allow corporations
to funnel billions of dollars into off-shore tax havens, who
unfailingly do the corporation’s bidding before the
nation’s.
Despite
the tonnage of bad press, Trump never tried to hide the fact
that he is a pathological prevaricator. Instead, through remarkable
sleight-of-mind -- at least in his own mind -- he quite brilliantly
recontextualized his mendacities into strategic adjuncts to
the maintenance and exercise of power. No matter how brazen
or outrageous the lie, on each and every occasion it served
one end: to maintain an iron grip on power in the context
of democracy where power lies with the voter and his consent.
Playing to the myriad aggregates of special interest groups
and their agendas, Trump told them what they wanted to hear,
and it was immaterial whether it was the truth or a lie. It
was all about consent. Even Noam
Chomsky, the author of Manufacturing Consent,
would agree that no one in the history of the presidency has
been able to manufacture consent like Donald J. Trump. It
discombobulates the mind that during the past decade Trump
paid
more in taxes to Taiwan than Uncle Sam and
yet 74.2 million people voted for him in a losing cause. It
is no less flummoxing that an arrogant, bloviating multi-billionaire
is now the champion of the working class, that a plutocrat
is the toast of the proletariat.
Like
no other President, Trump didn't care what a particular voting
group represented in terms of its values and beliefs. During
Charlottesville, he implicitly legitimized the white supremacy
movement. He has refused to criticize the loony QAnon faction
of the Republican party, and yet Trump is neither a racist
nor white supremacist. He is a master calculator and no one
has so blatantly whored for the vote than the 45th Commander-in-Chief.
Unlike
any other President, Trump understood that the power of the
presidency resides in its mythical underpinnings than the
powers invested in the office. That insight allowed him to
singlehandedly turn his presidency into a quasi cult. Trump
didn't want to be merely respected; he wanted to be adored,
revered, worshipped. He wanted us to believe what he privately
believed: that his remarkable ascent to becoming the most
powerful being in the world was of the same order as The Divine
Right of Kings. When Trump spoke his word became The Word,
multiplied by millions of adorers. Jan. 6th was Trump's greatest
triumph as thousands of people, flouting both the laws of
the land and the principles of democracy, stormed The US Capitol
Building in an expression of unconditional loyalty to their
hero/saviour. Somewhere in the hell of his own confection,
David Koresh is smiling.
In
August 2020, Trump, for whom the humility card is a non-starter,
tweeted that he would like his portrait added to Mount Rushmore
next to Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln. Implied
in his wish is that the condition of greatness need not be
derived from consensus or competence but from self-estimation.
What is of significance here is that he didn't try to veil
his megalomania, his off-the charts self-esteem, his unhinged
self-adoration. To make his Rushmore candidacy more palatable,
he could have cajoled one of his YesSirs to float the idea
-- but that would have been out of character.
If
Trump somehow manages to reinvent himself as a tragic figure,
it is surely due to the circumstance of his birth than the
disputed election result. For when all is said and written,
it was Trump's awful luck to be born in the USA under democratic
rule. He inherited a political system least suited to his
temperament. Democracy was the ball-and-chain, the dead weight
he had to carry every day of his presidency. He should have
been born in Uganda, Zimbabwe, Liberia, countries where the
incumbent wins every election. There, Trump would have ruled
for life, and as a fitting bookend to his reign, if there
were an African equivalent of Mount Rushmore (Mount Kilimanjaro),
Trump would have earned his rightful place in stone beside
the likes of Robert Mugawi, Charles Taylor, P.W. Botha, Yoweri
Museveni et al.
With
so much unprecedentedly known of an American President, is
it still possible to detest the man for his defective character
and the shameless manner in which he put blind ambition above
the people he was elected to serve, and yet admire him for
his forthrightness, his frankness, his authenticity?
As
we dig deep into the substrata of human motivation, H.
L. Mencken reminds us that we are "still a mere organism
in the end, a brother to the wild things and the protozoa,
swayed by the same inscrutable fortunes, condemned by
the same inchoate errors and irresolutions, and surrounded
by the same terror and darkness . . . "
As
unwaveringly authentic (real) as Trump was during his presidency,
we must disabuse ourselves of the notion that aspiring to
authenticity was one of his pet projects. In point of fact
Trump would be hard pressed to enjoin an intelligent conversation
on the subject. That Trump is incapable of editing himself
is a consequence of his constitution, and we shouldn't admire
him for it just as we don't admire someone who has never smoked
for not smoking.
But
it is quite proper to ask that as the most unedited, transparent
President ever, if Trump shouldn’t be granted special
status or a personal exemption at the seat of judgment? Both
the short and the long answer must be an emphatic NO, while
acknowledging that because of who he is, he made it spectacularly
easier to articulate all the reasons why we should have or
shouldn't have voted for him.
If
there was a silver lining to the dysfunctional (chaotic) Trump
presidency, it is that 'We the People' now know that CEOs
are virtual dictators and are therefore not constitutionally
fit to operate within the constraints of democracy. And if
'We the People' are unhappy with the way Presidents are chosen
-- the obscene sums of money that are required to run for
the highest office -- the rules of the game will have to be
changed in favour of competency and fitness for office.
Is
it not the supreme challenge of not just the USA but every
country to identify that one person out of millions who is
best qualified to take his or her nation to a better place?
Isn't that what we want of our system of governance, no less
than we want the best trained and most competent pilots flying
our planes, and most skilled surgeons repairing our bodies?
It
is still not too late for America to rise to the occasion
of answering that summons, if only to ensure its continued
high ranking among the nations of the world.
