Grand Delusion

The Trumpist Intellectuals Wake Up

There is a word for being perpetually behind. A little slow. Not quick on the uptake. As a society, we have largely decided that it’s not one that civilized people should use: it’s cruel and denigrates the genuinely vulnerable among us. But what else can you call it when it has only just dawned on certain people that something might be a little off with this Trump guy? Example: Sohrab Ahmari, who writes in UnHerd (so-called perhaps because no one is listening:)

Psychoanalysis speaks of “determination by the signifier”: the way people end up inhabiting the picture of them inscribed by others (parents, social institutions, and the like). You become what they say you are. Just so, Trump the war-wary populist has now fully given way to his liberal caricature: venal, erratic, childish, a chaos agent. Ordinary Americans do their best to protect their pocketbooks and 401(k) accounts from his whims; other world leaders increasingly look beyond him in preparing for the unstable international order he will leave behind.

Psychoanalysis also speaks of having your head up your own ass. The obvious retort is that the liberal caricature was not a caricature at all. It’s just the plain facts of the matter that anybody with eyes in their head can see. If you lacked an education or worldliness, maybe, maybe, you could be excused for falling for it. But an adult with a college education and a basic familiarity with the facts of life should have been able to see it coming. The only way you could talk yourself into believing Trump was anything other than a two-bit real estate hustler who elbowed his way onto the world stage was either ambition or delusion. It must be the latter, because the former can hardly be sated by his present employment. Maybe he was hoping to get into the court by playing lackey for JD Vance. For his trouble, Ahmari is now editor of a third-tier magazine. Why, Sohrab, it profits a man nothing to sell his soul for the whole world…but to edit UnHerd? Determination by the signifier, indeed. This is what happens when pretentions and pomposity get the better of the instinct for self-preservation: one becomes a buffoon. So it’s not a case of mental debility at all—again, that would be grossly unfair to the disabled who are innocent of this sin—but of willful self-delusion.

Ahmari is himself a bit of a charlatan who periodically picks up and drops intellectual positions for effect, so you can understand how he’d try out this bullshit, but Christopher Caldwell seems to me like a serious man. But still, he manages to feel disappointed by Trump at this late date and to believe nonsense like this: ‘Contrary to its portrayal in the newspapers, Trumpism was a movement of democratic restoration.” No, it really was not. It was always a con job. He goes on to write:

No one who witnessed Trump’s bravery after being hit with a would-be assassin’s bullet in Pennsylvania in 2024 will doubt he has character. But his virtues are not the ones you need to run a free country. Never has a president so availed himself of the public trust to line his own pockets. Trump welcomed Qatar’s offer of a new presidential airplane intended as a personal gift; he established a personal memecoin into which petitioners for presidential favor could drop multimillion-dollar contributions. We could go on.

Donald Trump? Corrupt? My word! Using the words “virtue” and “character” with a straight face in reference to Trump is patently ridiculous. So is this projection:

Trump has indeed made progress in fixing the deep state. His supporters like to think of him as a rough-hewn, corner-cutting, hard-bargainer of the Andrew Jackson sort, with the fortitude to ignore pleas from special interests.

But there has always been a red line: Americans did not expect Trump’s character flaws to endanger them in the realm of foreign policy. America’s Iran policy has been made over the past year by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Trump’s real-estate crony Steve Witkoff, working in consultation with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Both Kushner and Witkoff carry the title “special envoy for peace,” but neither of them has been confirmed by the Senate, as top diplomats and cabinet members must be. Kushner did not even release a financial-disclosure statement. So these two go to the Middle East to discuss with Netanyahu what to do about Iran. Netanyahu lays out Israel’s priorities, which involve, at the very least, disarming Iran. What American priorities are Kushner and Witkoff advancing?

…

Kushner and Witkoff are neither financiers nor diplomats by trade, but real-estate moguls. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, with President Trump in attendance, the pair unveiled an artist’s rendition of a gigantic, Dubai-esque oceanfront development called “New Gaza,” complete with a timeline for its construction. Of course, ground couldn’t be broken until the property had been purchased by whoever planned to develop it, unless Israel planned to neutralize the place by force of arms in the meantime.

I would bet quite a bit of money that a good deal of Trump’s supporters don’t even know Andrew Jackson is the guy on the twenty. They had no such expectations. They are smarter than Caldwell and Ahmari in a way because they elected Trump because he seemed like an unscrupulous gangster and thought that’s what the country needed. They still do: I’m not sure the war is as unpopular with Trump’s base as Caldwell wishes; they like it because Trump tells them to. That’s because they aren’t hardscrabble Jacksonian democrats chewing on corncob pipes and leaning on their rifles; they are addled boomers who watch Fox News for 12 hours a day. And, I’m sorry: many, many Americans did very much expect Trump’s character flaws to endanger them in the realm of foreign policy. For example, this American. It was extremely easy to see this coming. As I wrote in 2024:

Let’s also consider the consequences of Trump’s foreign policy with respect to Israel and Palestine. Allow me a Trumpian locution: Trump is the worst president we ever had on Palestine. That’s because he basically understands nothing about it and doesn’t really give a shit about it. What opinions he does have are guided by reflexive Islamophobia. And because he doesn’t care that much about it, he defers to people in his circle who actually do, who are either fanatics or amateurs. People like his ambassador to Israel David Friedman, once an attorney for the Trump organization, who has strong ties to the settler movement and organizations opposed to a two state solution. Or the Adelsons, who basically shaped Trump’s entire failed approach to the region. Or, Jared Kushner, his idiot son-in-law whose main qualification in this area is that he happens to be Jewish. (I think this is literally how Trump thinks: “Oh, Jared can do it, he’s Jewish. Oh, get David for it, he talks about Israel a lot. Israel guy. Oh, Sheldon, told me this, Miriam, told me that.”) These people are not diplomats, they are not spies, they are not statesmen, they are some schmucks off the street. That’s exactly who you are voting for when you vote for Trump: Schmucks off the street.

I can claim no particular sagacity in the realm of foreign policy: I was simply paying attention. And so were tens of millions of other Americans. Truly, the only people who could be this dumb are intellectuals. It’s exactly as Arendt observed when she noted how intellectuals in Germany “made up ideas about Hitler…Completely fantastic and interesting and complicated things.” Just relax—I’m not saying Trump is literally Hitler; I’m saying that this is the same failure of judgment Arendt spoke of: it’s the same incapacity to apply the correct concepts to the situation, namely that the person in question is a criminal lunatic.

As has been noted many times, the historical character Trump most resembles is, perhaps, Napoleon III—or, at least, Karl Marx’s caricature of him, as “An old, crafty roué, [who] conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery.” The pettiest knavery. Just please call it—at long last—for what it is.