Sunday, 14 July 2024

Making Trump great again

 

Donald Trump did not suddenly become a different person because he survived an assassination attempt. He did not become a better candidate. The flaws in his character will remain. But it is quite certain now that he has won the presidency. The shooting revealed a side of his character that will define the election and define it in his favour. Bravery and defiance.

Joe Biden is a decent man. A better man than Trump. But he has become weak, and it is quite clear now that he is unfit to lead anything let alone the free world.



Trump has all of the character flaws of George Patton, Ulysses Grant and Douglas MacArthur, but he is also the sort of man who would say “I intend to fight it out along this line if it takes all summer” and then do exactly that. Sometimes you need a leader with such flaws, though as Grant proved they often make poor presidents.

Trump is a poor loser. His response to losing the election in 2020 was disgraceful. Even if he sincerely believed that he had been robbed he should have used exclusively democratic and legal means to fight his cause. Democracy is above all about accepting defeat. Without that we are reduced to forms of tyranny and eventually fighting it out with clubs.

But sometimes it can be a virtue to be a poor loser. Grant, Patton and MacArthur were poor losers, for which reason they won in the end.

Trump is a womaniser. He has had numerous wives and numerous affairs. Rich and powerful men can behave that way. Ordinary men can’t though many wish they could. Trump transcends ordinariness and transcends the sexual morality that applies to everyone else. Our judgements barely touch him, they merely graze his ear like the bullet that would have killed someone else.

Trump is a criminal. He has been convicted by the courts. But criminal convictions only ruin those of us who have jobs that we could lose and reputations that are the foundations upon which we build our lives.

Being convicted doesn’t touch those of us who are below this for which reason a shop lifter doesn’t care at all if he is convicted. It also does not touch those of us who are above this. Napoleon gets away with his whiff of grapeshot on 13 Vendémiaire and Trump gets away with all the results of lawfare because everyone can see such trials for what they are.

Trump lacks judgement, but until the final year ruined by Covid his presidency was quite good. He did well domestically and in terms of foreign policy. Trump is willing to defy orthodoxy and that can be dangerous, but it also be effective.

Trump is an isolationist, and his instincts are protectionist. This puts him in the mainstream of American history. It is bad for a Europe that has relied too long on American might. It is bad for China, which has gained from free trade without reciprocating the deal, but it is not clear that it is bad for America.

Trump is certainly too old. It would be better by far if the contest was between too able governors in their forties or fifties, but the difference between Biden and Trump is not merely two years. If Biden had been shot in the ear it is unclear that he would have been even aware of it. Trump needed to be ushered off the stage by the FBI because he was shot, Biden frequently needs to be ushered off the stage when he has not been shot.

Trump’s thinking can at times be wild and his statements can be so provocative as to appear deranged. Inviting Russia to invade those NATO countries that don’t pay their way was just that. But while actually not making it any more likely that Russia would take him up on the invite, it did make it much more likely that those countries did pay their way.

The only way now that the Democrats can beat Trump is by jailing him, shooting him or ditching Biden. Whatever the Democrats have thrown at Trump he has become still stronger. So much so that he is now shaking his fist at them.

When general James Longstreet was wounded in the Wilderness in 1864 his first concern was to show his victorious troops that he was still alive. Trump’s instinct is the same. It makes it more likely that those troops will continue the battle and win it.

It is just possible that a competent Democrat candidate thirty or forty years younger than Trump could give him a contest, but even that is now too little and too late. The Democrats are going to be punished for pretending that Joe Biden was fit to lead in 2020 and still more so when it has become obvious even to those who hate Trump in 2024.

I would far rather have Ronald Reagan leading the free world in 2024. Trump could have a very good second term, but there are also great dangers in relying on a man whose character and judgement are so flawed.

But if you were on Omaha beach in June 1944, you would rather have a man who was brave and defiant than a man who thought he was in Oman.

If I had just survived someone shooting at my head, I would have been above all scared. My instinct would have been to cower and hide. Trump’s instinct was to shake his fist at the shooter and the world that has tried so hard to bring him down. In that if in nothing else he has touched what makes some leaders great.

He may just make America great again.


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