Who Is Donald Trump?

1,708 words

Biden is out. Trump is in. Is that a good thing for those of us who wonder if we were awake for the last four years or in an extended nightmare populated by a rogues’ gallery of psychopaths, racketeers, grafters, swindlers, weirdos and sundry lowlifes? All of whom appeared to have crawled out of that dark and fetid swamp; none of whom you would trust with your money, your safety or your children.

Here, however, is the problem with the question, at this point. No one I know can truly say: who Trump is. Or what Trump is. Maybe it depends on what the meaning of “is” is, per Bill Clinton, whose devotion to the truth was surpassed only by that of his highly principled misses, Our Lady of Chappaqua.

However, we do know who Joe Biden is, or better now, was, and anyone who followed what the old coot had been up to before 2021 could have easily predicted that post-2021 would be an orgy of corruption, maleficence and outright criminality. Joe Robinette, a serial plagiarizer, inveterate braggart and habitual buffoon, in charge of the government was like Ted Bundy running a battered women’s shelter. He did pretty much all you would expect (predict) given his clinical dementia, Obama’s patronage, the opportunists and ideologues pulling his strings, the absence of a serious opposition party and the state-run media managing the optics. The Party brass finally had to give him the heave-ho and replace him with a bungling, boozy valley girl whose singular distinction had to do with affirmative action. You must have thought that all the Democrats had left to offer the voters was nihilism – governing just for the hell of it!

Biden’s presidential performance as a life-long, Democrat, swamp-creature was predictable. Revoltingly, stupidly predictable.

Trump, however, is frustratingly, disconcertingly unpredictable. Which bring us to the question: who is Donald Trump?

Does anyone really know? We do know what he is not.

Since he rode down the golden escalator in Trump tower, June 2015, to announce his presidential candidacy, the vast legions of his enemies and detractors quickly drew the conclusion that he must be a “fascist,” with all the trappings: bigotry, intolerance and racism. A reaction of this sort comes from a logically disjunctive Manichean mindset permanently locked in the year 1939. “Good” is embodied in the “religion” of liberal democracy with its worship of “equality” and its embrace of the pathologies of wokeism. “Evil” must be the negation of liberal democracy as manifest in the person – do I have to say it? – okay, Hitler. Trump had risen up to affirm the interests and traditional values of white working-class Americans over the brown masses flooding across the southern border, a constituency of the needy and oppressed deemed the future of liberal democracy, and – dare I say it? – the new face of America. That made Trump an enemy of liberal democracy, an evil person, which, of course, was very scary and suddenly it was 1939 once again. Only Hitler this time had an orange comb-over instead of a Charlie Chaplin moustache.

Except, Trump is not a fascist, at least not in any remotely historical sense of what that term means, as I argued an article written several years ago. Anyone with the slightest familiarity with the biographies of Mussolini (fascism’s founder), Hitler (the German version), Oswald Mosley (the British version) – the original fascists, the “gold standard” to which Trump is constantly compared – would know how absurd the comparison is. Trump doesn’t claim to be a fascist and probably resents being called one. The Big Three proudly announced themselves to the world as fascists. They strutted around in black and brown uniforms, staged massive parades with banners, made the stiff-armed Roman salute every ten minutes, and bragged about how superior fascists were to everyone else.

While claiming superiority, mainly for himself, Trump has never called himself a fascist and never dressed like one. He called himself a Democrat for a while, rubbed shoulders with the Clintons. For a time, he said he was an independent. This was before he became a Republican and comically wiped the floor with the pre-selected doofuses like Jeb Bush in the 2016 Presidential primaries. The video montage from the Republican primary debates and the look on hapless Jeb’s face, as Trump in his inimitable carnival-show-hawker style heaped deserved scorn upon him, is priceless entertainment. The incredulous MSM talking heads sputtered and fumed – first reduced to mocking him, shortly after which he became a “fascist.” And, so he has remained so up through the 2024 Presidential election.

Ask yourself: Why in the world would Trump, who worships success, “winners,” identify in any possible way with three colossal losers, whose careers terminated with suicide, a firing squad, and prison? Look how things turned out for George Lincoln Rockwell.

Is Trump a crypto-fascist? Don’t be silly. From World Wrestling Entertainment impresario to Der Fuhrer? One cannot be a serious fascist over a long period of time, even secretly, without giving some indications. When he rode down the elevator, Trump was 71 years old. Before he ran for President in 2015 no one seemed to have the slightest clue or fear that he was Mussolini redux, plotting “the destruction of our democracy.” This was after decades as a high profile, New York City entrepreneur, a media celebrity, a serial monogamist with a decadent playboy lifestyle that invited national attention, attention that he greatly relished.

After so many years in the spotlight with no indication, just when did Trump become the whatever-sort-of fascist he is supposed to be? Did Hillary Clinton suspect that Trump was a fascist when she sat in that front row seat at his wedding to Melania?

People don’t, all of a sudden, become fascists in their late 60s. Fascism is, or was, a young man’s sort of thing. Mussolini, Hitler, and Mosley, all three were combat veterans from the WWI trenches, deeply disillusioned with the outcome, and radicalized at relatively early ages in the aftermath. They were openly hostile to and alienated from their countries’ political establishment. Trump was an ambitious rich kid who skipped Vietnam, became a workaholic hedonist, got even richer, then got bored and turned to politics later in life. He was never alienated from American society, rather one of its more colorful jet-setters.

Perhaps Trump is a Fascist but doesn’t know that he is one. So, whatever it is that he might think he is, he is confused, clueless or deluded and must really be a fascist without realizing it. Donald Trump doesn’t strike me be as a particularly introspective or self-reflective man, and being a fascist, psychologically speaking, I am confident to say, is a lot like being a communist, a socialist or a feminist. It demands serious introspection. You think, reflect, then put into play a tightly (fanatically?) embraced set of priorities because you firmly believe the world is not currently the way it should be, and you are determined to fix it. Many unflattering things can be said about Donald Trump, but “fanatic” is not one of them.

So, whatever Donald Trump was and is, rest assured, he is not, never was, and never will be a fascist – not a swashbuckling one, not a secret one, not an unaware one.

What else is Trump not? As noted above, he is not a serious, reflective thinker. He’s not religious. He has no discernable political philosophy with a set of principles that would guide him through difficult decision-making or the formation of his policies, and give him a consistent direction. Which accounts in part for his unpredictability. A “conservative”? A “liberal”? A “libertarian”? None of these or others I might propose are handles we can use to tell us what Trump will do in a given situation.

Is he an unprincipled opportunist, unlike, say, Hillary Clinton?

What Trump is, I believe, is a man profoundly changed by his entry into the political arena relatively late in life. The level and volume of vituperation, scorn and calumny poured down on him by the smart set of which he had been a part appear to be unprecedented in the history of American politics. Trump Derangement Syndrome should be covered in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Every conceivable effort by the establishment was unleashed to destroy him, including bankruptcy and criminal prosecution.

All of this, I believe, brought about a conversion of sorts. Trump appears to be a different man than he was in 2015. In that conversion, he gathered up an extraordinary sense of purpose and determination, guided by instinct and intuition, with which he launched a political resurrection no American politician had ever before done. For all of his shortcomings, his powers of will and endurance in the face of enormous adversity are simple phenomenal. To achieve what he did one senses motives beyond a vainglorious ego or a craving for adulation, and that he has persisted because does have a love for his country and a vision of a better America for, as he said in his 1st Inaugural Address , “[t]he forgotten men and women of our country [who] will be forgotten no longer.”

With his convincing election mandate from last November, he is now poised to be a much different President than the first time around. Will he be? He remains an enigma and unpredictable. But there are still many who think they know him. For those that hate him he will remain the caricature “fascist.” Those that love him believe that he will “make America great again.”

And there are those of us who still don’t know him, but we see that during the last four years the ruling class has taken off the gloves. We know that it regards white, Christian, traditional Americans as “the enemy” and intends the very worse for us and our progeny. We know that Kamala Harris’s election would have continued the rolling catastrophe of Obama and Biden. With Trump there is hope that he will change the course, that he will demonstrate that he is on the side of those Americans currently being replaced, pardon the J6 demonstrators and Derreck Chauvin, shut down the war in Ukraine, and deport illegal immigrants…for starters. Soon we will know if Trump II is for real.