A dynamic presidency

In American Greatness, historian Victor Davis Hanson brings to our attention a Trump biography by Conrad Black entitled Donald J. Trump A President Like No Other. Hanson writes,

Trump’s methods are fully explicable by what he has always done in the past—in the sometimes troubling, but more often reassuring, sense.



...Black is neither a hagiographer nor an ankle-biter. He seeks to understand Trump within the three prominent landscapes in which Americans had come to know their new president: politics, the celebrity world, and the cannibalistic arena of high-stakes Manhattan real estate and finance. Of the three, Black is most jaded about the anti-Trump hysteria within the first two, not because the real estate business is inherently a nobler profession, but because it more often lacks the moral preening and hypocrisies of both the beltway and tabloids. The result is an argument that the first president to have neither prior political nor military service nevertheless has his own demonstrable skill sets that are making his presidency far more dynamic than either his critics or supporters quite imagined. Black’s unspoken assumption is that it is more difficult to build a skyscraper in Manhattan than to be a career politician or an evening news reader.

What made Trump different from his competitors? Likely, his cunning, his almost Thucydidean reading of human nature, and his sixth sense about timing and salesmanship. In Plutarchian fashion, Black focuses on Trump’s physicality, especially his boundless energy and his impatience with nuance and self-doubt (“desperate cunning, unflagging determination, unshakeable self-confidence, ruthless Darwinian instincts of survival, and a sublime assurance that celebrity will heal all wounds”). Of course, the media and politicians were not ready for the naked applicability of these traits to the White House. But, as Black notes, the American people after decades of misgovernance were—as if to let loose Trump on their country as both avenger and deliverer.

...For Black, Trump became president because he outworked and outhustled his competitors, because he saw that most seasoned politicians were split-the-difference 51 percent hedgers—and that the country by 2016 desperately wanted some sort of Samson to tear down the pillars of a complacent if not corrupt establishment, even if they and their deliverer might sometimes be injured in the rubble.

Black instinctively captures the essence of the Trump paradox: How did someone supposedly so crude, so mercantile, and so insensitive display a sensitivity to the forgotten people that was lost both on his Republican competitors and Hillary Clinton? Certainly, no one on stage at any of the debates worried much about 40 percent of the country written off as John McCain’s “crazies,” Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” and “irredeemables,” and Barack Obama’s “clingers,” who were judged wanting for not capitalizing on the bicoastal dividends of American-led globalism.

Black notes the Trump-hinterland synergy. The country was looking for a third alternative to both free-market economics and neo-socialism, and yet again to both political correctness and the Republican often groveling surrender to it. Or as Black puts it, “Trump’s rise was an expression of sub-revolutionary anger by a wide swath of dissatisfied and mainly not overly prosperous or influential people.” But he adds that Trump was no third-party Ross Perot “charlatan” (or, for that matter, a Quixotic Ralph Nader), who came off quirky and without a workable agenda. Trump took a path that was far different from third-party would-be revolutionaries, in seeking to appropriate rather than to run against the apparatus of one of the two major political parties.

Most experts discounted Trump’s “make American great again” visions as anachronistic in the age of Silicon Valley cool, “peak oil,” the “knowledge-based” economy, and the “information age.” Trump doubled down and became even louder about free but fair trade, legal, diverse, and meritocratic immigration, “drill, baby, drill” oil policy, lower taxes and smaller government, an end to identity politics and political correctness, and a Jacksonian deterrent foreign policy that avoided both optional nation-building and the “blame America first” apologetics of Barack Obama’s “lead-from-behind” internationalism. Only half the country was ready for the Trump message (and perhaps less than that for the messenger)—but it was the more electorally important half in the key swing states of Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Trump assumed that even in the age of high techies and billionaire financiers, one can still not build a tower without the muscular labor of welders, cement layers, and glass installers.

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