Trump: A buyer’s guide

In the weeks since I wrote on the dilemma that Donald Trump has put social conservatives in, the problem has only become far more pronounced.  Trump has stated that a second Trump administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”  His running mate J. D. Vance has said that if a national abortion ban were passed by Congress, Trump would veto it.  Though claiming to support pro-life measures at the state level, Trump says that in Florida, abortion should be legal even past the first six weeks of pregnancy.  And he has said that in a second Trump administration, the government would either pay for, or require insurance companies to pay for, all costs associated with IVF treatment – even though IVF treatments kill more embryos every year than abortion does, so that an IVF mandate would be even worse than Obama’s notorious contraception mandate.  Trump has also come out in support of legalizing marijuana for recreational use.

Meanwhile, new Trump advisor Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. informs us that Trump has made it clear to him that he won’t be influenced by “right-wing assholes” anymore and will be “listening to more than just that kind of narrow right-wing band that people are terrified of” so that “people are going to see a very different President Trump than they did during the first term.”  He says that he and his fellow former Democrat (and still liberal) Tulsi Gabbard are “going to be on [Trump’s] transition committee picking the people who are going to govern.”  Kennedy, it will be recalled, recently opined that abortion should be legal even at “full-term,” and allowed for some vague restrictions only after the outcry his initial remarks generated.

These developments massively reinforce the already ample evidence adduced in my previous article that Trump is transforming the GOP into a second pro-choice and socially liberal party.  To be sure, it remains true that Kamala Harris, her running mate Tim Walz, and the Democrats in general are even worse on these issues.  Hence it goes without saying that no social conservative can justify voting for her.  Nor have I changed my mind about the conclusion I drew in the previous article – that the least bad outcome would be Trump defeating Harris, albeit narrowly enough that it is palpable to the GOP that it cannot in the future take social conservatives for granted.

But “least bad” does not entail “not bad.”  And it is imperative for social conservatives to face the hard truth that Trump is, from now on, bound to be very bad for the pro-life cause and for social conservatism more generally, even if not quite as bad as Harris.  Certainly it would be delusional to suppose that the role he played in overturning Roe v. Wade, and the conservative and Christian rhetoric he occasionally deploys, give any good reason to judge otherwise.  Trump is not someone with socially conservative inclinations who is temporarily moving left for short-term political gain.  Rather, he has always been someone of socially liberal inclinations who temporarily moved right for short-term political gain, but has now judged that this is no longer a viable position and is reverting to type.  If the evidence of his words and actions over the last couple of years left any doubt about this, his record prior to seeking the GOP nomination eight years ago should remove that doubt.  Many conservatives and Christians have convinced themselves that Trump is, however imperfect, an instrument by which our decline might be reversed, or at least paused.  In reality, his rise is a symptom of our decline and has accelerated it, even if in a different manner than that by which the Left has accelerated it.

Trump famously prides himself on his skill at “the art of the deal.”  Before socially conservative voters close the deal with him one last time, they should be clear-eyed about what they are actually getting, as opposed to what they would like to get or what Trump would like them to think they are getting.  What follows is a buyer’s guide.

Trump’s state of nature

Trump first ran for president in 2000, competing with Pat Buchanan for the nomination of the Reform Party.  He made a point of contrasting himself with the famously conservative Buchanan on social issues.  In his campaign book The America We Deserve, Trump condemned Buchanan for “intolerance” toward homosexuals.  While he wrote that he opposed partial-birth abortion, he otherwise characterized himself as “pro-choice” and said “I support a woman’s right to choose.”  These remarks followed upon comments made during an interview the previous year, to the effect that we was “very pro-choice” and that gays serving in the military (then a major issue) “would not disturb me.”  He emphasized, in the same interview, that his views were the sort to be expected of someone who has “lived in New York City and Manhattan all [his] life.”  In short, he was a typical social liberal, not the most extreme sort but certainly not conservative.  It was only when he considered seeking the Republican nomination in 2012 that he first claimed that he had become pro-life. 

Now, when you want to know what a politician really thinks, it is especially useful to consider what he has said when not seeking office, and when he is freely offering his considered opinion rather than being asked to formulate, on the spot, a position on some controversial issue of the moment.  Especially useful in this connection are Trump’s 1990 interview in Playboy, and his 2007 book Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life, which, though a crass self-help volume, also contains autobiographical elements and an expression of Trump’s personal life philosophy.  Sources like these give a good idea of how he sees the world, and the picture is remarkably consistent over time.

Interestingly, in the 1990 interview, Trump said he had no opinion on abortion.  But he did have much to say about matters such as trade, foreign policy, crime, and “the working man,” and his opinions then were very much like the opinions he has now.  This tends to confirm what any objective observer would have guessed from the history of Trump’s political career, which is that the latter issues (rather than “social issues” such as abortion) are the ones he really cares about.

But what is most important about the interview and the book is what they reveal about Trump’s fundamental values, what he takes life to be about.  In the interview, he says that it is not really money or material things that drive him.  This leads to the following exchange:

Interviewer: Then what does all this – the yacht, the bronze tower, the casinos – really mean to you?

Trump: Props for the show.

Interviewer: And what is the show?

Trump: The show is “Trump” and it is sold-out performances everywhere.  I've had fun doing it and will continue to have fun, and I think most people enjoy it.

Later on in the interview the theme is revisited:

Interviewer: How large a role does pure ego play in your deal making and enjoyment of publicity?

Trump: Every successful person has a very large ego.

Interviewer: Every successful person?  Mother Teresa?  Jesus Christ?

Trump: Far greater egos than you will ever understand.

Interviewer: And the Pope?

Trump: Absolutely.  Nothing wrong with ego.  People need ego, whole nations need ego. I think our country needs more ego, because it is being ripped off so badly by our so-called allies.

Later still, the interview addresses the question of the ultimate point of this ego satisfaction:

Interviewer: In the deep of the night, after the reporters all leave your conferences, are you ever satisfied with what you've accomplished?

Trump: I'm too superstitious to be satisfied.  I don't dwell on the past.  People who do that go right down the tubes.  I'm never self-satisfied.  Life is what you do while you're waiting to die.  You know, it is all a rather sad situation.

Interviewer: Life?  Or death?

Trump: Both.  We're here and we live our sixty, seventy or eighty years and we're gone.  You win, you win, and in the end, it doesn't mean a hell of a lot.  But it is something to do – to keep you interested.

Now, it is important to point out – both in the interests of fairness to Trump, and to allow his critics to see that he is a more complex man than many of them give him credit for – that in the interview and the book he also emphasizes the importance of charitable giving.  I think he is sincere about this, and it is a serious mistake to think that Trump is fundamentally motivated by greed.  He has grave flaws, but that is not one of them.

What Trump is motivated by, as both the interview and indeed his entire public life make manifest, is egotism, and the imperative to “win.”  The depressing and indeed ugly consequences of this view of life are spelled out in Think Big and Kick Ass.  There he divides the world into “winners” and “losers,” with the aim of the book being to show how to secure a place in the first category (p. 15).  This is not a goal that can ever be realized once and for all, but requires a constant pursuit, so that “you can never rest, no matter how good things are going” (p. 30).  And it requires egotism of the kind he evinced in the interview.  “Having a big ego is a good thing,” he writes (p. 279), advising that “everything you do in life, do with attitude” (p. 269) and “[do] not give a crap” what others think about it (p. 271).  Practicing what he preaches, he tells us that “I’m really smart” (p. 148) and “I always think of myself as the best-looking guy” (p. 269) – though, comically, he pretends that humility too is somehow among his virtues, writing that “I am not a conceited person and I do not like to have conceited people around me” (p. 156).

In this “game of life,” says Trump, “money is how you score” (p. 43).  But it isn’t money in itself that gives satisfaction.  Rather, Trump says, it is the “deals” one makes in the course of pursuing success that does so (p. 41).  Quoting the opening lines of his famous first book The Art of the Deal, he writes:

I don’t do it for the money.  I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need.  I do it to do it.  Deals are my art form.  Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write beautiful poetry.  I like making deals, preferably big deals.  That’s how I get my kicks.

What is the big deal about “deals”?  Trump makes it clear that it is the domination of the other person involved that gives deals their appeal.  In Think Big and Kick Ass, he writes:

I love to make the big score and to make the big deal.  I love to crush the other side and take the benefits.  Why?  Because there is nothing greater.  For me it is even better than sex, and I love sex.  But when you hit, when the deals are going your way, it is the greatest feeling!  You hear lots of people say that a great deal is when both sides win.  That is a bunch of crap.  In a great deal you win – not the other side.  You crush the opponent and come away with something better for yourself. (p. 48)

On the matter of sex, Trump boasts of the many women he has “been able to date (screw)” because of his bold attitude (p. 270), and is frank that this includes “married” women (p. 271).  But the reader suspects that what Trump would do with other men’s wives he likely would not tolerate from his own. “Being in a marriage,” he says, is a “business” (p. 21), and as with every other business arrangement, one must make sure that one’s own interests are protected.  He puts so much emphasis on this that he devotes an entire chapter to the importance of always getting a prenuptial agreement whenever one marries (as he has three times).

“I value loyalty above everything else,” Trump tells us (p. 160).  And evidently, that is precisely because he thinks it is not the normal course of things:

The world is a vicious, brutal place.  It’s a place where people are looking to kill you, if not physically, then mentally.  In the world that we live in every day it is usually the mental kill.  People are looking to put you down, especially if you are on top… You have to know how to defend yourself.  People will be nasty and try to kill you just for sport.  Even your friends are out to get you! (p. 139)

Crucial to protecting your interests, Trump emphasizes, is revenge.  This is a major theme of Think Big and Kick Ass, not only repeated several times but elaborated upon in an entire chapter of its own.  “I love getting even… Always get even.  Go after people that go after you” (p. 29).  “When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades” (p. 183).  “If you don’t get even, you are just a schmuck!  I really mean it, too” (p. 190).  “You need to screw them back fifteen times harder” (p. 194).  And so on.  He relates the case of a former employee who failed to help him when he needed it, but later faced hard times of her own, losing her business, her home, and her husband.  This, he says, made him “really happy,” and “now I go out of my way to make her life miserable” (p. 180).  He also tells us about an athlete friend of his who had been betrayed by his manager but declined to take Trump’s advice to get revenge.  Trump broke off the friendship over this, refusing to associate any further with a “loser,” “schmuck,” and “jerk” who would refuse to get even (p. 192).

Now, I submit that the view of human life all of this reflects is like nothing so much as Hobbes’s state of nature.  For Hobbes, human beings in their natural condition are nothing more than self-interested bundles of appetites, each of whom pursues his own desire-satisfaction and glory in a way that is bound to be at odds with others’ pursuit of their own desire-satisfaction and glory.  This inevitably makes social life nasty and dangerous, and the only remedy is to agree by “contract” to follow rules that are in each party’s self-interest, and only insofar as they are in one’s self-interest.  There is, for Hobbes, nothing in our nature that can provide any higher motivation, nor can we have knowledge of an afterlife or of any religious doctrine that might afford us any higher motivation.

This view of human life is fundamentally at odds both with the tradition of moral and political philosophy deriving from Plato and Aristotle, and with Christian doctrine.  But again, Trump’s vision is disturbingly reminiscent of it.  His egotism evokes the Hobbesian agent selfishly seeking his own glory and desire-satisfaction; his emphasis on demanding loyalty, while simultaneously getting the better of others and taking revenge on enemies as the key to navigating a hostile social world, calls to mind the relationship between human beings in a Hobbesian state of nature; and his obsession with “deals” echoes the Hobbesian view that contract alone can yield anything close to beneficial social relationships.  And Trump’s vision of life, like Hobbes’s, is fundamentally at odds with Christianity.  Certainly it is hard to think of an ethos that more manifestly contradicts Christ’s Sermon on the Mount than Trump’s celebration of egotism and revenge (not to mention adultery and divorce). 

The Trumpification of conservatism

Naturally, one can push such an analysis only so far.  No actual human being is strictly reducible to a Hobbesian agent, because Hobbes’s conception of human nature is simply wrong (certainly from the point of view of the natural law and Christian anthropology I would defend).  Nor is Trump without his virtues.  Again, I believe his charitable impulses are sincere, reflecting something like what Aristotle would call the virtue of liberality.  I think his patriotism is sincere, as is his love for his family, all of which reflects the virtue of piety.  I think his concern for working people is sincere, and reflects something like the virtue of magnanimity.  His determination in the face of setbacks is impressive, and reflects a kind of courage.  And he can be very funny, which is no small thing in a leader.

The trouble is that Trump’s egotism and obsessive desire to “win” seem more fundamental to his character than these virtues, and can distort or even overwhelm them – so much so that he at least approximates a Hobbesian agent.  And this accounts for the words and actions that have made him such a controversial figure.

To be sure, there is an enormous amount of nonsense said and written about Trump.  It is true that too many of his admirers are unwilling to listen to any criticism of him, but it is also true that many of his critics are too willing to believe any criticism of him.  And overreaction to this excessive hostility to him is a major reason why the devotion of his admirers is often excessive. 

To note some examples of the nonsense in question, the constantly repeated claim that Trump said after the Charlottesville incident that there are “very fine people” among neo-Nazis and white supremacists is a myth.  The truth is that he explicitly said that he was not talking about such people, who, he agreed, should be “condemned.”  Trump’s remark about a “bloodbath” if he loses the 2024 election was not (contrary to what is often asserted) a prediction of political violence, but rather about dire effects on the auto industry.  Despite what is often alleged, Trump never advised people to inject bleach as a treatment for Covid.  Some of the recent prosecutions of Trump are indeed legally flimsy and manifestly politically motivated.  And so on.

It is also quite preposterous to characterize Trump as a “fascist.”  He is nothing as ideological as that.  To be sure, what he wanted Mike Pence to do on January 6, 2021 would have been a very grave offense against the rule of law, as my friend and sometimes co-author Joseph Bessette showed in a Claremont Review of Books essay.  That alone should have prevented Republicans from ever again nominating him for president.  But there is no reason whatsoever to attribute it to a fascist agenda.  It reflects instead the pique of a man for whom the prospect of losing to Joe Biden was so painful a blow to his ego that he was too willing to believe the theories of those who assured him the election was stolen, and that the Eastman memos afforded a solution.

But that is bad enough, and Trump does deserve criticism for the disgrace of January 6.  Other common criticisms of him are also perfectly just.  Take, for example, his predilection for exaggeration and falsehood.  It is not so much that Trump is a liar as that he is a bullshitter, in Harry Frankfurt’s famous sense of the term.  The liar, as Frankfurt points out, cares very much about the truth, if only to hide it.  The bullshitter, by contrast, is not primarily interested in truth or falsity so much as in saying whatever is useful for furthering some goal he has.  That may involve speaking a falsehood, but it might instead require speaking the truth.  The bullshitter doesn’t care so long as it works. 

This is why Trump will both say things that are true but which other politicians lack the courage to say (for example, that illegal immigration is a serious problem that neither party has been willing to deal with) while mixing them with arresting but absurd falsehoods that no one else would dare peddle (such as that Mexico would pay for a border wall).  The former lend credibility to the latter, and together such remarks function to create the impression that Trump alone has the boldness and vision to see and do what needs to be done.  Sometimes he will persist for quite a while with some particular bit of bullshit (as with the “birther” narrative about Barack Obama), other times he will deploy it only briefly (as when he repeated the ludicrous rumor that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the Kennedy assassination).  What determines what he says and how long he says it is whatever is necessary in order to “win” and close the “deal.”

Trump is also rightly criticized for the ugly and utterly disgraceful things he often says about people who stand in his way, as when he ridiculed the looks of a female political rival, and mocked Senator John McCain’s suffering as a prisoner of war.  Trump’s defenders sometimes try to minimize such behavior as mere New York brashness or the like.  But to any objective observer these are clear and grave examples of what moral theologians call the sin of contumely.  They are sinful because they unjustly deprive people of the respect they are owed.  They are grave because the humiliation they inflict is public, and because they greatly exacerbate the bitterness of contemporary social and political life. 

There are other manifestly immoral things Trump has done, such as his proposal to kill the families of terrorists, and his boasting of attempting to seduce a married woman and of taking advantage sexually of women attracted to him because of his fame.  And I have cited only some of the words and actions of his that are publicly verifiable – there are, of course, other grave accusations against him, which I leave out only because I do not know whether they are true.  Yet, though when running for president in 2015 Trump claimed to be a religious Christian, he also said that he doesn’t ask God for forgiveness for anything he’s done.

All of these things are intelligible given that Trump’s personality approximates that of the Hobbesian ego seeking to advance its own glory and self-interest (to “win”) in whatever way seems fitting to it, bound only by whatever terms it has contracted with others to follow (the “deal”).  Except that, unlike those who contract to leave Hobbes’s state of nature, Trump explicitly tells us that when he makes a deal he hopes to “crush” the other side and make sure that he alone truly benefits.

This also makes it intelligible why the same man who appointed the justices crucial to overturning Roe would now endorse policies diametrically opposed to the pro-life cause and to social conservatism generally.  Given the view of the world that Trump has consistently expressed and lived for decades, it would be absurd to suppose he personally cares about or even sees the point of the things social conservatives care about.  The obvious explanation for why he catered to them for as long as he did is that it was in his political interests to make such a “deal,” and now that he sees them as mostly a liability, the deal is off.

But that is not the worst of it.  Again, Trump explicitly tells us that he does not enter into a deal with a genuine concern to benefit the other side.  The aim of a deal, he writes, is to “crush the opponent and come away with something better for yourself.”  If the other side benefits, that is incidental, a byproduct of Trump benefiting.  Trump’s defenders often accuse his pro-life critics of insufficient “gratitude” for his role in overturning Roe.  This is like saying that a buyer owes a used auto dealer “gratitude” for selling him a decent car, and that this gratitude should keep him from complaining or taking his business elsewhere if the dealer later tries to sell him a lemon.

In any event, Trump himself is bound to interpret criticism from social conservatives as ingratitude, and here his explicit policy of revenge comes into play – in such a way that the situation for social conservatives in a second Trump administration is likely to be even worse than I described in my previous article.  For it’s not just that Trump will no longer promote their agenda, and it’s not just that he will even advocate policies that are positively contrary to that agenda.  It’s that, if social conservatives protest or resist this, Trump’s vindictive nature is likely to lead him to seek retaliation.  He may well, as he puts it, “get even,” “go after” them, “screw them back in spades,” “screw them back fifteen times harder.”

In this way, along with the other ways I’ve described in this article and my previous one, Trump is putting social conservatives in a very perilous position.  And in other respects too, he has done grave damage to the conservative movement.  His egotism constantly leads him into foolish and sometimes even dangerous behavior, such as his attempt to pressure Pence into unconstitutional action on January 6, and his unjust demonization of Republican officials in Georgia who would not do his bidding.  Such actions have sown division within the Republican Party and greatly damaged its reputation. 

Trump’s bad example has also rubbed off on too many of his followers.  Aping his predilection for bullshit, too many of them are prone to crackpot conspiracy theories and woolly “narrative thinking.”  Aping his aggressive boorishness, too many of them have become excessively bellicose and more interested in “own the libs” stunts than in serious and effective policy proposals.  Aping his imperative to “win” and make “deals” above all else, too many of them have become willing to compromise their principles for electoral victory.  Awed by the force of his personality, too many have become cult-like in their devotion, and intolerant of dissent.  Understandably frustrated by the fecklessness and cowardice of so many conservatives, they have embraced what they wrongly judge to be Trump’s masculine alternative.  Yet being an egotist and a bully is not masculinity, but rather a cartoonish distortion of masculinity.  If too many conservatives exhibit what Aquinas calls the vice of effeminacy, Trump represents an opposite extreme vice, not the sober, genuinely masculine middle ground.

Trump’s defenders will respond that the greatest danger nevertheless comes from the Left.  I agree, as I have made clear over and over and over again.  But it simply doesn’t follow that Trump is the remedy.  His essentially Hobbesian individualist ethos is simply another variation on the liberal disease that afflicts the modern body politic, rather than its cure.  Even then, it is less an ideology than merely the personality type of one man, who is unlikely to leave behind him even a coherent movement, much less a political philosophy, after he is gone.  His legacy will likely be a social conservatism that is greatly diminished in influence, and a larger conservative movement that will be less serious intellectually and remain internally divided indefinitely.

But though Trump is far from the instrument conservatives need, he is the instrument they are for the moment stuck with.  It is crucial that they be absolutely clear-eyed about what they are getting.  It is reasonable for them to hope that he might prevent or mitigate some of the damage done by the Left.  But they will have to be constantly on guard to prevent him from inflicting further damage of his own.