Trump’s Golden Opportunity
February 3, 2025
My readers know I love The Economist news magazine — a voice of reason in a world gone mad.
But after their pre-election endorsement of Harris, I sent a letter-to-the-editor calling it “disgracefully weak. Reading as though penned by a Trump lover under duress in a hostage video. Making support for him seem arguably reasonable, merely risky . . . There’s little sense of the thoroughgoing dishonesty . . . You virtually ignore his twisted psyche. Voting for Trump is not merely risky, it’s insane.”
My letter wasn’t printed. But the editorial’s writer did respond, explaining their belief that Trumpist readers would close their ears to a harsher assessment. I replied that the editorial’s timidity just gives them permission to vote for Trump.
After the election a slew of articles tried to parse out what Trump and his administration would actually do. As though they’d be normal policy decisions. All this “made me laugh,” I wrote in another letter, “because it ignores that Trump is insane.”
That one wasn’t published either (not that I expected it).
Their regular “Lexington” columnist covers U.S. politics. In the January 25 issue he muses that Trump, despite all the doubters, “really does have the chance to lead America into the golden age he proclaimed in his second inaugural address.” Enabling “him to achieve the legacy he wants as ‘a peacemaker and a unifier.’”
Lexington explains how circumstances around some big issues actually give Trump great opportunities. And he’s got unprecedented power to do stuff, with Republicans controlling Congress and in cultish worship (or terror) of him, while “his adversaries at home are confounded and enervated.” Take immigration for example. His extreme rhetoric and actions having established his cred with diehard xenophobes, he could now actually put across the kind of sensible overall reform we’ve needed for decades. Lexington similarly sees openings for Trump to be a true peacemaker in Ukraine and the Middle East. And so forth.
But much of that blueprint for Trump accomplishment would require his not being Trump.
I’m reminded of a prescient blog post of mine from November 2016, about similar hopes preceding his first term: “so many times I’ve seen some foreign leader elected, thinking what a great opportunity he has to prove the doubters wrong. They never do. Look at South Africa’s Zuma. A creep before. A bigger creep after.
“Power does corrupt. It doesn’t make bad men better, it makes them worse.”
Lexington is no fool, citing Trump’s “self-pity, a flickering attention span, a vulnerability to flattery and a reverence for strongmen.” This hardly scratches the surface of the snakepit between Trump’s ears. The column does suggest his biggest enemy is himself.
One thing he is masterful at is claiming credit. He bangs about an issue, like immigration or inflation, spitting blame all over, then declaring he’s fixed it. Facts not mattering. Look at his cringeworthy press conference about the plane crash. Starting off in proper seriousness, he soon veered into a long ridiculous partisan rant attacking Obama, Biden, “DEI” and other pet bêtes noires, falsely blaming them for the tragedy — and claiming (just nine days in office) it’s all good now!
DEI of course is code for whites being displaced — by supposed inferiors. Trump similarly blamed the L.A. fires, and even the Baltimore bridge disaster, somehow on DEI. Stoking the racial anxiety and prejudice that’s salient in his supporters. Sadly, people fall for this sick shtick.
He’s also excellent at self-congratulation for assertedly fixing things already fixed. Lucky for him, he was handed a great economy by President Obama — and now again by Biden (yes). But listening to Trump, you’d think it was all horrible before he came in, and he’s made it great. Actually, all a president has to do is not screw it up. (And Trump is hard at work violating that precept, as with his tariffs.)
But I would even question Lexington’s bits about the peacemaker and unifier legacy Trump is said to want. Is that sort of thing his true ambition? What he gets up in the morning aiming for? We talk about means to achieve ends. And what are one’s final ends? Trump might indeed like to be a peacemaker and unifier — yet not for their own sakes, but rather as a means for his true goal — self-aggrandizement.
Read his psychologist niece Mary’s book. Trump, deep down, knows he’s a despicable fraud, and his whole life has been about salving that wound. Not by being better, of which he’s incapable, but through others’ eyes. Thus the insatiable lust for flattery Lexington mentioned. What he craves most is being bathed in adulation. And legions of fools (and opportunists) give it to him.
Though a panel of academic historians, evaluating all U.S. presidents, authoritatively rated Trump the worst. Well, duh.