Trump Himself Is Not a Crisis

The catastrophe is those who act in his name. The voters. The enablers. The self-immolators. The ones who abase themselves before him.

Several years ago it became clear there’s nothing singular about the current president.

He’s not uniquely evil or uniquely charismatic; he’s not an especially “malignant” pathological figure; he’s not, of course, messianic.

Sure, he lacks a long list of ordinary human qualities, as I wrote in 2016. He doesn’t seem to recognize much about the world outside of the confines of his skull. And he’s hot for a monopoly, an empire, the lion’s share, far more than he needs—or even can eat and enjoy.

But that’s par for the capitalist course. As Walter Benn Michaels has written, the fearsomeness of the American capitalist is not that he has so much money; it’s that somehow he keeps wanting so much money. His astronomical appetite sets him apart from those of us who are periodically contented, recognizing that we can only sleep in one bed at a time.

As hard as it is for oligarchs to imagine, we Sally Housecoats and Johnny Lunchbuckets have trouble even mustering a craving for another bed and another and another.

But even Trump’s big appetite is ordinary. It’s archetypal. The man who longs for a monopoly is the run-of-the-mill merchant whose ambition is checked only by the ambitions of others, the paradigm for whom the Invisible Hand was first conceived.

He’s also the stock figure whose depredations civilization and law exist to protect the rest of us from. The insight of Enlightenment types, early capitalists, and Sigmund Freud is that we can’t count on the natural modesty of human ambitions to serve as a brake on our individual wills to power. So we erect churches and laws and culture.

So Trump is bog standard, so standard he’s a type.

But here’s the difference: the people around Trump are not types. They’re outrageous and inexplicable. Economics doesn’t account for them.

As a phenomenon, Trump is not a crisis. What’s a crisis is how other people act around him.

And this is a problem for, really, everything.

In an open and well-regulated market, men whose eyes seethe with ambition would pursue their own ambitions. I mean big swinging dicks like Lindsay Graham, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Rudy Giuliani, Elon Musk and so many others. In a working system, with people behaving consistently, they’d pursue those ambitions and see Trump as a rival.

Instead, like clockwork, these men laid eyes on Trump and dropped their ambitions like wet rags. Then they decided to enable his ambitions.

They forfeited not just their own wills to power, but their standing, dignity, fortunes, authority, moral commitments. They turned into punchlines, objects of ridicule. They went back to Trump over and over, each time more servile.