Who Is Donald Trump? A Human Assessment

Donald John Trump left the office of President of the United States nearly seven months ago. His second impeachment, this time for incitement of the insurrection of January 6, 2021, ended in acquittal on February 14, because only seven Republicans voted to convict him. If nothing else, it can be said of that outcome that it was a repudiation, and that it was briefly a confirmation that, to at least some extent, America is still governed by the rule of law.

A week or so after the acquittal, GOP Senator Ted Cruz stated that “for four years, Congressional Democrats have been obsessed and consumed with hatred for President Trump.” Elsewhere it’s been said that that Democrats and leftists are “scared” of Trump.

Obsessed. Consumed with hatred. Scared. Check. Check. Check.

But, pausing the reply there would be childish and simplistic, because that person we’re obsessed with, consumed with hatred over, and scared of may be out of office, but he wields near-total control over the Republican party. Aspirant GOP politicians are obliged to seek Trump’s blessing, or at the very least, to strenuously avoid doing anything that might piss him off. The small list of Republicans who have refused to kiss the ring or who have failed to perpetuate with sufficient zealotry the Big Lie that Trump was cheated out of victory in the election continues to grow at a snail’s pace. The callow displays of fealty by Republicans and their party to the person of Donald Trump could be dismissed as merely pathetic, were there not so much at stake.

Discerning the reasons for the obsession, hatred and fear of Donald Trump on the part of liberals and the left, however, requires an assessment of Donald Trump. Who the actual hell is this person who had control of America’s nuclear arsenal for nearly half a decade, right up until a few months ago, and managed to do quite a number on America (especially during the Covid-19 pandemic) and the world, without nuking anything or starting a new shooting war?

There are going to be history books written about Donald Trump and his legacy, obviously. There will be detailed psychological profiles on him, because there pretty much have to be: we need to understand who the hell that man is, and how to prevent him, or another like him, from getting anywhere near the levers of power again. Particularly since it’s entirely possible that he will do exactly that in a few years.

I had this piece nearly finished on Inauguration Day. The day after that, it felt out of place. It felt like nobody wanted to think about Trump anymore, that five years of dealing with his omnipresent face and voice were enough. Hell, there was even briefly an inkling that the Republican leadership might be able to finally stir itself to something resembling righteous indignation: their very own “you’ve done enough, at long last, have you no sense of decency, sir” moment. “There is a line, and it’s way the hell out there in left field, but it’s there, and you, Donald Trump, crossed it.” So I shelved it for awhile. Except that…. Nope. Didn’t happen. The world hasn’t seen the last of Trump yet; that much is certain.

But again, who is Trump?

A few things have become very clear since he took that fateful ride down the escalator six years ago and announced he was running for President.

Firstly: we all knew exactly who Donald Trump was before he became President of the United States. We already knew that he is a man who is willing to enrich himself with funds taken from his own charitable foundation. We already knew that he is a man willing to defraud Americans who enrolled in his “Trump University” and paid him their hard-earned money in pursuit of a little slice of the American Dream. We already knew that he is a man who saw no problem with continuing to insist on the guilt of and impugn the reputations of five young African-American men after they’d already been exonerated of rape charges via DNA evidence. We already knew he is a man who has no qualms about sexually exploiting women over whom he’s in a position of power. And we already knew that, in business, he was a man who regularly stiffed contractors he hired on his construction projects. Just regular, hardworking people trying to feed their families and build a better life for themselves, screwed over yet again by a wealthy powerful guy. There’s not really any factual dispute about those things I just rattled off; most are matters of public record. But they serve to remind us, as per John Galsworthy, that “a man is the sum of his actions.”

And based on those actions, any thinking person can conclude, easily I submit, that Donald Trump is, quite simply, not a good person. Because a good person doesn’t do those things.

And I’ll suggest that all those things we already knew about him were such that everything Trump did as President and has done as ex-President, every significant decision he made, has made complete sense based on what we knew of him, and was essentially predictable (at least in hindsight). Historians are going to have a field day with that in years to come.

Speaking of Trump’s supposed wealth, we also knew that much of it has always seemed superficial and tacky. And we also knew that, for some reason, he’s never wanted the public to know just how wealthy he really is. Indeed, the image of him serving McDonald’s food to football players at the White House — junk food on a silver platter — was a metaphor for the persona he presents.

Secondly: we also came to know the things he’s not. He speaks of his love for America and engages in garish displays of patriotism, but he can’t help but seem superficial or insincere when doing so, because it’s clear that he doesn’t seem to really like any of the things that make up America. He’s never traveled around America on her highways or trains, seeing it, experiencing it, drinking it in, getting its dirt under his fingernails. In fact, he slagged the “flyover states” more than once at rallies held in those states. He doesn’t go for Coney Island dogs, or barbecue in Memphis, or enchiladas in San Antonio; he eats mass-produced fast food crap and well-done steaks covered in ketchup. He doesn’t drink Budweiser or bourbon or anything else. He tries to cultivate the image of a macho tough guy, but it’s no more than surface deep. He doesn’t exercise, other than whatever exercise golf provides. Besides golf courses, he hates being outdoors. He doesn’t shoot guns. He doesn’t ride quads or horses or dirt bikes. In short, other than some apparent interest in football, he doesn’t seem to like or value any of the things “real Americans” like and value about America.

Hell, his slavishly devoted fans would probably hate Donald Trump if he wasn’t rich.

We also learned that he’s actually not terribly remarkable as a human being. He’s not brilliant. He’s not a great speaker, not a great writer, certainly not a great thinker. He can’t speak off the cuff with wit; nobody’s going to be dropping pithy Trump bon mots in twenty years, or next week. He doesn’t even read much. He doesn’t have an interesting or fun or quirky side interest (Clinton: saxophone. Bush: ranchin’. Obama: basketball.) He doesn’t seem to know much about history or international relations or the military, and he doesn’t display intellectual curiosity about those things or anything else. He has said literally nothing during his Presidency that could make a person laugh on the basis of wit or cleverness; in all his speeches, did he ever tell an actual joke about Democrats or anybody else? As noted above, he does seem to like playing golf quite a lot, but so what — all presidents play golf.

But he (and thus we) learned, by accident apparently, that he has one great talent: he knows how to attract and inspire into a messianic fervour, and even to bloodlust in some cases, a large and very specific segment of the American population. And not just American, but uniquely American. Trump probably could not have succeeded politically in any other country, because in no other country would there be tens of millions of people like… that. (Fill in your own adjectives.)

It’s been observed that, on any issue, Trump perceives two acceptable outcomes: either he is the winner, or he was cheated out of the win. There are no other options he will accept. Knowing what we know of him, it’s easy to imagine him employing that approach while, say, playing checkers with one of his kids when they were six (if he ever did that). And we also noticed it during Hurricane Dorian, during which he badly doctored a map with a marker to avoid the supreme indignity of having to say some variant of eleven words: “fortunately, it turns out Alabama won’t get hit by the storm.”

There’s a word to describe a man like that: small. Not little; small.

Republicans have complained during the last four years that liberals and the left were out to get Trump from his first day in office, that they “never gave him a chance”, and so forth. However, there’s never been an answer from Republicans to the obvious responsive question: what is there about the man described above — who we all knew pretty well before July 2015, due to his decades in the public eye — that should have caused liberals and leftists to say “yes, I want that guy to be the president of the country we all love”?

The only sensible thing for any thinking person to do when faced with that guy in the White House was to ensure that his tenure there was as brief as legally possible, and that he was under a frigging microscope at all times. And then when he’s finally gone, you let out a deep, exhausted sigh and figuratively count the damn silverware.

I’ve come back repeatedly to that exchange in the White House press room a seeming eternity ago on March 21, 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic was starting to knife its way through America, when NBC correspondent Peter Alexander asked Trump, “what do you say to Americans, who are watching you right now, who are scared?” True leaders are forged in fire, and in a moment of escalating national and global crisis, Alexander handed Trump a giftwrapped opportunity to finally, at long last, be presidential. A moment to level with the American people about the threat and its severity. A moment to remind the American people that they have sacrificed and triumphed over adversity before and can do it again if they pull together and help each other. A moment for his very own “the only thing we have to fear is….” moment, chiseled into Plymouth Rock and written with lightning in the history books. A moment to lay out a bold, aggressive strategy backed by the best science, reliable data, and expertise available, and then let the experts get to work.

And yet, Donald Trump did none of those things.

His actual response to Alexander’s question — “I say that you’re a terrible reporter” — put the cherry on top for any who were still somehow on the fence by that point: this is not a man who should be anywhere near the levers of power, especially not during a global crisis. This is a man who lacks discipline, self-awareness, and courage. He did not respond to Alexander’s question as he should have as a leader, because he was unable to do so.

And consequently, by the last day of Trump’s presidency, over 400,000 of his people were dead. And since then, due largely to his weaponization of public health measures and the suspicions his craven acolytes have sown about those measures and about vaccination, a further 215,000 have died as of today.

Obsessed with, consumed with hatred for, and scared of? Guilty. Guilty on all counts.

That’s the man we were obsessed with, consumed with hatred for, and scared of, for four years. And no sane person wants to go through that again.