One way in which he truly is authentic
David Frum on Trump’s official Memorial Day statement:
It is the responsibility and honor of the president to speak for the nation on the solemn occasions of collective remembrance. Some presidents are endowed with greater natural eloquence than others, but that does not matter. What the country listens for is the generous and authentic message underneath the rhetoric, whether that rhetoric is graceful or clumsy. The last general to win the presidency said, “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” The country heard those words, believed them, and trusted him.
That was of course Eisenhower, who was in charge of sending thousands of soldiers to the beaches of Normandy.
The 45th president is often described—and sometimes praised—as “authentic.” That compliment, if it is a compliment, is not truly deserved. In many ways, President Trump is not the man he seems. He was not a great builder, not a great dealmaker, not a billionaire, not a man of strength and decisiveness.
But there is one way in which he truly is authentic: He is never able to play-act the generous feelings that he so absolutely lacks. “To show an unfelt sorrow is an office which the false man does easy.” In that one sense, Donald Trump is not false. He does not feel sorrow for others, and he does not try to pretend otherwise.
Yes. I was talking about much the same thing earlier today when I said
If you had to come up with one word to sum up Donald Trump, on pain of being forced to spend time in his company, “shameless” would be a strong candidate. He’s psychopath-level shameless. He does not care; nothing will ever make him care; he is sealed off in a greasy tube of self-adoration, beyond the reach of shame or remorse.
It’s the most striking thing about him. He has no generous feelings, no sorrow for the sorrows of others, no compassion, no shame that he has no compassion, no ability to care, no ability to care that he doesn’t care. He couldn’t fake it if he tried because he doesn’t even know what it is.
Trump’s perfect emptiness of empathy has revealed itself again and again through his presidency, but never as completely and conspicuously as in his self-flattering 2018 Memorial Day tweets. They exceed even the heartless comment in a speech to Congress—in the presence of a grieving widow—that a fallen Navy Seal would be happy that his ovation from Congress had lasted longer than anybody else’s.
It’s not news that there is something missing from Trump where normal human feelings should go. His devouring need for admiration from others is joined to an extreme, even pathological, inability to return any care or concern for those others.
It’s the most degrading aspect of this degrading tragedy: the fact that that didn’t make him unelectable. The fact that on the contrary it’s probably why he was elected – the scorching shame of that is what we will never live down.
The whole obsession with “authentic” is way overboard anyway. To many people, authentic simply means you speak with a very small vocabulary, say what you think no matter how nasty, and don’t eat sprouts or wear Birkenstocks. It never occurs to these people that being authentic is about being who you are, not necessarily about being an asshole, but the idea of authentic so often gets applied just to the middle of the country and the south. It is assumed, apparently that “coastal elites” are somehow fake people, phony people, doing things they hate just to show off their “smarts” and acting in a way that they don’t believe just to promote the idea that they are “better” people.
I’ve lived in Trump Land long enough not to buy any of that. Many of the people here are not authentic; they don’t dare be authentic, because to be who they really are would put them outside of the society of this area. They hide their sexual orientation, their religious belief (or non-belief), their little lives with little ideas and little motives, their hatred and anti-Semitism, and their abortions/contraception/non-marital sex.
Being authentic is not in and of itself a good goal, if being authentic is used as an excuse for acting like a smug, self-righteous asshole telling other people how inferior they are because they happen to like art films, live theatre, or sprouts (for the record, I hate sprouts – and cappuccino – but I plead guilty to the rest of it).
Hear hear. Exactly this. Trump is a man without empathy or soul.
Iknklast:
There is a helluva lot in that post of yours.
A rush to conform socially is just one step before a rush to submit politically. And we should all by now be aware of where that road leads.
He doesn’t pretend to care about others, because he can’t. Nevertheless, he wants OTHERS to pretend that he has any and every praiseworthy quality, because he wants the praise that goes with it.
“He has no generous feelings, no sorrow for the sorrows of others, no compassion, no shame that he has no compassion”
I’m convinced that this is basically the core of his appeal to a large part of his base. They care little for anyone besides themselves and their immediate friends/family, and Trump models the shamelessness they wish they themselves had regarding that fact.
You know how ‘elites’ seems to have no sensible meaning, e.g. how it can apply to an academic living on near-poverty wages but doesn’t apply to a real estate mogul with a gold plated apartment? By my reckoning, ‘elite’ is best translated as ‘someone who tells me I should care about others’. I think that’s the fundamental thing they’re angry about: Being told they should care about women, black people, hispanic people, gay people, etc. Like most of us, they’ve been raised with the idea that it’s wrong to be selfish, that being selfish is a big part of being a bad person. This hasn’t changed the fact that they ARE selfish, but there’s tension between their perception of themselves as good people and their lack of concern for other people. ‘Elites’ bring that tension to the forefront instead of letting it go quietly ignored. Donald Trump gives them a chance to stand in a big circle and pat each other on the back while saying it’s okay. They don’t love Trump does because they actually love what he’s doing per se, they do it because unquestioning support for Trump is the price they pay to join a group of other supporters who model the same kinds of ugliness and pettiness and selfishness they themselves do, thereby they can all pretend together that those things are unobjectionable.
“the scorching shame of that is what we will never live down.”
But we will. If there is a through-line in US history, it is our society’s shortness of memory. There is no living down. There is no learning of lessons. There is only a sigh of relief when a current crime becomes a thing of the last, and we can all move on. The US would be healthier if it did deal more with its past, but that’s not what it is.
Nualle – I’m not sure that’s unique to the US. The obvious example outside the US, of course, is the Armenian genocide, which the Turkish government refuses to admit, but there are others, some more subtle.
One of my English friends, when denying the US ever contributed anything positive to the world (in spite of the fact that she was going to a US public college and getting US assistance in her education by working 20 hours a week for the college), would point out how the British empire was “kinder and gentler” than any empire before. That may or may not be true, but when you are decrying the US empire, in which we at least give the pretense that the other countries are autonomous, by pointing out that your own empire was slightly less brutal than the ones that came before, you are denying history. Empire is still empire, and there were a lot of nasty things done in the name of the British empire.
Most countries have skeletons in their closet, and we deny history at a peril to the future. Right now, the US is the biggest problem on that, so we focus relentlessly on Trump and Friends. But the problem of limited historical memory continues to wreak havoc around the globe.
And besides: “slightly less brutal than the ones that came before” is a bare minimum standard. It indicates either some tiny shred of ability to learn lessons and integrate them into practice, or simply the upside of slight random deviation from a norm. Credit comes sometime better than that.
And really – at the very same times white, U.S. citizens were being awful imperialists over oh-so-far-from-citizen black and reddish Americans, the British were being mighty awful imperialists in India. Wounded Knee versus the Sepoy Rebellion… I think we can just all turn our heads in shame rather than compete over who’s less atrocious.
The standard for national leadership met by Trump is one we’ve put on the shelf since the days of inbred Hapsburgs. We’re going to have to remember this one to bury it again – remember and stay vigilant, like Germany does. (And they’re a fine example too of just how hard it is to kill the fascist weed permanently.)
Amen (if no one minds my saying so).