A note on character in politics by James Piereson newcriterion.com/blogs/dispatch…
Several anti-Trump conservatives, including Jonah Goldberg, William Kristol, Peter Wehner, along with several others, have maintained that Donald Trump will fail or be drummed out of office due to defects in his character.
Mr. Trump lies, dissembles, exaggerates, mistreats subordinates, does not listen to advisors, dismisses critics, bullies or belittles opponents, and brags about his wealth—just for starters.
Such attributes are most unflattering and self-destructive in an individual, more so in the President of the United States and the leader of the free world.
As @JonahNRO writes:
“For a very long time now, I have been predicting that the Trump presidency will end poorly because character is destiny. I’ve said it so often, I occasionally need to be reminded that I didn’t coin the phrase.”
“For a very long time now, I have been predicting that the Trump presidency will end poorly because character is destiny. I’ve said it so often, I occasionally need to be reminded that I didn’t coin the phrase.”
”The Greek philosopher Heraclitus did when he observed “ethos anthropoi daimon,” most often translated as “man’s character is his fate.”
Some have quibbled as to whether or not this is an appropriate interpretation of the philosopher’s words, but that seems beside the point. Aristotle said much the same thing, as have other moral philosophers through the ages.
Character is destiny, both in individuals and political leaders.
The problem with this proposition, at least as it applies to politics, is that Machiavelli destroyed it five hundred years ago in The Prince, and thereby laid the foundations for modern politics.
This is not to say that Trump’s character and norm-breaking style are unimportant or irrelevant to his performance in office, but that the general proposition (“Character is destiny”) is generally false as applied to political life.
Trump may fail, but most likely for reasons unrelated to his character.
The problem with Trump (or any other person in high office) is that it is hard to say what his character is, or where his unusual style ends and his character begins, or whether or not the various things he does actually reveal his character.
If Trump’s character is his destiny, then it is hard to understand how he managed to come as far as he has through the ups and downs of a business career and now election to the highest office in the land.
If we take his critics at their word, then Trump’s bad character should have taken him out of the business world and certainly out of the presidential race a long time ago. Bad character leads to a bad ending.
His success up until now, far surpassing the achievements of most mortals, contradicts the proposition that “character is destiny,” unless one is prepared to say that there are important aspects of Trump’s character that produced to his success—a proposition worth pondering.
Trump may be in greater control of himself than his critics give him credit for. The president likes to pose as a tough guy who enjoys a good fight, but how much of that is real and how much of it is a pose designed to have an effect?
We know that this is a piece of his well-known negotiating style: let’s scare them first, and then we’ll get a deal more to our liking.
This may be true as well of his name-calling and his twittering: it’s all part of a style he has adopted to achieve the ends he seeks because he thinks the “nice guy” routine is stale and does not produce results.
There are some who think that Trump is “trolling” America, and liberals in particular, in order to get under their skin, draw a reaction, throw them off balance, and provide entertainment for his supporters.
If that is so, then he has certainly achieved that goal. But that implies that he is engaged in an act, a presentation of himself, rather than an expression of his character.
Is Trump perhaps, then, the ultimate Machiavellian, pretending to be a demagogue, a crude and tasteless public figure like many of our Hollywood celebrities, all for the purpose of achieving some large service on behalf of his country?
That is also a possibility worth considering, in which case he would deserve to go down in history as one of the great actors of all time. In a strange way, Trump seems to know what he is doing, even if everyone else thinks he is unhinged or out of control.
He also appears to be comfortable in his own skin, likewise a useful quality in a first-rate actor.
After all, in a time when celebrity intersects closely with politics, it is possible to think that the Donald Trump we see on stage is not the real Donald Trump at all, but a public concoction made out both to satisfy and to confront the bizarre culture in which we live.
