The first descriptor I attached to Donald Trump, back when he took the lead in the race for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, was “empty vessel.” He was never that.
More recent epithets I have used include “carnival barker” and “master of disaster.” He’s much more than those.
Peer beyond the night fog emanating from those who consider him a new Hitler and those who worship him as a sort of messiah: In the light of empirical reality, Trump towers over the first quarter of the 21st century like no other political figure.
I understood the forces that propelled him forward — I thought that they were of world-historical importance. But I never gave much credit to the man himself.
Correcting the record
What follows is an attempt to correct the record. I have no wish to glorify Trump or to assess his moral worth but only to figure out why, as an analyst, I missed the consequential dimension of his character.
In retrospect, I can see that the sources of error lay within me. Trump is one of a kind and escaped my ready-made categories. He’s also a mixture of popular culture and personal weirdness — the hair, the hand gestures, the dancing — which everything in my background told me was not to be taken seriously.
Let me offer a significant example: political oratory. My models of eloquence in political speech are Winston Churchill and Ronald Reagan. When, on YouTube or television, their voices speak to me from beyond the grave, my heart beats faster and I’m overcome with sadness that nobody today delivers such an effect.
Trump’s rhetoric leaves me cold. When he spoke of “American carnage” in his first inaugural address, I had no idea what he was talking about. When he proclaimed a “golden age” to coincide with his second presidency, it sounded like empty bragging.
How he deals with important issues is perplexing to me. He berates adversaries, high and low, in a manner that seems petty and often childish. His style of talking, which he calls “the weave,” spins around and around and seldom arrives at its destination.
All this could be interpreted as a criticism of Trump, but I intend it rather as a partial explanation of why I failed to obtain an accurate picture of the man. Trump, after all, is a performer who carried a trivial reality TV show to popularity for more than a decade — he well knows how to communicate with the American public. And I get the humor.
Watching Trump be Trump can be vastly entertaining; there’s no predicting what he will say next.
The key to the Trump rhetoric may be found in that unique ritual — part county fair, part revival meeting — known as the “Trump rally.”
What becomes evident from viewing these events on TV is that Trump loves the adoration of the crowd. But more than this, he loves the crowd itself, the proximity to ordinary people.
He may be the only American politician who currently displays, and knows how to convey, a visceral affection for voters. He’s clearly energized in their presence, to the extent that he never wants the show to end. Just like some operatic arias offer an excuse for the diva to flaunt her vocal skills, the meanderings of the weave are Trump’s pretext for keeping himself in front of his audience.
That’s his moment of transcendence.
The style, with its comical insults, first-person informality, and wandering attention span, fits perfectly into the modalities of digital communication. This isn’t by design. It’s just the way he talks, the first of many coincidences favoring him with which we must come to terms. Trump is a boomer, who, online, sounds like a zoomer.
He’s a face-to-face personality transmuted, almost physically, into the virtual realm. He was the Beethoven of Twitter during his first presidency, the loudest voice amid the uproar of what Jonathan Haidt has called the digital Tower of Babel.
I had difficulty fitting so many contradictions inside my head.
My realization that Trump the actual human was playing at a higher level than I had grasped came with the near-assassination episode in Butler, Pa. This, for two reasons — one obvious, the other less so.
‘Strange attractor’
The obvious reason was the physical courage and presence of mind that Trump showed during those deadly and chaotic minutes. It could easily have been otherwise. Most men like to think of themselves as heroes; but when the bullets start flying, they hit the ground and make like a pancake. Simply by appearing dazed and old, Trump might have disqualified himself from elected office.
Instead, he had the composure to put on his shoes, which had fallen off under the crush of Secret Service agents, before turning to the crowd and urging his shocked supporters to “Fight!” It was a gesture for the ages.
The second reason pertains to what I would call the providential interpretation of Trump, to which he personally subscribes. “I was saved by God to make America great again,” he said in his recent inaugural speech.
That can be dismissed as hubris, but I think that some part of Trump, like the rest of us, is grappling with how to make sense of Trump. For those too squeamish or skeptical to invoke the deity, I can produce a mathematical explanation: Trump is a “strange attractor,” an incarnation of coincidences so incredible that they would be rejected out of hand in the most preposterous Hollywood script. When he enters the room, the laws of probability that rule dynamic systems go haywire.
At Butler, the bullet that would have exploded his head barely nicked his ear when he turned to glimpse at a screen behind him. The distance from the shooter was negligible. Trump was the proverbial fish in a barrel, yet he was left dramatically bloodied but alive.
Similarly, the photo taken of him shaking a fist at destiny, blood trickling down his face, Secret Service agents wrapped protectively around him, American flag flying in the background — what are the odds against such an image occurring spontaneously? And yet it did.
If we examine Trump’s trajectory over the last eight years, many similar questions arise.
How did he manage to beat Hillary Clinton in 2016?
How did he resurrect his popularity after the disaster of Jan. 6, 2021?
How did he so easily dispose of talented Republican presidential seekers of the 2024 nomination, a field that included accomplished, proven winners like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis?
Events skew for him
How could he thrive under the relentless persecution of the establishment — the FBI raids, the criminal trials, the lawsuits, the gag orders, the Hitler comparisons?
Events just happen to skew to Trump’s advantage. His ostensibly fatal defeat in 2020 turned out to be the luckiest of breaks: The political steamroller that is Trump today can’t be explained without reference to the corruption and incapacity of the Biden years.
The terrible fires that devastated Los Angeles shortly after Trump’s election became a demonstration, on the national stage, of government by anti-Trumpists — progressives so spellbound by skin color and sexual identity that they forgot to keep the fire hydrants filled.
In a world of politicians floundering in the storm, Trump imposes himself on his surroundings: He is the storm.
His career has coincided with a colossal transformation of society brought about by the rise of digital information systems. One effect has been an eruption of rage and revolt by networked “normies” against the elites who run our great institutions.
It’s a conflict between the centuries — between a present stuck at one minute before midnight and a new dispensation struggling to be born out of the womb of history.
From the first, American elites saw in Trump the embodiment of everything they loathed about the new era. He was disruption and disrespect in the flesh — thus the vehemence of their attacks.
For years, I thought that they were mistaken. Elite hysteria, I believed, said more about their own inadequacies than anything cogent about Trump.
No going back
But I have come to see that the mistake was mine. Some dim instinct for survival in the elite establishment allowed it to recognize the form of its destroyer. In the most improbable turn of all, Trump has emerged as the avatar of the digital age, a Hegelian figure bearing the direction of history, the Weltgeist, upon his shoulders. The plodding hierarchies of the federal government have collided with the digital warriors Trump has let loose — among others, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
It isn’t a fair fight. The traumatized old regime is being torn apart limb from limb.
I have been wrong before, but this feels final. The odds are massively against Trump replacing the existing system with one of his own — though, of course, there’s always that strange attractor force at work.
But there will be no going back to some artificial version of the long-gone 20th century; no reactionary fantasy world imposed by the analog mentality; no online censorship, no debankings, no politicized bureaucracy.
We have crossed a boundary into the new, and we’ll have to deal with the consequences, fair and foul. The old is gone, not with the wind but with Joe Biden, the perfect symbol of senile government.
The causes of this epic collapse are partly structural and partly a matter of random luck. But much of the responsibility — credit or blame, depending on where you stand — falls on human agency, in the person of Donald J. Trump.
Martin Gurri is a former CIA analyst and the author of “The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.” From City Journal.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
