The newly inaugurated president wields the most famous name in the country, and that’s been the case since his enthronement as Republican chief a decade ago. Yet, I still find myself asking: Who is Donald Trump?
No, I’m not requesting a table of biographical data informing me of his birthday or favorite color. Nor do I necessarily want a list of his policy endorsements. The real question I need answered is one we’ve seen posed inconclusively over and over. How does Trump see the world?
I’ve come to the idea that, for better or worse, Trump is not a visionary ideologue or conviction politician. Members of his coalition may be so. You may argue that they determine the overarching ends of “Trumpism.” However, they do not, by themselves, explain the man in the Oval Office.
Members of the MAGA movement, redeemed establishmentarians and renegade culture warriors alike, are perplexed by their leader’s lack of axiomatic beliefs. When the clock was ready to strike midnight on American TikTok, for instance, Trump, the well-proclaimed China-hawk, blindsided his allies by postponing the ban. More consistent hawks like senators Tom Cotton and Lindsey Graham were left in direct opposition to their president’s day-one stand.
And despite his enormous popularity among evangelicals, Trump has distanced himself from that group’s core moral tenets on abortion, IVF and similar procedures. Traditionally, the pro-life stance has been an inseparable part of every Republican platform since the Ronald Reagan era. Nevertheless, Trump promoted a states’ rights policy and received little intra-partisan pushback.
Given his lack of hard-and-fast views, I’d wager that Trump is not a Trumpist! He is not concerned with a utopic future governed by his favorite ideas but rather the one governed by him and staffed by his favorite people. Sure, people are complex; he likely fancies one policy or another. But power outranks policy. I told you, the reader, that biographical details mattered little, but that’s only true when they’re examined independently. It is not unreasonable that a man of Manhattan, as I once called him, is more invested in his sociopolitical stature than any philosophical ideals.
Robert Caro, famed biographer of Lyndon B. Johnson, described the 1960s president as being motivated by “power in its naked form, for power not to improve the lives of others, but to manipulate and dominate them.” Now, I don’t suppose that Trump is a master Machiavellian who lives entirely for the accumulation of social resources, as Caro oft depicted LBJ. Fame, acclamation and loyalty from his lieutenants seem to be other goals that steer the president. Still, I find Caro’s portrayal striking and illuminating.
According to Caro, Johnson supported the New Deal and the Great Society because those distributive approaches “let you do things for people, and therefore gives you the greatest opportunity to get gratitude.” Gratitude leads to leverage, and leverage leads to power. For Trump, I see it the same. Nativism, for instance, serves as a means to power. And when power comes first, moral limitations, like obeying election laws, seem trivial. No wonder LBJ had his own spar over an election result in 1948.
Given these circumstances and all the rest, I view the president as not too dissimilar from what he portrays himself as: an unscrupulous, instinctive magnate with an overweening taste for spectacle. I may be wrong on that speculation, but I am even more confident that many of the personages, foreign and domestic, who have been gearing up to negotiate with the president will operate under that assumption. Compared to some of his more conscientious and wonkish predecessors, understanding the personality of the 47th is a critical objective of all actors who want something from him or his country. Everyone is still asking: Who is Donald Trump?