Vol. 72: Donald Trump and the end of history

Democracy’s debt to a sociopath

         Unconventional thoughts about Donald Trump’s “hush money” trial, in which the first U.S. president ever to be impeached twice became, last week, the first U.S. president convicted of a felony:

         The case: In politics and much of life, the right things often happen for the wrong reasons. Trump is a con man who has spent his life eluding or trying to dismantle any entity seeking to hold him accountable.Falsifying records of hush money payments to a porn star to cover up their affair during an election campaign is probably the least of Trump’s offenses against democracy and humanity. Prosecuting him for such a “crime” is like ticketing Jack the Ripper for illegal parking. But it’s a start.

         The villains. Not Trump. As I’ve suggested before, he’s a sick man. Trump’s seemingly insatiable hunger for attention led me to conclude years ago that he suffers from narcissistic personality disorder. Judge Juan Merchan’s attempts to employ rational incentives (fines, threats of imprisonment) to restrain Trump’s behavior during the trial failed because, I submit, Trump is incapable of controlling himself. This year Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal (1987), defined Trump as a sociopath— that is, someone who shows no regard for right and wrong or for the rights and feelings of others. Whether you buy my analysis or Schwartz’s, we’re not dealing with a rational mind here. Our legal system has barely begun to scratch the surface of how to handle such psychological illnesses.

         The real villains here are Trump’s allies and supporters who unhesitatingly echo and spread his claims that the judge, the prosecutors, the jury, New York residents, and the Biden administration— not to mention the election judges who certified Biden’s election victory in 2020— are biased against Trump, if not “crooked and corrupted.” Elected Republican officials who traveled to New York during the trial to reinforce this narrative included Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott of Florida, J.D. Vance of Ohio, and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama; House Speaker Mike Johnson, Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota, and two state attorneys general: Brenna Bird of Iowa and Ken Paxton of Texas. The purpose of a trial is to examine evidence; their purpose was to distract from the evidence. Their apparent notion— that if enough people believe something, it must be true— is the essence of the fascism celebrated by Leni Riefenstahl in Triumph of the Will, her 1935 cinematic paean to Hitler. It’s the same notion that Hans Christian Andersen so deftly exploded nearly two centuries ago in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” But in a world populated by fallible and often gullible humans, this belief in “the faith that moves mountains” needs to be quashed anew in each generation.

Lock him up?

         The heroes: Twelve jurors refused to be intimidated by the distracting theatrics inside and outside the courtroom. Instead, they focused on the evidence and the law, which is to say they did their jobs. Much like the little boy in Andersen’s story, these anonymous ordinary citizens put their own safety at risk to declare that, in effect, Trump has no clothes. In a situation that required courage and uncluttered thinking, these jurors rose to the occasion. That’s an essential requirement of a democratic system.

         Appropriate sentence: “Lock him up” might sound like poetic justice to anyone who recalls Trump leading similar chants against Hillary Clinton in 2016. Jailing Trump would gratify many people— especially folks unjustly locked away by our imperfect legal system. But even if Trump were a rational actor capable of learning a lesson from our system’s traditional punishments, the fact remains: He’s a 78-year-old non-violent first offender. Would you advocate jail time for anyone else with that résumé?

         Faithful subscribers to this column have already read my facetious catalogue of suggested punishments for Trump, which I posted here in April 2023. In that column I listed the pros and cons of ten proposed penalties for Trump in descending order of my preference, beginning with execution and torture and working up from there. If you missed it, click here. If you’d rather skip that column and cut to my Number One preference, here you go:

         1.  For a first offender, token fine and six months’ community service. Pros: Treatment as a juvenile delinquent will drive Trump bananas; community service requirement could trigger an allergic reaction, possibly fatal. Cons: None that I can think of offhand.

         Democracy’s prophets (who, unlike those Republican officials mentioned above, did not make a special trip to the trial last month): Benjamin Franklin, asked what the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had created: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

         H.L. Mencken, in 1920: “As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a narcissistic moron.”

Fukuyama’s regrets

         Democracy’s failed prophet:  In the exuberant wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, the customarily sober political scientist Francis Fukuyama penned an influential book titled The End of History and the Last Man, which argued that humanity had reached “the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." My personal bullshit detector starts buzzing whenever I hear anyone declare the “end” or the “last” of anything, whether it’s the director of the U.S. Patent Office who in 1831 (yes, 1831!) proposed closing his office because, as far as he could see, every conceivable invention had already been invented; or the editors of Fortune Magazine who in the early ’70s proclaimed J. Paul Getty and John D. MacArthur “The Last Billionaires” (today there are 2,781 billionaires in the world, according to Forbes).

               Twenty-five years after Fukuyama’s book appeared— following the fall of democracies in Russia, Turkey, Egypt, and Hungary, 9/11, the rise of ISIS, Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, and Trump’s election as president— Fukuyama manfully reconsidered his original rosy scenario. “Twenty-five years ago, I didn't have a sense or a theory about how democracies can go backward,” he acknowledged. “And I think they clearly can."

‘Yes We Can!’

         You could argue that Donald Trump has done the world a big favor. His election as president in 2016 exposed flaws in our democratic political system that didn’t occur to Fukuyama, among others: Obama’s “Yes We Can!” (elect a Black president) of 2008 became Trump’s “Yes We Can!” (elect a charlatan) of 2016, not to mention “Yes We Can” (elect a convicted felon) of 2024. Now Trump’s criminal and civil trials have exposed the limitations of our legal system as well.

         Trump may be nutty and nasty, but he differs from the rest of us only by degree— which may explain why, as Trump himself boasted in 2016, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue in broad daylight without losing votes. And need I add that, in this year of an election that he could conceivably win, we have hardly seen the last of him?

         Bottom line: We who believe in democracy have work to do. The end of history? We’re just getting started.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com