The Rorschach President

What Do You See When You Look at Donald Trump?

To some he’s an avenging angel sent to make America great again. To others he’s a devil hell-bent on carnage and destruction. Still others say he’s just a pinhead. Read multiple reports about a Trump rally and you might wonder if the reporters were all at the same event. But who is this Donald Trump fellow anyway?

I’ve criticized both those who would make Trump a God Emperor and those who would make him Literal Hitler. But I’m no closer than they are to figuring out precisely what lies behind the Orange Mystery. Trying to find the Real Donald Trump is like trying to find the Real King Arthur: the man has long since been subsumed by the myth.

For centuries the West has been Disenchanted. We want facts, not poetry: equations, not allegory. I tried to escape the Trumpian vortex by rejecting legend and seeking reality. And in doing so I wound up as deceived as those who fancied themselves grandmasters of 5D Chess. For better or worse, Donald Trump has become a Myth. We cannot weigh, measure, or reason with Myths. We can only engage with them. And how we engage depends on who we are and what we expect.

The Dying Land

In 1859, the year Alfred Tennyson released four Arthurian poems, gunboat diplomacy expanded British territorial holdings around Hong Kong. In 1870, when he released The Holy Grail and Other Poems, British ships were sailing through the newly constructed Suez Canal. In 1885, when Tennyson (now Lord Tennyson) completed Idylls of the King, British Africa stretched from Egypt to the Cape of Good Hope.

Tennyson’s King Arthur is the pinnacle of Victorian ideals. He is unfailingly generous and gracious; he defends the weak and shows mercy to the vanquished; he fights on even in the face of certain defeat. But this nobility becomes his tragic flaw. Camelot does not fall because Arthur is weak: it falls because Arthur is good. As Guinevere complains to her lover Lancelot:

Arthur, my lord, Arthur, the faultless King,
That passionate perfection, my good lord—
But who can gaze upon the Sun in heaven?
He never spake word of reproach to me,
He never had a glimpse of mine untruth,
He cares not for me …
He is all fault who hath no fault at all..

Arthur knows something is wrong, but because his heart is true, he cannot imagine his queen and his most trusted knight are false. Other knights assume Arthur is aware of their infidelity but chooses to ignore it. The king they once revered becomes a cuckold in their eyes. And as they lose respect for their liege Lord, they lose respect for the traditions and manners that made Camelot great.

In Tennyson’s time Queen Victoria presided over an Empire on which the sun never set. In 1991 we found ourselves the world’s sole superpower. But while British real national income rose an estimated 46% between 1855 and 1873, most American gains since the Soviet collapse have accrued to the wealthy and super-wealthy.

After World War II America had two generations of unparalleled prosperity. Today the generation which benefited most, the Boomers, is widely hated for being soft and selfish. The “American Dream” has become a distant memory and we have recast our historical heroes as villains.

Victorian Romantics looked back to Camelot to understand the Raj and to acknowledge those nagging feelings of impending doom. Twenty years after Tennyson’s death in 1893, Edwardian England found itself embroiled in a Great War that would send Britain’s best and brightest to die in the trenches.

Tennyson struggled with black bouts of depression for most of his life. In 2023 11.3% of American men and 23.8% of American women reported that they had been or were being treated for depression. In a waste land ruled by an oblivious king, is it surprising that we’re searching for a knight of the grail? Or that we might be easily fooled by somebody who promised to fix what was wrong?

The Manifest Destiny

In 1803 Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase nearly doubled the size of American holdings. The frontier opened up with all its perils and promise. It was a blank slate where you could escape your past and create a better future for yourself and your family. And over the course of the next century that land was tamed from sea to shining sea.

This was not entirely a peaceful process. The former residents were driven out of their homes and onto reservations. Poor people of all colors and ethnicities were exploited as cheap labor. Many succumbed to disease and hunger. But by 1900 America had 45 states connected by 193,346 miles of railroad lines.

With the rise of industrialism, America also became home to ethnic groups from around the world. Immigrants worked as laborers and shopkeepers, escaping the Old World’s strife and poverty for a New World whose streets were paved with gold. If that gold was sometimes hard to find and those streets were sometimes mean, the next generation could hope to accomplish more than their forbears.

That vision of American exceptionalism sustained us through two World Wars and a Great Depression. It culminated in a period of unprecedented prosperity. But today we are “rethinking” our history. Our erstwhile heroes are now scorned as heroes and bigots. Our great melting pot has become a tool by which European Anglophone supremacy was forced on oppressed immigrants.

In Constantin von Hoffmeister’s excellent new book Esoteric Trumpism, he notes:

Trump, a force majeure in America’s recent political landscape, signifies more than just a person or a presidency. He is an embodiment of a resurgent will, a yearning for a remembered past, and a challenge to the present state of affairs. His presence is less about the man and more about what he represents: a counter-movement against what many perceive as a decaying cosmopolitan order.

If you are part of that modern cosmopolitanism that began with Woodrow Wilson and peaked with the rise of the European Union, Trump represents the Bad Old Days. The Bad Orange Man is a Jungian Shadow that you can fill with historical atrocities and injustices, then work yourself into a frenzy at the impending doom.

If you reject that cosmopolitanism, Trump is a ray of hope in a world lost in despair. For you the God Emperor is the Golden Child, the Madhi, the one who will defeat the wicked and restore divine order. You project your hopes rather than your fears onto Trump. But you project nonetheless.

You may argue that I’ve oversimplified things, and protest that your view isn’t nearly so black and white as all that. And of course you would be right. We’re dealing with a Myth here, and myths are simultaneously simpler and infinitely more complicated than reality. To be swept up in the Myth is to touch the Oversoul. Heroes, Villains, and their audience are all caught up in something transcendent.

The Pure Fool

Donald Trump is a stupid man’s idea of a smart person, a poor man’s idea of a rich man, and a weak man’s idea of a strong man.

Anonymous, frequently attributed to Fran Lebowitz

America has long had a conflicted relationship with our robber barons. They’re the targets of our disdain and our envy. Once we pored over gossip columns for news of our playboys and heiresses. Today our super-rich have reality shows and TikTok channels. Try as we might, we can’t shake our fascination with the aristocracy.

You could argue that Donald Trump inherited a fortune and note that he has an Ivy League degree from Wharton. But those details aren’t as important as the fact that Trump doesn’t behave like a real estate mogul. He’s vulgar in the old-fashioned sense of the word. From his love of McDonald’s to his penchant for childish but cutting insults, Donald Trump is a bumpkin with a billionaire’s bank balance.

As Lebowitz or pseudo-Lebowitz put it, Trump is a poor man’s idea of a rich man. He gleefully shows off his wealth in big gold letters across skyscrapers and casinos. But yet he remains approachable to anybody who tunes in and watches him share his wisdom with — and fire — apprentices. He’s not some trust fund snob staring down from his ivory tower at the proles. A poor person can look at Donald Trump and imagine “He’s just like me if I were rich.”

To the peasants Trump is a hero. To the minor nobles he’s a class traitor. Times aren’t so good for the gentry as they once were. About the only thing that separates them from the serfs nowadays is proper manners. The Imbecile-Errant not only fails to look down on the peasants, he considers them his allies. And, to add insult to injury, he even behaves like them.

In the longhouse foolishness makes you differently abled, but it certainly doesn’t give you a claim on leadership. The only people fit to rule are those with a proper education and appropriate test scores, those who are vetted by the right committees and repeat the right slogans. The Imbecile-Errant mocks those committees and surrounds himself with other fools who Distrust the Science.

Unlike the blended admiration and hate the lower classes generally offer their betters, Trump inspires a love and devotion typically reserved for saints and kings. This is because, like Parsifal, Trump is the pure fool. He has noble blood but peasant manners. His innocence at first gets him in trouble, as he finds himself outwitted by the evil denizens of the Swamp. But after his adversaries prove unable to kill or jail him, he returns in triumph.

The Scapegoat

The crowd by definition seeks action but cannot affect natural causes. It therefore looks for an accessible cause that will appease its appetite for violence. Those who make up the crowd are always potential persecutors, for they dream of purging the community of the impure elements that corrupt it, the traitors that undermine it. The crowd’s act of becoming a crowd is the same as the obscure call to assemble or mobilize, in other words to become a mob… the word mobilization reminds us of a military operation, against an already identified enemy or one soon to be identified by the mobilization of the crowd.

Rene Girard, The Scapegoat, 16

If you’re one of my Left-leaning readers, your thoughts will immediately go to Trump’s efforts to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria. If you’re one of my Right-leaning readers, you’ll be reminded of the long years of Trump demonization and how the Swamp turned our elected president and his supporters into figures of absolute evil. Only a few will understand that both examples might apply.

With Barack Obama’s 2008 victory, most Leftists felt America had reached a major milestone. Four decades after the Civil Rights Act, American voters elected a President based on the content of his character rather than the color of his skin. Even mainstream Republicans refrained from the kind of Bull Connor style racism we saw in the 1960s. The loudest argument against the new President was aimed not at his race but at his citizenship.

During the 2008 Democratic primary season, Clinton staffers suggested that Obama had been born in Kenya and hence was not a natural-born citizen. That argument failed to hold sway with primary voters. But a few Republican “Birthers” decided that Barack Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate was faked. Perhaps the most prominent Birther was a New York Republican named Donald Trump.

Alongside his earlier calls to execute the Central Park Five, Trump’s support for Birtherism convinced urban liberals that he was a bigoted kook. Then, in 2016, Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton. This victory turned their distaste into frothing hatred for Trump and his supporters. Those liberals who thought that racism was dying now decided that America had fallen into the hands of White Supremacists.

After Reagan gutted the unions and Clinton gutted our manufacturing center, things got a lot harder for Trump’s working class constituency. They had grown used to being ignored by the middle and upper classes. But as the rhetoric about “Whiteness” grew increasingly heated, they started to feel like they were being actively targeted for annihilation.

While many resisted being scapegoated, quite a few on both sides played up to their opponent’s fears. White college students declared that “all White people should die” and gloated “your grandchildren are going to be brown LOL.” Angry young White men embraced the “White Supremacist” label and promised “total nigger death.” These antics convinced both sides that the other was dangerous and genocidal.

Myths are powered by heated rhetoric. Nobody wants to hear stories about Sir Giles the Mediocre running his spear through Athelraed the Incompetent. There are people on both sides working to calm tensions and find common ground. There are many more who’ve grown accustomed to jousting with irredeemably evil monsters.

The Hero’s Trials

There’s an old plotting model that puts main characters up a tree in Act 1, throws rocks at them in Act 2, then rescues them in Act 3. To become a hero, the protagonist must face seemingly insurmountable challenges, yet triumph because he is the Chosen One.

Trump’s earlier civil and criminal trials were seen by Team Blue as proof of his utter perfidy. To Team Red, they were signs that the Swamp would stop at nothing to neutralize the Trump threat. These efforts only served to further polarize the already divided electorate.

Then, on July 13, 2024, Thomas Crooks opened fire on Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. One audience member was killed and two were critically wounded. Had Trump not turned his head, he would have taken a bullet to the brain. As it was, the shot only grazed his ear. And as Secret Service agents pulled him away, a bloodied Trump raised his fist and shouted to the crowd “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

Opponents immediately recognized that image’s power and worked to neutralize it. Many who had laughed at disinformation-spreading “conspiracy theorists” insisted that the shooting was staged and the blood fake. Trump’s supporters, by contrast, assumed that the Biden administration had plotted the failed assassination with the help of a corrupt Secret Service.

The Democrats were on the whole less inclined to follow the “BlueAnon” conspiracy theorists. They offered the lukewarm scolding we would see later after Luigi Mangione’s CEO-shooting. Mostly they avoided the subject. Ceding the point was probably their best option, but it still left Trump in a much stronger position than he was in prior to the event.

Not quite three months after the shooting, Trump returned to Butler. As Steve Krakauer described it:

The second Butler rally was a revival, in multiple definitions of the word. It was an improvement. A return. A religious gathering, highlighted by deep excitement.

There was opera singer Christopher Macchio on hand to belt out beautiful renditions of “Ave Maria” and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” There was a touching tribute to Corey Comperatore, the Trump supporter who was killed at the July rally. And there was Trump’s speech, interspersed with a giddy Elon Musk literally jumping for joy.

Some have claimed that this shooting was the moment Trump won the election. By surviving the assassination attempt, Trump gained an aura of strength and invulnerability that neither Biden nor Harris could match. It made his victory look inevitable, as he was the candidate not even death could touch.

The Emperor’s New Clothes

The noblemen who were to carry his train stooped low and reached for the floor as if they were picking up his mantle. Then they pretended to lift and hold it high. They didn't dare admit they had nothing to hold.

So off went the Emperor in procession under his splendid canopy. Everyone in the streets and the windows said, "Oh, how fine are the Emperor's new clothes! Don't they fit him to perfection? And see his long train!" Nobody would confess that he couldn't see anything, for that would prove him either unfit for his position, or a fool. No costume the Emperor had worn before was ever such a complete success.

Hans Christian Andersen, The Emperor’s New Clothes

We know this tale from Hans Christian Andersen, but there are earlier Spanish and Indian versions. Swindlers convince a vain king that they have woven magical cloth that can only be seen by the right sort of people. In the Spanish and Indian versions, those of illegitimate birth cannot see the cloth. Andersen’s con artists tell the king that the cloth is invisible to those who are stupid or unfit for office.

Unwilling to admit that he cannot see the cloth, the king pays them handsomely for their finely woven clothes. His nobles go along with the ruse for fear of losing their jobs. The audience goes along because everybody else appears to see the cloth. And for a time it looks as though the ruse might work, as nobody is willing to call it out.

Then somebody announces that the emperor is naked. In Andersen’s version it is a child; Lucanor tells us the innocent is a Negro; the Jain tale has a commoner ask if the emperor has become a naked ascetic. This crack in the edifice sends the lie tumbling down, but gives the swindlers time to escape with their ill-won gains.

Rumors of Joe Biden’s declining mental state were swirling around before the 2020 election. Those rumors were quickly dismissed by Biden voters and supporters as disinformation. Most Democrats went along with the crowd, unwilling to be seen as gullible Trump supporters. Then, at the June 27 debate, the world got a look at the American emperor’s new clothes.

Trump attacked Biden ruthlessly, noting at one point “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either.” Biden tried to hold onto power, and his inner circle insisted it was just a bad night and our 46th President was still sharp as a tack. Alas, the damage had been done, and on July 21 Joe Biden withdrew (or was withdrawn) from the election.

Peer pressure can go a long way, and many Americans outsource their political thinking to their trusted news sources. But the longer you maintain a façade, the greater the damage when it finally comes tumbling down. Surrounding yourself with sycophants, even powerful sycophants, is a recipe for disaster. It is as yet unclear whether Donald Trump has internalized that message.