Earlier today, I sat down with John McWhorter for our monthly tête-à-tête. We begin with the latest installment of the old debate on Trump’s personal shortcomings and their consequences for his legitimacy and authority. John boils down Trump’s governing philosophy to a single axiom: “He’s an asshole.” For John, that’s the key to understanding both Trump’s style and substance, why his decision making appears capricious and contradictory, and why he so casually disregards norms, conventions, diplomacy, and, on occasion, basic human decency.
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I won’t deny that Trump is, to use John’s term, an asshole. But I don’t think his personality is determinative, and I think it explains neither his decision-making nor his (admittedly declining) popularity. Profanity, bluster, and rudeness aside, I see Trump as a far more conventional figure than he appears at first glance. He responds to structural and institutional conditions that are larger than any one leader and any one nation. For example, he didn’t invent the immigration debate in order to serve his own ends. He intervened in it, first as a candidate and then as the president. And his position, extreme as it may seem to some, has been voiced by many, many others, going back long before he was born.
Now, I don’t always like the way Trump responds to particular structural and institutional conditions. I think he could have intervened in the IDF’s Gaza campaign much earlier, and perhaps prevented much unnecessary death and destruction. And, like most of the country, I’m very skeptical about the necessity of our involvement in Iran. But these matters require analysis on their merits, rather than tracing them back to the psychology of a particular person, even one as powerful as Trump.
This matter is closely related to a topic John and I discuss here, regarding a recent essay of mine: the moral language of public reason. When we use morally loaded language in reference to an event, we ought first to ask whether our usage matches the word’s definition in context. “Genocide,” for example, has a rather specific definition in the context of international law. Treating it as an epithet to be slung or batted back, or as a signal of our own moral position vis-à-vis the Gaza conflict, does a disservice to the use of reason in determining the moral stakes of the debate. With all due respect to John, I would say the same thing about his use of the word “asshole” regarding Trump.
John and I will probably never resolve our differences over Trump, which isn’t a problem in itself. There are other matters on which we can think collaboratively, including John’s recent piece for the New York Times about the comparative effects of DEI policies and AI technologies. Both, John persuasively argues, thicken the fog of suspicion that falls over individual achievement, leaving us wondering if what we’re seeing is what it appears. It’s bad enough to be deceived and know it. But the more damaging consequence is the eternal, nagging problem of never quite being sure. As John points out, that is the world AI is creating, whether or not it intends to.
We spent the second part of the stream responding to reader questions from the Q&A. We’ll have that up soon for full subscribers. And if you’re not yet a subscriber, what are you waiting for? Click below and start getting the full TGS experience.
