Donald Trump's Political Mythology

Isaac Lopez has argued in a commentary published recently on this site that Trump has a good chance of winning this November because the liberals have replaced “American values” with laws and norms that are foreign and enraging. In response, the “silent majority” (in fact, a minority) of Americans elected “a very stable genius.” This essay is about the nature of an aspect of Donald J. Trump’s governance that has been overlooked: his cult. None of the usual political arguments can explain the desperate stances taken by his followers. The explanation offered here is twofold: One is the need for reversing a feared path to secular “socialism.” The second is that Trump has asserted that reality is subject to his will and personality. Ancillary to this is the idea that Trump’s persona can unify America by subordinating “difference” to a mythic national identity.

Donald Trump has, for a large minority (possibly 40 percent of the electorate), the persona of a mythic hero, a hero who can overcome all obstacles by sheer will. Through a close reading of Trump’s angry language, one realizes that Trump has woven a recognizable myth for citizens bereft of purpose and power. This is Trump’s will-to-power. Trump has given meaning and purpose to people losing out to technology, urban wealth, science’s truth, and social helplessness exacerbated by the pandemic. He is a hero of revenge against regulators, the media, and modernity itself. Even the pandemic cannot overcome him; he overcomes the pandemic, until recently.

Behind his brave new world of post-truth and alternative facts is a real breakdown in the metaphysics of small towns, white workers, farmers, and others on the fringes of academia, the law, and the punditry. The breakdown has revealed the loss of Trump’s followers’ foundation for their intelligible reality. The family, religion, all the narratives of American nationalism are threatened with extinction in their minds. Saving America requires a revival of their myth of America and, in particular, the Confederacy, which would restore what has been lost. The change took place since at least the 1960s, but it goes back to the Civil War.

What happened in the 60s was a breakdown in the metaphysics of small towns and white working-class neighborhoods; what had been their world was ground down by demands for equality, new lifestyles, environmentalism, and technology. Evangelism came out of the closet and called America back to an old-fashioned God. The path to Trump was built by the impact of modernity itself on his worshiping loyalists. The death of God, the loss of faith, alienation, and the deterioration of skilled labor by technology are being lived by his “real” Americans. This American crisis was not seen in this light by moderate politicians, but it was seen by Trump—as a way to win an election.

Liberals called on science, technology, and social engineering to solve all our political, social, and economic problems. The scientist is the new priest; the welfare bureaucracy substitutes for the family; psychiatry and psychotherapy fill in for the loss of community and the loss of meaning. All of these “solutions” were based on materialism and calculation, however. Religion, patriotism, and patriarchy were now problems to be solved or subcultures to be mocked.

In the 70s and 80s, reactions on the right to America’s transformed reality were scattered: evangelicals castigated the sexual “revolution,” libertarians attacked government regulations, and Cold War hawks militated against what they saw as being “soft on communism.” Ronald Reagan created a coalition that isolated liberals and progressives. The shock of Barack Obama’s presidency amplified the fear that America was losing itself. This brought about a revival of populist nationalist mythology, personified by Donald J. Trump. Not conservatism, but a popular resurgence of American identity. To white working-class men, Trump has become a mythical hero. He has to a remarkable degree redefined what America is in national terms as identical to the values of a mythical America. Trump says that we Americans are one people, not inclusively but exclusively. Our one Nation has but one people, Christian and Undefeated. After all the rhetoric of “melting pots,” the refuge of the world’s tired, huddled masses, we have come to be a fortress walled against the world.

The failure of liberalism to meet this challenge only further paved the way for Trump. None of the rational managerial solutions to modernity’s problems worked very well. Welfare, Medicare, computer technology, and rational bureaucracy did not embody the felt values of Trump’s followers, which they experienced as real and unchanging. Political scientists and sociologists theorized that values were only emotions or socially constructed. Liberalism did not recognize values the way that rural America did. Nor did they make sense of masculine virtues, which liberals regarded as “sexism” or “racism.” To the true believers (rural Americans, working-class whites, and evangelicals), the values that made America a real nation had to be God-given and traditional. America is, therefore, a nation that stands for something transcendent.

Now a new response was needed for true believers who were not being heard, one that answers the sense of loss and what must be won back. All they had before Trump—in the words of Barack Obama—was to cling to their Bibles and guns. Moreover, these marginalized citizens also demanded a real life based on what a man made from his own labor. Losing that has led to profound tragedy: drug addiction, suicide, the sense of the decline of America into a second-rate power. Trump’s most successful claim was that he was going to “bring back” the family, God, and, maybe most important, the old jobs of mining, steel production, the automobile industry. These iconic pillars of people’s lives became the core of Trump’s message. That these promises could not be kept was not important because just the promise was like magic that gave people a renewed sense of order, meaning, hope, and dignity.

Conservatives like Goldwater, Nixon, and Reagan paved the way for an American revival, but they did not really engage with disillusioned Americans. While Reagan and other conservatives would agree that America needed a world that made sense and had moral gravitas, Donald Trump has delivered the myth to overlooked, powerless Americans who faithfully believe and defend the myth as Trump declares it. This will last regardless of who wins in November. What many critics and pundits agree are his weaknesses—incoherence, ineptitude, lack of seriousness, and a lack of connection to a shared reality—are his strengths. What is he doing when he goes off on a binge of outrageous lying, preposterous claims, and self-aggrandizing narcissism? He is creating an America that “real” Americans recognize as theirs. This is the will-to-power that rips off the mask of American rational politics. He replaces that mask with a mythology of strength, greatness, and, above all, the capacity to change the world, to take charge of the world, to own one’s destiny. That mythology is impervious to criticism.

Instead of waiting for evidence and waiting for sober analysis and even more sober policies, Trump simply exercises his will to assert an imagined world. This gives extraordinary power to powerless people. This assertion is not knowledge, nor is it about resistance to change. He has created a constant barrage of contradictions and nonsense with a sense of power that has flummoxed even the most sophisticated among us. Indeed, his intention is to flummox the sophisticated. Instinctively, everything that Trump says allows his believers to share in the willful remaking of reality. The wildest conspiracies are believed and acted upon because they are unreal to liberals. Trump rejects all the standard political machinations by making his “instinct,” his “feelings,” and his “intuition” the only legitimate sources for judgment and action. Those who would say otherwise are revealed as liberals, fake news journalists, traitors, and anarchists.

One may object to this by saying that Trump is being portrayed here as a kind of wizard or magician. No, he is a cult figure whose words and very presence can transform an intolerable, agonizing environment into an intelligible, valuable, meaningful world to live in. That this is a house of cards is irrelevant. Look at what he is doing to save us all: defeating the radicals, restoring male dominance, getting sexuality re-balanced, making America a military powerhouse that cannot be pushed around and that does not need allies or institutions like the UN or WHO or WTO or any of the rest of the rationalist alphabet that supposedly constitutes the limits of our political imagination.

Will Trump win next week? Does it make a difference? He has made a reality that can last a lifetime. He has shown Americans that they can resist their incorporation into a world order by conjuring up new realities. Trump’s Americans are also liberated from the tropes of liberal circumspection and reflection: they can be racist, sexist, and politically incorrect and feel good about themselves. And if anyone criticizes them, they have their guns.