How Donald Trump is bound to fail
Over the past few months, and especially in his second inaugural address, Trump has gone all 19th century on us.
Representative image
NEW YORK: After a four-year hiatus, we are once again compelled to go spelunking into the deeper caverns of Donald Trump’s brain. We climb under his ego, which interestingly makes up 87% of his neural tissue; we burrow beneath the nucleus accumbens, the region of the brain responsible for cheating at golf; and then, deep down at the core of the limbic system, we find something strange — my 11th grade history textbook.
Over the past few months, and especially in his second inaugural address, Trump has gone all 19th century on us. He seems to find in this period everything he likes: tariffs, Manifest Destiny, seizing land from weaker nations, mercantilism, railroads, manufacturing and populism. Many presidents mention George Washington or Abraham Lincoln in their inaugurals. Who was the immortal Trump cited? William McKinley.
You can tell what kind of conservative a person is by discovering what year he wants to go back to. For Trump, it seems to be sometime between 1830 and 1899. “The spirit of the frontier is written into our hearts,” he declared in his address.
It’s easy to see the appeal. We were a boisterous, arriviste nation back then, bursting with energy, bombast and new money. In 1840, there were 3,000 miles of railroad track in America. By 1900, there were roughly 259,000 miles of track. Americans were known for being materialistic, mechanical and voracious for growth. In his book “The American Mind,” historian Henry Steele Commager wrote of our 19th-century forebears: “Whatever promised to increase wealth was automatically regarded as good, and the American was tolerant, therefore, of speculation, advertising, deforestation and the exploitation of natural resources.” So Trumpian.
It was a time when the national character was being forged not among the establishment circles in Boston, Philadelphia and Virginia but out on the frontier, by the wild ones, the uncouth ones. It was the rugged experience of westward expansion, historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared in 1893, that had given America its vitality, its egalitarianism, its disinterest in high culture and polite manners. The West was settled by a rising tide of hucksterism — the spirit of circus master P.T. Barnum more than that of aristocratic novelist Henry James.
It was a golden age of braggadocio, of Paul Bunyan-style tall tales. It was also an age when to be American was to be wreathed in glory. Many Americans believed that God had assigned a sacred errand to his new chosen people, to complete history and to bring a new heaven down to earth. (Kind of like the way God saved Trump in that Pennsylvania field so that he could complete the sacred mission of deporting more immigrants.)
Herman Melville captured, without endorsing, the nationalist fervor in his novel “White Jacket”: “We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people — the Israel of our time. God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls.” Walt Whitman joined the chorus: “Have the elder races halted? / Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas? / We take up the task eternal.” There’s no confidence like adolescent confidence, for a person or a country.
I can see why this image of a wild, raw, aspiring America appeals to Trump. It is sometimes said that Trump appeals to those left behind, the losers of the information age. And this is a nationalism filled with aspiration, daring, hope and future-mindedness. (It helps if, like Trump, you whitewash a few minor details about 19th-century America from your portrait — like, you know, slavery and Reconstruction.)