The best argument for Donald Trump’s presidency was never about the man himself. It was about the people who voted for him.
It wasn’t really about what he would do for taxes, immigration or the federal judiciary. He did many needed things on those fronts for sure, but any clever Republican politician with a good pollster could have come up with that agenda. It wasn’t about his vaunted business experience and how he might inject a little necessary private-sector sense into a stultified bureaucracy. It certainly wasn’t about his penchant for conversation-dominating social-media expostulations — polls have indicated a consistent popular distaste for them.
The best argument for Donald Trump was that he led and gave voice to millions of Americans who had been leaderless and voiceless for decades.
The secret people
The secret people, as a British poet once described his similarly disdained countrymen — smiled at, paid, passed over. The deplorables. The men and women whom the media, entertainment and corporate human resources types never meet in their local Whole Foods but deride as bigots and brutish neanderthals.
People who had voted for Republicans and Democrats and had an increasingly hard time telling the difference. People who had voted for a “compassionate conservative,” who led the nation into a catastrophic and futile war. People who had voted for the nation’s first African-American president, a man promising hope and change but delivering hope mostly for those who had plenty of it already and change for few of those who really needed it.
These were Americans left behind by, or alarmed by, the unforgiving juggernaut of “progress” hailed by our political, business and cultural leaders as the glorious arc of history.
Economic progress that saw the logic of global supply chains and free labor movement render millions of American workers too expensive to employ, condemning their communities to despair. Technological progress that atomized society, turning people into redundant ex-employees, doom-scrolling screen junkies, and datasets for clever algorithms to target. Cultural progress that, in the space of a decade, told people that beliefs they had held dear all their lives were now immoral and needed to be expunged from schools, workplaces, lives.
People who had grown up believing their country, for all its faults, was decent and good and had been a unique force for human freedom were now told that it had always been the nerve center of oppression, fit only for a re-education of reactionary minds.
Donald Trump stood for those people, understood them — and, quite uniquely among politicians, actually liked them. It’s not hard to understand why they liked him. Of course there were those who harbored darker beliefs and more malign intent. But if you think they number more than a small fraction of the 74 million who voted for him a second time last year then perhaps it’s you who needs education about what your country is like.
Legitimate concerns
In short, President Trump’s greatest achievement will have been the elevation of the legitimate concerns of perhaps half the U.S. population, an improbable, physics-defying reversal of the political tides that had eroded much American self-confidence in the preceding generation.
But leadership involves more than simply articulating the fears and aspirations of those who need leading. People follow leaders, heed their words, absorb their example. Leaders not only reflect the ideals of the led; they reflect back to them the values by which the country should be governed. By this leadership standard Mr. Trump must be judged too.
The damage his unpardonable behavior — throughout his presidency, but especially since the election — has done to the bonds that hold a fragile nation together is incalculable. His refusal to accept defeat, and the steadily escalating insistence to his followers that they should never accept it, is for many a defining conclusion that bears testimony to his unfit character and invalidates whatever other argument can be made for his presidency.
There is much to this. The loss of civic trust from his promotion of ever-larger falsehoods has widened, rather than helped close, the divide, risking further alienation from constitutional politics of those who voted for him and — not incidentally — paving the way for a potential undoing of much of what he did achieve.
Perhaps Joe Biden will prove a judicious leader. We can hope. Perhaps he will remember to heed the voices of those who voted for Mr. Trump and not dismiss them as domestic enemies, as many of his now ascendant allies are doing. Perhaps he will resist the powerful voices around him who want the last four years to be written off as an aberrant sideways pause in the march of progress.
That would be unwise. Learning from Mr. Trump’s success is as essential as disavowing his misdeeds.
The Wall St Journal
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