Something Short of Tragic

Figures like Donald Trump reap the rewards for pursuing vice over virtue.

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376
Former President Donald Trump. (Phelan M. Ebenhack for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

Hey,

I wrote my Los Angeles Times column on the sadness of Donald Trump’s life right now. I won’t reprise the whole thing here. I just want to use it as a jumping-off point. 

While I find Trump’s existence pitiable these days, I can’t really muster much actual pity in the technical sense. Pity involves notions of compassion and sorrow for another’s misfortune, and there are few people in public life I’m less inclined to allocate such feelings for. Even on issues where I am nominally on his side, I think he deserves all of the trouble he has invited upon himself. 

For instance, I do not think Congress should make his tax returns public because I think punitively releasing tax returns is a bad practice, even when done against people I think have it coming. 

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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    So sad to see Rusty Reno heading up Richard John Neuhaus’s magazine.

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  2. Mark

    On a positive side of Trump, he sometimes to charities he was not affiliated with just because someone asked him to. I have a friend with Lupus who wrote to Trump and asked him to donate to the local NY chapter of that charity. She didn't know Trump, was not a famous or rich person. Trump gave $25,000. Does it make up for all the other badness? No. But it is one little piece of goodness that he did.

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  3. Dougaj2

    Trump was the presidency of Joseph McCarthy. Self-promotion that stirred distrust, branded people, and raised anger. McCarthy lasted until self-promotion’s sustainability exceeded its connection to important events and conversation. Trump’s personal sustainability collapse may be in view, but his legacy successors are jockeying to perpetuate his wing. Hopefully opposition Republicans are able to clip that wing.

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      Ben Connelly

      I get the point you’re trying to make but I don’t actually think Donald Trump was the Joe McCarthy president. I think he was the Donald Trump president. Trump is sui generis in a bad way and McCarthy wasn’t exactly like Trump. For one thing McCarthy was probably smarter. And I think his downfall was probably more due to the witch-hunt aspect of his trials and the fact that he was actually really ineffective at accomplishing the goal he supposedly was pursuing. And in the 1950s, people acted more like adults and eventually decided that this was stupid and the country needed to move on.

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  4. Bobby D

    I appreciate your continued engagement with Reno and the NatCon crowd. Thanks too for linking to Bahnsen's excellent critique.

    I still don't understand the purpose of this movement.

    Reno is a smart enough guy to recognize the straw-man nature of his argument here. That's especially true when the straw man is as egregiously constructed as this one is. This argument wouldn't convince even the most modest skeptic. He's just preaching to those who, under the influence of motivated reasoning, want Reno's argument to be true. In that sense, it functions as a kind of post-truth affirmation of a reality that exists merely in the realm of people's feelings. Even so, these arguments never give explicit voice to what these feelings are. In the end, they just feel that more people should be devout practitioners of Christianity.

    Further, the movement confounds me because there's nothing that's apparently actionable. They can proffer all kinds of diagnoses of certain problems, but have no solutions. I suspect that that's because they want to avoid having to defend the track record of authoritarian states in which utopian ideals quickly gave way to gulags. In fact, the few leaders whom they hold out as models--Trump, Orban, Putin--embody few of the moral virtues they claim to espouse. So, while such leaders may put an end to capitalism, it's unlikely that they'd replace it with anything more virtuous in the eyes of Reno and the NatCon crowd.

    These folks have plenty of criticism for those of us who fail to think outside of the box of liberal democracy. But it seems equally reasonable to ask them to think inside the box of reality. At this point, the whole NatCon movement seems like a kind of virtual-reality exercise.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Ben Connelly

      I’m increasingly beginning to think that the problem with Reno is that he is not in fact a smart enough guy. He’s done and said things that were so profoundly unserious as to make you question his intelligence. Maybe he’s a bit of a grifter though and he’s doubling down on dumb populism.

      “Further, the movement confounds me because there's nothing that's apparently actionable. They can proffer all kinds of diagnoses of certain problems, but have no solutions. I suspect that that's because they want to avoid having to defend the track record of authoritarian states in which utopian ideals quickly gave way to gulags.”

      Yes. Exactly what you said. Hazony and Deneen can be oddly difficult to pin down in interviews sometimes other than making nods to Hungary and the beginnings of something new that can’t be totally defined. I’m beginning to think it’s because there’s no actual there there. For all the grandiosity, they don’t actually have some new post-liberal philosophy that will revolutionize the world. They struggle with simply, “okay so what does it look like? Give me an example” questions because they’re actually not sure themselves.

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      1. Bobby D

        I recently listened to Andrew Sullivan’s interviews of Hazony, Ahmari, and Trueman. Not one of them could proffer a coherent argument in favor of their brand of post-liberalism. In the end, the logic was little more than, “I want a government that preemptively picks people like me as society’s winners because that feels right to me.”

        I also wonder whether a lot of these guys aren’t closeted gays who just can’t come to terms with their sexual orientation. Society’s acceptance of homosexuality as a benign condition seems to loom large for these guys and for others in this movement, like Rod Dreher. But none of them can give a coherent account as to why it looms so large for them. Their critique of the liberal order seems to rest on the fact that it asks them to justify why they believe that the government should discriminate against gay people. They don’t have a justification; they just feel that gay people should legally and socially marginalized.

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        1. Avatar photo
          Ben Connelly

          Yeah I listened to Sullivan’s interview with Hazony. Ahmari’s an idiot, but maybe I’ll listen to that one. Hazony seems too smart for his own good. I’ve listened to a variety of interviews with him and he is both entertaining to listen to and annoying. He sometimes gets angry in ways that seem unnecessary and his theories seem to be more about getting him on the forefront of some new movement than anything really new and groundbreaking. The biggest thing that annoys me is that his story about history and political philosophy is incredibly self-serving. He’s clever enough to string together true facts to create a wildly distorted narrative, for instance about the Founding. I haven’t caught him in an outright obvious untruth yet, but I think a true scholar could.

          Who is Trueman?

          I’ve noticed the homosexuality connection, too. Gay marriage seems to be the linchpin between the sudden decision that Western civilization had collapsed, the embrace of Hungary and Putin, and the sudden new legal theory (CGC) that conveniently would overturn Obergefell and Bostock. I doubt they’re closet gays themselves. Many of them, including Dreher at least, do sincerely believe that homosexuality is a sin and marriage is between a man and a woman. My own position is the same as David French’s on that subject (also I think if these post liberal guys want to be honest they need to condemn out-of-wedlock heterosexual intercourse just as much as they condemn homosexuality).

          I’ve also been listening to interviews with Patrick Deneen. Like Hazony, he’s frustrating to listen to. With Deneen, it’s easier to catch him in obvious false statements. But it annoys me because he says something and people believe it.

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          1. Bobby D

            Thanks for the continuing dialogue. Carl Trueman is an evangelical theologian who recently appeared on Sullivan’s podcast.

            What’s surprised me most about these guys is just how patently unpersuasive their arguments are. As you note, Deneen simply lies when the truth doesn’t further his argument. Hazony is a bit more clever. He lies are lies of omission rather than lies of commission. But they’re lies nonetheless. And they’re not even well-crafted lies. I’ve concluded that they’re simply telling lies to a cadre of people who want to believe lies.

            It seems rather clear that the Windsor (2013) and Obergefell (2015) were the twin sparks that led these folks to conclude that liberalism had to go. Until that point, they had been willing to accept that liberalism’s benefits far outweighed its costs. Perhaps it failed to direct us towards proper teleological ends. Even so, life in the liberal world was still preferable in comparison to what preceded it—a world in which life for most was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. But alas the arrival of same-sex marriage tipped the balance: If you take them at their word, they’d gladly forego all the pleasantries of the liberal order if doing so would push gays back into the closet. This is a rather remarkable position to me, given that extending such rights to gays comes at almost no material cost to the broader society. Sure, it probably makes it less likely that traditionalist Catholicism won’t become mainstream. But that wasn’t going to happen anyway. It reeks of a kind of petty tribalism in which it’s supposed that any benefit that comes to someone in the other tribe must necessarily come at my expense.

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  5. Avatar photo
    Larry.Jones

    Well done Jonah.
    Happy NewYear to all!

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  6. Avatar photo
    John Berresford

    When I think of Trump today, I think of old Joe Kennedy, another man who ended up with vast wealth and fame but no real friends. He sat on his beach in Florida, read newspapers, and groused about how the world was going to hell. By the time he died he was paralyzed, three of his four sons were dead (two murdered), and he was left with Teddy, the least impressive of the four.

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    Bono Vox

    Not to be proffering a monocausal explanation of everything, but when it comes to the apocalypse that was the Trump Presidency….Something sort of tragic is the quandary of democracy is stupid people can vote…and are the most likely not to heed fair warning to job number ONE when comes to a little something called THE TEN COMMANDMENTS: Thou shall NOT have any gods before ME! I know I still live in a country where a minority majority of my party are one generation removed pure white trash….but when it comes to R.R. Reno, it is not tragic, but more like a bad cosmic joke, a professing Catholic, with a broken moral compass and intellect for hire, would defend the indefensible when blaming all the world’s problems on the…Capitalism. Capitalism is to Economics what Evolution is to Biology….just a theory that explains everything, not a cause, for like Mother Nature, the economy is not sentient. What Would Jesus Do if invited to the Obersalzberg, I mean deposed President’s third world dictator/drug lord oceanside villa Mar-a Lago….certainly not what R.R. would do and go down on The Orangeman like Majorie Taylor Greene does in public. For the love of God and country, not to mention justice, Calgon, take me away, I mean INDICT TRUMP! Ashli Babbitt still cannot be reached for comment. Thanks for taking my rant Dispatch. Viva Jonah! Gotta run on. Peace through superior mental firepower

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  8. J-C

    jocari, hunc confectum locum tractum habet. est nova materia?

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  9. SerenityNow

    I'm going to nit pick here on one point irrelevant to the meaning of the entire article.

    I believe that there actually is a law that requires all Presidents and VPs to release their tax returns after Spiro Agnew essentially was caught selling favors while governor of Maryland and as VP under Nixon. It has not needed to be enforced as all candidates for these offices freely provided that information - except for one.

    If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but I believe Congress is well within its rights to release Trump's returns - at least for the years prior to 2021.

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    1. Avatar photo
      CynthiaW

      "I believe that there actually is a law that requires all Presidents and VPs to release their tax returns ..."

      Can you cite the specific Federal statute?

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      1. SerenityNow

        I did your homework for you. It's not a requirement to disclose taxes. Presidents are required to have their taxes audited while in office. https://www.marca.com/en/lifestyle/us-news/personal-finance/2022/12/21/63a2d1ffe2704ee7358b4591.html

        Surprisingly, that didn't happen between 2017-2020. Hmmm.

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        1. Bobby D

          As you note, the law only requires that the President's tax returns be audited. Of course, it appears that Trump may have used his position as President to prevent that from occurring. So, perhaps this is a reasonable remedy for such interference.

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          Jhc

          "I did your homework..."? 😂😂

          "When I did a little homework, I found that claim was wrong." There, FTFY.

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          Richard Maxton

          It was your own homework, but thanks for confirming that POTUS and VP are NOT legally bound to release their returns. Auditing is another thing entirely, and the IRS should be made to explain why it didn't do what was required of it.

          Again, the IRS is proving to be far more political in its financial assessments than it has any right to be. Shocking (but not really).

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        4. Keith

          "I did your homework for you"? That's a bit rude, considering you were the one making the original allegation, which turned out to be incorrect.

          I think that prospective presidents *should* release their tax returns, and voters should assume that if the candidate refuses, he or she has something to hide, and take that information into consideration when voting. There may be a good argument for making it a law. But if it's not a law, it's not a law.

          The fact that the required audits did not happen while Trump was president is indeed worrisome. That law should be amended to take control of its execution out of the hands of the chief executive; some sort of permanent independent executive to deal with this and similar things that might be an inherent conflict of interest. Sad that it would be necessary.

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          CynthiaW

          Thank you. That was very informative.

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  10. Cdm99

    Excellent article, and thank you for making the point that money is not the measure of everything. My only point of disagreement is with "Sure, he was a black swan in that it actually got him the presidency, but it also revealed the real man."

    I think I first heard of him in the early 90s, not sure if it was his racist pursuit of the Central Park Five, or one of his laughable failed enterprises that first brought him to my attention. But my impression of him started at "pompous asshole" and deteriorated from there. Everything he's done since has amplified, as opposed to revealed, what an unbelievable scumbag he is. The only thing surprising about it was the depths to which it sunk, not the direction in which it went.

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    1. Mark Anderson

      It was "The Art of the Deal" in 1987 that brought that guy to my attention. (I think Oprah was involved.) I thought he was loathsome, but that was just a first impression. "Unbelievable scumbag" is the better description, but even that doesn't say it all.

      And yes, an excellent piece of writing.

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      1. Cdm99

        If he had only stayed out of politics, he could have been the Don King of professional wrestling.
        They could have had running hairdo competitions between the Two Dons!
        And then we could have laughed at him without having to wonder if we should be crying instead.

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        1. Avatar photo
          GW

          Had the NFL approved the 2014 sale of the Buffalo Bills to him, he could have been the team owner who made Dan Snyder look like a boy scout... that would have been enough attention for him to forego a 2016 run.

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