Who are Trump’s Role Models?
I’ve made fun of the president on my Linked-In and Facebook sites, referring to him as Donito Trumpolini. The way he juts out his jaw and grimaces inevitably evokes Benito Mussolini. That Trump was born just shortly after Mussolini’s death temps me to invoke the Buddhist notion of transmigration of the soul. And Trumpo’s apparent fondness, if not to say fascination, with the dictators of our own era, most notably Putin, reinforces my strong suspicion that he would be a dictator, if only he could. His behavior on January 6, 2021, seems best explained by this motivation. Lucky for us, he’ll be Joe Biden’s age, when he finishes his term. Octogenarian authoritarians aren’t unknown. The Russians were addicted to them in the final years of the Soviet Union. Still we can at least harbor the hope that his thirst for power will have been tempered, if not quenched, by 2028. And Don Jr. doesn’t impress me as a “Baby Doc.” ala Haitian history.
For the nonce, we have The Donald for four more years, whether we like him or not. He often seems to be one of kind. His iconoclastic behavior has driven the decorum of the presidency down more than a few notches. No prior president, save perhaps Andrew Jackson, ever acted with such apparent disregard for common courtesy. He also appeared to be making up his first term as he went along. His reprise thus far seems to have been much better-planned. Still, the composition of his Cabinet includes enough wild cards to persuade even a toady like Mitch McConnell to occasionally vote “no.” Letting the likes of Elon Musk slip his leash is bureaucratic shock and awe on an unprecedented scale.
Then there is his lengthening list of far-out foreign policy proposals. Rename the Gulf of Mexico. Acquire Greenland. Reacquire the Panama Canal. Depopulate Gaza and take it over… Mar-a-Lago East?
Is this all just craziness? I say absolutely not. Nor is it originality. Trump is tearing pages from the history books… and not at random. To my knowledge, he hasn’t mentioned Winston Churchill. However, his appointment to Secretary of Defense —- a bright guy but a light weight—-reminds me of Churchill’s decision to be his own Defence Minister during the Battle of Britain.
About other role models he’s been more explicit. “Trump referenced only two presidents in that inaugural address: William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. There is something ominous in these choices: McKinley for the general spirit with which he imbued America and Roosevelt for the particular way that spirit manifested under his leadership,” writes Ted Snider in The American Conservative. Two expansionist presidents… one of whom actually created Panama, acquired the Canal Zone and commenced construction. Teddy Roosevelt also was an early interventionist in the Arab world. The Perdicaris Affair, fictionalized in “The Wind and the Lion,” involved the kidnapping for ransom of an ostensible Greek-American living in Morocco. “Perdicaris alive or Raisuni (the Moroccan chieftan who kidnapped him) dead,” rang in the Republican convention hall in 1904. The actual diplomatic and naval maneuverings of the Great Powers around “the Affair” were nowhere nearly as dramatic as the Sean Connery/Candice Bergen movie make them out to be. But they did TR’s successful presidential campaign no harm either.
In short, Trump’s inspiration for his proposed international adventures couldn’t be more explicit or transparent. The source of his “Make America Great Again” aspiration is more ambiguous. In a 2016 New York Times interview, he cited the 1940s and 1950s as a time when ““we were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody, we had just won a war, we were pretty much doing what we had to do.” I think, however, a deeper dive into the 1950s would dissuade Trump from repeating that preference. Unions represented one private-sector worker in three. The top marginal tax rate was 91 percent. As I’m at pains to point out in my new book, if the Fifties were a Golden Age, it’s because Big Business, Big Government and Big Labor collaborated like never before or since. Try telling selling that to Elon Musk, muck less his master.
His other choice of a golden age in that same interview is more consistent with his recent inaugural comments. Of the turn of the 20th century —- the era of McKinley and TR —- he opined, “If you look back, it really was, there was a period of time when we were developing at the turn of the century which was a pretty wild time for this country and pretty wild in terms of building that machine, that machine was really based on entrepreneurship,”
Hold a mirror up to Trump’s foreign and domestic agendas, as they are being articulated and implemented, and you see reflected the Gilded Age and the birth of an American Empire some 125 years ago. Of course, he’s not buying into it whole hog. TR as Trust Buster holds no interest for him, I’m pretty sure. But most everything else about the era seems to appeal. TR was congenial with oligarchs like J.P. Morgan, with whom he settled the Great Anthracite Coal Strike in 1902. That’s the TR our Mr. Trump, who just settled a threatened ILA strike, likes.
Trump recently said he wants to be remembered for the wars he didn’t get us into. That’s smacks of TR too. Teddy, after cementing his national reputation on San Juan Hill in what he called “a splendid little war,” never got us into another one, splendid or not, during his two terms. Au contraire, he snagged a Nobel Peace Prize for his diplomatic intervention into the Russo-Japanese War.
Bottom line, if you want to look into the mind, heart and soul of The Donald, I recommend Theodore Rex by Edmond Morris.
Of course, as all too often, I may be wrong. Trumpolini’s grander instincts may be swallowed up by his breathtaking venality and greed. He may be satisfied to use his tariffs to raise revenue and his creature, the Muskrat (as I like to call him in my social media posts) to cut spending, simply to enable the extension and expansion of tax cuts for himself and his wealthy oligarchs, while reeking revenge on all who have dissed him.
But I don’t think that’s all that we see happening here.
