Now that events are moving quickly and Trump may not be in charge for much longer, it is time to consider what it was that made him such a galvanizing figure and why that ran out of steam so quickly. It is important to answer these questions in part to create a historical record while the flavor of him is still with us and also because the way he exits office, whether in chains or on a gurney, as opposed to in a Nixonian display of bravado, may lie in his character, and the clue to that character is why people were drawn to support him in the first place as well as in the three years of his Presidency.
Trump is not easily explained by the theories that are applied to other authoritarian or cult of personality leaders. He is not charismatic, which was not true of Hitler, whose followers adored him and whose mesmerizing speeches were appreciated for their power even by those who opposed him. People who support Trump don't particularly like him. They think he blusters, is too full of self-praise, that he lies and is swinish towards women, but they put that all aside because of what they do like about him. Nor is he an efficient if cold and peremptory leader as is the case with Mussolini in his hayday or Franco throughout his career. Trump gets everything wrong in foreign policy and none of his policies to bring back jobs to the United States seem to have worked. Nor is he a Populist hero akin to Andrew Jackson or Pa Watson, who also used racism to build their bases, but here Trump elevated into a crisis what was clearly not one in that illegal immigration, a persistant problem, was not getting any worse fhan it had been for a while until Trump made it a campaign issue that may damage the Republican Party for generations to come. Nor was Trump much of a thinker. He did not offer a distinctive ideology that showed his followers a different way of understanding the world, as did Lenin; rather, his speeches are known for their venom and sarcasm rather than for their thoughtfulness or even for a gracefulness of language, Trump is given to empty adjectives, his followers the ones who have to fill in what he means because he does not know how to do that, which is very exasperating to his opponents, who want to find something he says that will be the basis of their opposition to him, when what he is a master at doing is saying one thing one day and something else the next and not bothering to sort it out. It is difficult to argue with someone so unmindful of the laws of debate, which insist on engaging what the other person says and finding a response to that.
I think the best way to understand Trump is that he is a person who violates decorum and people respond to the short term pleasure of watching someone doing that rather than consider the long range problems in doing so. Let us be careful in our definitions here. Decorum refers to the practices people engage in so as to respect some underlying features or the logic of human interaction. So decorum will consist of people being subservient to their betters because people with power can take out their anger against those who are subservient to them even though they may not do that on every occasion. Not just slaves do that; people defer to their bosses all the time just so as to get along, not necessarily mindful that the boss has input on whether or not the person will get a raise that year. Decorum also means not raising your voice in church or in class lest other congregants and students take that amiss and somewhere down the road hold what you said against you. Life is everywhere characterized by decorum, whether in such overt matters as following the procedures of a court or a religious ritual or in less overt matters like not getting all carried away at a funeral and threatening to throw oneself into the grave with a loved one lest people remember that when you move in with someone new and are called a hypocrite.
Decorum is different from a norm or a collection of norms because those latter things are habits that have become sacrosanct so as to enforce customs such as a ban on pre-marital sex, or women being destined for life as a housewife or a very few other roles, such as teachers and nurses and servants, or men obligated to jump out of their trenches so as to be in the line of enemy machine gun fire. Norms are regarded as self enforcing even for matters where you can’t know in advance what norm is being violated, as when people decide it is wrong to smoke e-cigarettes even though until recently no one had even heard of them, a young person deciding not to follow a fad that is suspected of being dangerous. According to a doctrine of norms, a person has an impulse and immediately a norm pops up which is either to be obeyed or violated. Decorum, rather, is some well established set of expectations for how responsible people act in that they are aware of consequences down the road having to do with the nature of that activity. It is a violation of decorum, rather than just bad manners, not to acknowledge the presence of someone to whom one has just been introduced even if shaking hands with them is verboten, a violation of religious norms.
Manners, for their part, are very different from decorum. They concern behaviors that make it easier for people to get along with one another rather than matters, as is the case with decorum, which are recognitions of what is going on in interaction, as happens when a person at a bank asking for a loan decides not to yell at the loan officer for withholding the loan, but takes the resistance to offering a loan with politeness because there is no other alternative, being impolite clearly closing any chance of ever getting a loan or a favor from that bank again. Manners, for their part, consist of activities that reach out to other people so as to smooth the way, appreciating that person’s point of view, and usually consists of offering up a gesture of respect, while decorum usually means keeping quiet or doing what is obligated, because there is no other way, no way around the power and other relations that obtain. You are polite to your girl friend’s brother at the dinner table because you are not yet well enough ensconced in the family to let the person who is your future brother-in-law know what you think of him, and so holding your fire is a matter of decorum rather than of politeness, which is the category of behavior that would obtain if you just decided not to confront your brother in law’s political opinions, now that you were a full fledged member of the family, so as to keep the family peace, in which you now also have a stake.
People raging against conformity usually have decorum rather than politeness in mind because people can always feel generous towards people, which is the soul of politeness, but they also feel constrained by decorum, because it means giving in to what they might feel are, underneath it all, unfair arrangements that are represented and which enforce the present instance. So people mind their p’s and q’s and resent it, and, I would suggest, are more offended by decorum the less powerful they feel themselves to be, ever hamstrung by the situations in which they find themselves. They want to lash out, but don’t know how to do so.
Which brings us to Trump, who is not so much impolite as he is a violator of decorum. He calls out the practices by which people might feel oppressed even if they don’t precisely know what those practices are. One of his most inflammatory statements was denouncing the countries of West Africa from which some immigrants to the United States had come as “shithole nations”. This was to contrast them to Norway, a country from which Trump would welcome immigration. This remark was widely regarded as racist, which it probably was, because Norwegians are white and West Africans are Black. It was also impolite in that we do not generally heap opprobrium on others just for the fun of doing so because it might hurt their feelings. But most of all, it was a violation of decorum.
Ever since the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 it has been a generally recognized principle for the conduct of diplomacy to treat nations as legitimate so long as they have control of the populations within their territories whether those countries are also strong or large or have developed economic systems or respect human rights. That is in order to recognize the war of all against all that is part of the nature of international relations and the truce that holds in good times between nations. That means there is an ambassador from Antigua even if that nation is economically dependant on American cruise lines. It also holds for nations that in more accurate parlance are called either “failed states” or ones which have not lived up to the promise that came with their independence from the British Commonwealth in the 1960’s that they would become prosperous now that they were free of the British yoke. So Trump and his supporters are thinking that they are simply being honest rather than politically correct when they describe them as shithole nations when what they are doing is breaking with the compact to treat all sovereign nations as respectable so as to maintain the fiction of international harmony. Why bother? The point is not the niceties of international relations but what are the facts straightforwardly told. That is what is admirable about Trump. Even a dummy knows which are shithole states and which aren’t, and Trump is certainly that.
The same goes for some other of Donald Trump’s pronouncements. He claims that he could shoot people on Fifth Avenue and get away with it as far as his supporters were concerned. That is not meant as an observation on Constitutional law, however much his lawyers say in court that he is not subject to investigation so long as he holds the office of President. It is also an impolitic statement in that he is boasting about his power, and boasting is considered impolite in that brave and wise people are aware of their shortcomings. More important, the remark is indecorous because it challenges the idea that no person is beyond the law for all the mischief such an idea would create for a nation that is both a democracy and a republic, violating the precepts of both concepts, in that a tyrant is not republican and a demagogue is usually regarded as an aberration to which democracies are subject.
But Trump’s public is loyal and appreciates his willingness to poke a finger in the eye of established opinion, including political precepts that have been around for thousands of years or at least since the time of the Founding Fathers. That nihilism is his appeal and so the question becomes the very difficult one of why so many people have turned nihilistic and whether they can be restored from that condition to having a decent respect for decorum. Perhaps it is the liberty taken by the uninformed that they may heed neither the conservative precept that long engrained practices are of some use, having passed the test of time, nor heed the liberal precept that practices have to pass the test of rigorous logical analysis. Trump gets his way because he not only plays to the forces of ignorance but is himself ignorant and so knows exactly what are the gut instincts of his supporters, which is to knock down idols.