A Decade After the Descent, or The Preconditions of Trump’s Rise: Part One

In the past few days, Donald Trump has publicly floated the idea of granting a presidential pardon to a convicted serial sex trafficker and child abuser, even sending his own personal lawyer, who also happens to be the deputy attorney general of the United States, to meet with that vile creature to discuss her terms.

Now, as an obvious adjunct of this transparently desperate and unhinged self-protection “strategy,” Trump has let it be known that he might grant a pardon to popular rap star Sean “Diddy” Combs, who just happens to be another accused sex trafficker recently convicted on prostitution-related charges. That is, in another typically Trumpian act of transparent corruption — of “shooting a man on Fifth Avenue,” to borrow Trump’s own famous account of his emotional hold over his audience (aka voters, aka cult followers) — is attempting to inure his MAGA flock, and his country in general, to the diminution or trivialization of systematic sexual exploitation and abuse of very young and sometimes underage people, in order to minimize or normalize his own tawdry long-time associations with Jeffrey Epstein and his “groomer” and co-abuser Ghislaine Maxwell. To whitewash his consideration of a pardon for Combs on the grounds that he and Combs were “friends” back in the day is merely to highlight the degree of Trump’s lack of conscience and the extent to which his personal inner circle has commonly been populated with the criminally perverted.

Meanwhile, Trump has denied Taiwan’s president permission to land at a New York airport, which the latter was going to use as a transfer point for a trip to several Central American countries which recognize Taiwan’s sovereignty, because this permission — permission to use an American airport as a mere connection for a journey elsewhere — had upset communist China and thus threatened to derail Trump’s efforts to further undermine American society with another of his wonderful trade deals.

What these latest news items indicate, albeit superfluously after so many years of similar overtness, is a U.S. president with absolutely no backbone, no dignity, no consistency of thought apart from thoughts of personal advantage, no moral compass or any other motivating principle aside from a craven desire for the wee man’s gratification of reducing others to a condition of grovelling self-abasement to his will, no capacity for regret or atonement, and in general no depths to which he will not sink in the service of his pure and purely animalistic (i.e., sub-human, unmanly) urges of self-seeking and self-protection.

But none of this, I emphasize, is new. None of it was unknown prior to his appearance in late 2015 as the immediate frontrunner in the Republican presidential primaries, in that famous ride down the escalator. None of the detailed revelations about his past behavior and statements which surfaced during those primaries were particularly surprising to anyone who was aware of Trump’s existence prior to 2015. None of his vulgar and outrageous treatment of his Republican rivals during the primaries themselves — his grotesque mockery of the physical appearance of a female candidate and of a male candidate’s wife, his exploitation of absurd rumors and conspiracy theories about his opponents, for example — nor the baseness and mendacity of his closest and most influential supporters and apologists, could have struck anyone as out of character, either for him or for those supporters. It could not and it did not strike anyone as even novel, let alone mind-changing.

And this very lack of surprise about Trump’s life of corruption and amorality, the sheer dearth of any real shock value in all the “shocking revelations” about him over the past decade, is a major source, the primary material condition, of his success, in the face of what might seem on its face — and will undoubtedly seem to the people of some future civilization, if any should arise — to be the sort of violations of decency, self-restraint, and basic human maturity that objectively ought to bury a prospective political career in minutes. That is to say, while there are millions of people who do express shock at Trump’s behavior and words, they do so, I contend, only because they happen to oppose Trump politically for reasons unrelated to his character and mind. If he happened to have chosen their side of the emotional-political divide as his preferred vehicle for self-promotion in 2015, and their moral-political opponents as the special targets of his reprehensible and civility-destroying public attacks, they would likely be supporting him today, through it all, just as his actual supporters are doing now, and for the same reason, namely that his utter lack of character or principle, and his long life of public grossness, have already been normalized in America’s psyche to such a degree that these factors no longer have any capacity to sway opinion one way or the other. Character, in a reversal of one of the longstanding pieties of American politics, no longer matters in the least. Winning, or rather the superficial optics of winning, is all that matters in today’s world — a fact that Trump intuited long ago, in a demonstration of what we may call the savantism of the sociopath. Hence his comment, back before the Iowa caucus of 2016, that he would lose no supporters if he shot a man on Fifth Avenue. That is, he knew even then that his support did not depend at all on whether he had, or could fake, an ounce of moral fiber or a shred of decency in his soul. Promising people what they are dying to hear, whether this involves the perceived good of their country or merely the exploitation of their weakest fears and ugliest thoughts, is the golden road to personal success, whether or not one achieves anything promised, or even has any interest in, or strategy for, doing so. 

During the early stages of the fateful Republican primaries of 2016, I enjoyed a serious off-the-record e-mail exchange about the risks of Trump, and the foolishness of his followers, with a friendly former associate of mine, an influential man in America’s conservative media world, the sort of person whose choice of direction that year would be more than a matter of personal preference and character, but rather, due to his position, a real factor in the outcome of that crucible moment of American history. Palpably appalled by Trump the man, but still trying to hedge his bets in anticipation of what increasingly seemed the inevitable fate of the GOP, he attempted to explain to me, in the most gentlemanly terms, why he was reserving the right to load his resources onto the Trump bandwagon if necessary. A man of education, experience, and principle, he could not simply reduce himself to being a sell-out for personal material advantage, or a man desperate to sustain an illusion of relevance amid the rising tide of an ever-growing and ever-more irrational Trump cult, as so many of his conservative media peers were actively doing at that time. And so, in an awkward (in my opinion) attempt to pave a path, or more precisely an escape route, to his ultimate decision in a way that would prove him to be above the mere pettiness of the usual bandwagon hoppers, he acknowledged to me, with great moral clarity, that he knew Trump was a man with neither conscience nor political principles, and certainly a poor mind’s substitute for Ronald Reagan. At one point along the way of this open and unguarded exchange, which continued over several days, my friend frankly, and quite perspicuously in my judgment, defined Trump as “pure id.” In truth, from all of my old associate’s parsing of Trump’s nature and thought processes during that correspondence, this one wonderfully apt phrase is the insight that has remained vivid in my memory through all the intervening years. In the end, this man’s rationalizations for eventually accepting and accommodating himself to Trump and the cult, at the expense, I believe, of his own past political positions and published statements (not to mention his private comments to me), were disappointing and untenable, as were those of all the others who made the same compromise during those days. But that is water under the bridge, and in fact, all that stands out now from among his reservations about, and half-apologetics for, Trump during our lengthy correspondence, was that one very tasty bone he was willing to throw to his fellow (but in the end more firmly rooted) Trump skeptic — his acknowledgment that Trump was and is “pure id.”

I must add that this description of Trump was no casual remark spoken without intellectual intent, but was coming from a former Ivy League academic, an elite-educated social scientist. That is, the “pure id” reference was not a pseudo-sophisticated throwaway line, but a precise, artful description, carefully chosen — and used in the context of explaining my interlocutor’s slowly increasing willingness, or at least resignation, to accept Trump as the Republican Party’s leader, and specifically to support Trump’s presidential nomination if and when necessary.

Stripping away the peculiar conclusion drawn from it (or drawn in spite of it), I wish to take a moment to reflect on my old associate’s compelling and in my opinion excellent — and, in its way, almost exhaustive — summary of Trump the man: “pure id.”

The term id was coined by Freud to name the innate and most basic element of the human psyche, the pool of urges and gratification instincts which exists before the development of the ego, which in its turn restrains the id with reason and circumspection, and the super-ego, which imposes parental and societal structures of good and evil upon the individual mind.

The following is an excerpt from Freud’s own 1933 account of the nature of the id. As you read it, consider in how many ways it obviously and brilliantly explains not only Trump’s essence, but also the specific and endlessly displayed peculiarities of his approach to governance, namely that whim-driven and volatile changeability and absence of any consistent or unifying purpose which his most ardent true believers try to cover over with their laughable fantasies of the nine-dimensional chess wizard.

It is the obscure inaccessible part of the personality; the little we know about it we have learnt from the study of dream-work and the formation of neurotic symptoms, and most of that is of a negative character, and can only be described as being all that the ego is not. We can come nearer to the id with images, and call it a chaos, a cauldron of seething excitement. We suppose that it is somewhere in direct contact with somatic processes, and takes over from them instinctual needs and gives them mental expression, but we cannot say in what substratum this contact is made. These instincts fill it with energy, but it has no organization and no unified will, only an impulsion to obtain satisfaction for the instinctual needs, in accordance with the pleasure-principle. The laws of logic — above all, the law of contradiction — do not hold for processes in the id. Contradictory impulses exist side by side without neutralising each other or drawing apart; at most they combine in compromise formations under the overpowering economic pressure towards discharging their energy…. 

Naturally, the id knows no values, no good and evil, no morality. The economic, or, if you prefer, the quantitative factor, which is so closely bound up with the pleasure-principle, dominates all its processes. Instinctual cathexes [emotional interests] seeking discharge, — that, in our view, is all that the id contains.¹Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis, New York: Carlton House, 1933, 104-5 [Emphasis added.]

To live a life dominated by the id, or, if you will, to live as though one were “pure id” itself, would be to live entirely under the sway of immature vested interests aimed at primitive self-gratification. It would mean to live for “goals” (really just raw urges) which are simply emotional and instinctive in character and source, and pursued in a manner lacking any filters of moral accountability or logical consistency. It would explain a man living for many years in close association with predators of underage girls, treating those predators as friends. It would explain that same man later seeking to deny the obvious evidence of his past connections with those predators when their existence becomes inconvenient, and to publicly toy with, even to negotiate for, a possible pardon for a convicted human trafficker purely for the sake of his own perceived material advantage, without a moment’s thought for the victims of this criminal — hundreds of them in the case of Ghislaine Maxwell. It would explain his easy admiration of and identification with the world’s bloodiest tyrants, and his wish to reduce his country’s armed forces to his personal bauble. It would explain his willingness to publicly demean political opponents without restraint or remorse, to redefine people as friends in good standing or enemies to be destroyed on a dime, based on whether they are bowing to his every wish or daring to disagree with him about something. It would explain his willingness to fabricate a fantasy story to explain away his election defeat, which, according to the immature gratification-seeking that is id-thinking, was simply not an allowable reality for this man, such that he could activate this pre-established lie immediately, on election night, and continue to cite it for the next five years without hesitation despite every single attempt to substantiate it having blown up in his face. It would explain his willingness to work up a mob of cult followers to a violent assault on the U.S. Capitol in an effort to bring his lie into reality by sheer force of violent assertion, even to the point of openly endangering the life of his own vice president by identifying him to the mob as a coward who was betraying them, their president, and their country by selling out to the (imaginary) election thieves. It would explain his willingness to tease out the ugliest impulses of his cult followers by acts of deliberate and largely lawless cruelty and dehumanization perpetrated against thousands of immigrants, whether legal or illegal, cultivating fear and hatred for non-white foreigners among his “base” by means of the crackpot moral theories espoused by high-ranking appointees of his administration. It would explain his ability to chat amicably with a former president at a public funeral one day, and then publicly accuse that president of treason, a capital crime, the next. It would explain his demand that foreign leaders fawn on him and belittle themselves before him as a condition for deigning to offer them a reprieve from his random, often existentially threatening punitive actions or refusals to honor prior commitments. It would explain his obsession with treating the world economy as so many voodoo dolls to be pricked and punctured on a daily basis for his own vainglorious sense of unbridled power, all historical precedent and principles of economic liberty be damned.

It would explain everything we see from Donald Trump on a daily basis, and to be frank, it would be difficult, and more difficult than ever over these past six months, to find any Trump actions which do not fit neatly within the boundaries of this account. 

Now, I remind you that this account — the identification of Trump as “pure id” — was offered to me, in 2016, not as an argument against supporting such a man for president, but as an explanation of his rise and potential usefulness, as though the very purity of Trump’s illogic and amorality were some sort of saving grace or justifying condition, rather than being an absolute disqualification. That this sort of rationalization could ever have seemed reasonable is disconcerting enough, coming as it originally did from an Ivy League social scientist with sound conservative ideas and a clearly defined disrespect for Trump as a human being. That it is still implicitly being used all these years later, and with far fewer reservations, by millions of formerly reasonable and principled adults throughout the United States, and spanning all economic strata and education levels, is truly evidence of…well, of something catastrophic, something far deeper than any trite theories about Trump’s salesmanship skills, his reality television experience, or the low IQs of his “base,” many of whom are in fact, and provably, quite far from unintelligent.

What is that something? Or what factors, taken together, comprise the somethingness that conditioned America for the rise of such a depraved and brazenly uncivilized creature — such an id-dominant individual — as he who now stands astride the world as some kind of cartoonish residue of Dionysus and Mr. Hyde?

We will take a look at this question in Part Two.