Trump's Anti-Success

Loser Breaks All

In a New York Times column, David French mourns the coarsening effect of Donald Trump on the national culture. According to French, the fact that Trump is “The most powerful and successful politician of the past decade” and also “an immoral man who is dishonest, cruel and illiberal at a fundamental level it creates a situation— especially in his own party — that rewards all the same vices.”

Yes, Trump is dishonest, cruel and illiberal, but the idea that he has been successful is a dangerous illusion that amounts to a disorientation. The coarsening that David French decries is a product of a chimerical image of success that French’s own column is perpetuating. We’d better dispel this mirage now if we hope to understand what we are about to go through.

Trump looks like a success to MAGA-world, but Trump himself knows better.

He has not succeeded. His life is—has always been and always will be—one of constant flight from a mysterious, terrifying environment saturated with existential threats. Sometimes this impersonates forward movement, but the direction is dictated by the exigencies of escape, not the pursuit of an objective. Trump is being chased. The objective markers—the money, even the presidency—that David French and the media in general confuse with success offer Trump no relief. Within seconds, today’s Trumpian “success” becomes tomorrow’s terrifying liability, vulnerable, exposed in a bewildering storm of hostile conditions and influences which Trump cannot name, let alone understand or surmount.

Trump feels no safer today than he felt yesterday. The characteristic swaggering excesses of Trump’s public postures—the swollen ballrooms, the bellicose tweets, the blatant lies, the aircraft carriers sent to tame suspected drug dealers in motorboats—represent the self-protective bravado of a terrified schoolyard bully, the frantic shouting of a showman losing his audience. It is a dangerous mistake to believe that Trump breaks rules only when the rule-breaking facilitates his pursuit of a concrete goal and will behave himself when that goal is reached; he breaks rules because he lacks the cognitive bandwidth required to understand them and the discipline necessary to operate among them.

Any architecture of rules, standards, conventions, ordered collaborations and evaluations is a torment for Trump. He knows he cannot function in those contexts—that he is doomed to a permanent disadvantage there, to inevitably facing better-equipped enemies. He awakens every day (or in the middle of each night) to confront a mental world that Joseph Mitchell described in a classic account of frantic efforts to prevent the spread of bubonic plague in World War II era New York,

“The rats of New York are quicker-witted than those on farms and they can outthink any man who has not made a study of their habits. Even so, they spend most of their lives in a state of extreme anxiety, the black rats dreading the brown and both species dreading human beings. Away from their nests, they are usually on the edge of hysteria. . . If hemmed in, or sometimes if too suddenly come upon, they will attack. They fight savagely and blindly, in the manner of mad dogs; they bare their teeth and leap about every which way, snarling and snapping and clawing the air. . . . One of the hazards of fighting a fire in a junk shop or an old warehouse is the crazed rats.”

Yes, it is true in some sense that Trump represents an image of “success” that might warp the behavior of MAGA followers. A legion of pop-culture figures has the same sort of power.

But the central problem is that Trump is far from confident in success, and that he is most dangerous when he feels most threatened.

We are entering a period in which threats to Trump’s sense of safety are accumulating at an exponential rate. The crops planted by his bizarre extemporizing in response to past threats—tariff-driven inflation, catastrophic Medicaid deprivations, student loan defaults—are about to be harvested. He is a lame duck. His usefulness to his aspiring successors is waning: soon he will be seen by them exclusively as an obstacle in their way. He will respond to new menaces with illegalities more flagrant, statements more racist, policies more deranged executed in response to displeasing television commercials, more wild distractions deployed in combustible environments.

Taking pleasure from some new event that denies Trump more “success” and diminishes his “most successful” may seem to be a forgivable indulgence. In fact, taking pleasure in his mounting fear, supplants the reaction we should feel: fear for our own futures and our children’s as hysterical terror overtakes him. There are worse things in this world than coarseness.