By Ross Douthat
Every act of political violence yields instant reactions that can’t be supported by the available facts.
A single assassination attempt by a loner with a rifle doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about whether America is poised to plunge into a political abyss. Nor do the motives of would-be assassins necessarily map onto a given era’s partisan divisions. Nor can we say definitively that this assassination attempt has sealed up the 2024 election for Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance — surely the wild twists and turns of the Trump era should disabuse us of that kind of confidence.
Having lived through eight years of that era, though, I feel comfortable making one sweeping statement about the moments when Trump shifted his head fractionally and literally dodged a bullet, fell bleeding and then rose with his fist raised in an iconic image of defiance. The scene Saturday night in Pennsylvania was the ultimate confirmation of his status as a man of destiny, a character out of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel or Thomas Carlyle or some other verbose 19th-century philosopher of history, a figure touched by the gods of fortune in a way that transcends the normal rules of politics.
In Hegel’s work, the great man of history is understood as a figure “whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World Spirit.” Hegel’s paradigm was Napoleon, the Corsican adventurer whose quest for personal power and military glory spread the ideas of the French Revolution, shattered the old regimes of Europe and ushered in the modern age.
For Hegel the great man’s role is a fundamentally progressive one. He is developing or revealing some heretofore hidden truth, pushing civilization toward its next stage of development, sometimes committing crimes or trampling sacred things but always in service to a higher aim, the unfolding intentions of a divine process.
In different ways in my own lifetime, American conservatism and liberalism placed Hegelian hopes in Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, both figures who seemed to embody a grand optimistic vision of how the global future would unfold.
But what if progress isn’t linear, and the World Spirit’s purposes are a bit more complicated than an optimistic form of liberal Protestantism expects? What if an era is decadent rather than vital? What if there is no obvious next political stage for a civilization’s development? What if stagnation and repetition rule the day? What does a man of destiny look like then?
I think we have to say it looks like Donald Trump: a man of notable charisma, limited ideological conviction and naked appetite, motivated as much by wounded vanity as by Napoleonic ambition, who has become the avatar of the rebellious populism that has remade his era’s politics and overthrown or undermined its establishments.
And not just an avatar but a perfect one, more perfect than all the other leading populists — because from Viktor Orban to Javier Milei to his own newly chosen running mate, they tend to have specific ideologies and relatively worked-out worldviews, whereas actual populist sentiment is more protean, more flexible and opportunistic, more certain of its enemies than its policy commitments. More Trumpian, in other words: He’s the archetype of a global phenomenon precisely because he offers something less coherent and predictable, more inchoate and vibes-based, than other figures in the right-wing International.
But that archetypal status extends beyond the substance of the populist age. Trump is a “chaos candidate,” as the extremely non-Hegelian Jeb Bush once said, for whom chaos is a ladder, and conventional political opposition a relatively easy obstacle to overcome. He is a man of negligible intellectual curiosity who dominates all of his epoch’s popular media forms: gossip columns, cable news, reality television, social media. He’s a man who represents the shadow side of the American character — not the Lincolnian statesman but the hustler, the mountebank, the self-promoter, the tabloid celebrity — at a time when American power and American corruption are intermingled. And he’s a man graced, this past weekend especially but always, with incredible, preternatural good luck.
That last quality is understood by some of Trump’s religious supporters as proof of divine favor and a reason to support him absolutely. But this is a presumptuous interpretation. (Some notably sinister historical figures have enjoyed miraculous-seeming escapes from assassination.) The man of destiny might represent a test for his society, a form of chastisement, an exposure of weakness and decay — in which case your obligation is not to support him without question, but to try to recognize the historical role he’s playing and match your response to what’s being unsettled or unveiled.
But that recognition is essential. Why talk about Trump in these sweeping terms, the anti-Trump reader might say, bringing in God and history and building him up to be something more than just a charlatan and demagogue? Because otherwise you’re just not dealing in reality. The man has survived self-disgrace and countless political near-death experiences, he’s poised for the greatest comeback in American political history, he just turned an attempted assassination into a Renaissance painting of bloodied defiance … you either see him as the defining figure of the age or you don’t see him at all.
I’m as guilty of this as anyone, not for underestimating Trump at the start (almost everyone did that) but for constantly trying to look beyond him, imagining a world where his political appeal somehow diminished organically and politics regained a more normal-seeming shape — in a Joe Biden versus Ron DeSantis presidential tilt, let’s say. Even my essay on his potential second term, appearing the morning of the assassination attempt, ended with a wistful vision of Trump the lame duck, fading from the spotlight through his second term.
I don’t think that’s how this goes. Trump can be defeated; Hegel’s man Napoleon was defeated, after all, and Hegel assumed that world-historical figures were destined to “fall off like empty hulls from the kernel” when their purpose had been served.
But to beat him — memo to the Biden Democrats — you have to do more, go further, risk much, become something you yourself did not expect. Because in a struggle with a man of destiny, there is no normalcy to be restored.
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