Trump as Classical Hero
Anger be now your song, immortal one,
Achilles’ anger, doomed and ruinous,
That caused the Greeks loss on bitter loss.
Those lines from the Iliad refer to a difficult time for the Greek forces in the final year of their decade-long siege of Troy. Their hero Achilles, blessed by the gods with invincibility, was AWOL for seventeen books of the poem, because the king stole his captive slave girl. During this time the war went seriously downhill for the Greeks as they desperately tried to get their hero back into action.
Similarly, Trump is holed up in Mar-a-Lago, pissed off at his party. His Vice-President and a host of Republican Congresspersons, Governors and Attorneys General failed him by allowing the Democrats to steal the election. Meanwhile, the Democrats have control of the battlefield, more or less. Meanwhile too, various Republican emissaries are appearing at Mar-a-Lago to make peace with their fallen hero and play golf with him, some hoping to bring him back into action, some not so sure that’s a good idea.
The Republicans can’t just ignore Trump, just as, back in 1200 BCE, the Greek soldiers couldn’t ignore Achilles. They came to understand that their king was a moron. He’d started the war to take back “a stolen whore” and was willing to sacrifice them in the course of a stupid standoff over yet another whore. “You send us back to bloody war for that?” they ask him. For the soldiers, Achilles was their best hope of getting out alive.
Some Republicans feel this way about Trump and many more doubt him but can see no alternative. They remember his glory days, his first victories, that were as indicative of divine favour as any of the early victories of Achilles. In 2015 – 2016, Trump took over the Republican party lock, stock and barrel, no strings attached and no favours owed to anyone. Almost nobody thought he could win over the senators and governors he was running against, but he ended up with 45% of the votes. The most serious contenders weren’t even close: Texas senator Ted Cruz at 25%, Ohio Governor John Kasich at 14% and Florida Senator Marco Rubio at 11%. Jeb Bush, of the Bush dynasty, former Governor of Florida, the favourite of the party establishment, got close to no votes.
Then, Trump came from behind to win against Hillary Clinton. It seemed at first to be a David and Goliath contest, Clinton holding all the cards in terms of experience and grasp of policy. The Democratic election machine was well oiled and funded, and it was thought that Clinton would attract women voters who, whether Democrat or Republican, wanted a woman to finally hold the presidency. The early polls were so bad that Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader, was all for cutting off party funding to Trump’s campaign, and diverting it to Republicans who actually had a chance of winning seats. At least then, if they lost the presidency, they would keep Congress.
As president, Trump’s lucky spell continued. He had the luck to be able to appoint three justices to the Supreme Court, giving it an overwhelming conservative majority. He brought in massive tax breaks, and further distancing of government from economic, environmental and social regulation. He hacked away at trade deals like KORUS (with South Korea) and NAFTA (Mexico and Canada), and upped duties on steel and aluminum. This sparked reprisals from trading partners, but the economy continued to grow, which made people think the deals were not that important. His isolationism, both in economics and foreign affairs, while unpopular with Wall Street Republicans, seemed to reflect the mood of voters — exhaustion because of years of war in the middle east, and anxiety at the loss of manufacturing to China, South Korea and Taiwan. He moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, firming up Jewish and evangelical support.
Trump seemed immune to things like the Hollywood tapes that showed him to be sexist, or his praise of white supremacist rioters at Charlottesville that showed him to be racist. But the public seemed also to be tiring of the politics of political correctness and liked to see their president challenging the forces of Me Too, Cancel Culture, and Black Lives Matter. The Democrats, digging up dirt from Brett Kavanaugh’s youth, moving to defund police, promoting the teaching of critical race theory in schools, acceding to the toppling of Confederate statues and even the statues of Washington and Jefferson on university campuses, seemed to be supporting a standard of morality that would “cancel” every politician in American history, every entertainment icon from Charlie Chaplin to Bob Dylan, and every writer from Mark Twain to Ernest Hemingway. They seemed also to be acceding to university-campus identity politics that, under a façade of achieving social justice for every victim-identity group from women through trans-sexual to the handicapped and the fat, masked a nihilistic attitude to western civilization that amounted to a desire for its eradication.
Trump’s testing of the limits of established governmental protocols like staying at arm’s length from the military, the FBI and CIA, and keeping White House business confidential, was viewed by many voters as a battle against bureaucratic obfuscation and secrecy. Trump’s main method of communication was Twitter. He had 90 million followers, and during his time in power issued 57,000 tweets. Trump printed out and bound them together as guides to policy. He kept track of the “likes.” Trump once quipped, “I’m the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters.” Citizens felt that they were in the know, sometimes even more than White House staff and Congresspersons. Sometimes the public learned things first — before even the officials Trump was firing or meeting with, or the politicians he found reason to attack. And citizens could make their own comments.
Trump had a new way of debating that that was effective and made for lively television. In the nomination debates, he didn’t attack the other nominees on policy matters, nor in the 2016 presidential election did he take on Clinton over policy. Actually, he had no grasp of or interest in party policy whatsoever, somewhat like most of the voters. Instead, Trump engaged his adversaries in schoolyard-level slagging matches, at which most of them, especially Clinton, were not practiced. He seemed to realize the advantages of being a dark horse candidate, a media personality and billionaire about whom little was known apart from the fact that his show was popular and he seemed to have a lot of money. Since politics is compromise, adjustment, and expediency, all political accomplishments are compromised, so it’s easy to find in the public record betrayals, shady deals, and inconsistencies that hint at moral failures or conspiracies, especially in someone so long in office as Clinton.
Trump attacked the other nominees and Clinton as old guard, tired, out of touch, low energy, losers and liars — any number of vague, unanswerable descriptors that could easily be illustrated by various events in his enemies’ political histories. He also slung gratuitous insults: Cruz’s wife was ugly. Bush was “sad,” putting his “senile”, 90-year-old mother (who hated Trump) on display to get voter sympathy. Kasich was “a sucker for Obamacare in Ohio.” Clinton was a criminal who needed to be locked up.
Rubio was the only candidate who seemed to get it. When Trump said he had big ears, Rubio noted that Trump had small hands, and “you can’t trust a man with small hands.” Trump said that Rubio sweated so much during the debates that the audience got sprayed; Trump squirted his water bottle on the audience as an illustration of what happened to him when Rubio was talking at the next podium. Rubio said that Trump needed a full-length mirror in the washroom to check to see if he’d pissed himself during the debate. Rubio joked that Trump’s tweets were so full of spelling mistakes that he must be forcing one of the unpaid foreign workers at Mar-a-Lago to write them. He also made fun of Trump’s hair: “he’s flying around on Hair Force One.” And he said, “Trump isn’t making America great again; he’s making it orange.”
Trump would also tell outright lies about his competitors: Cruz’s father had a hand in the assassination of Kennedy. Kasich’s stint as one of the managing directors at Lehman Brothers caused the company to declare bankruptcy and precipitated a global financial crisis. Clinton was in league with America’s enemies, like Iran, had driven her husband to infidelity, and viciously attacked her abusive husband’s accusers.
Not only did Trump attack his immediate competitors with insults, lies and false accusations, he took on the whole party establishment. Former Republican heroes like John McCain and George W. Bush were both losers, Bush for having an “uninspiring and failed” presidency and losing the Iraq War, and McCain for having lost to Obama and been captured in Vietnam. In fact, there wasn’t a previous Republican president that Trump didn’t have some complaint about, even Reagan, who liked trade deals and who was a hero to all of Trump’s Republican adversaries.
The liberal media went wild dealing with Trump’s sins, inconsistencies, gaffes and lies. Don Lemon was driven to tears, Chris Cuomo to anger, and Rachel Maddow to schoolmarmish lecturing. The trouble with Democrats pumping the bellows of self-righteousness was obvious, and easily picked up by Fox News and the television audience. Was Trump a groper? Guess what? So were John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton, Andrew Cuomo and a list of other Democratic luminaries. Did Trump seek to use his position to corrupt officials and make money? Guess what, so did the Clintons and Joe and Hunter Biden. Did Trump approve of the torturing of political prisoners? Guess what, so did Obama. Did Trump encourage police and courtroom oppression of minorities? Guess what, the man most responsible for minimum sentencing laws that have sent thousands of citizens, a disproportional number of them black, to jail on minor offences, and resulted in the US having a larger prison population than China, was Joe Biden. And Kamala Harris was ardent in enforcing those laws. Does Trump support Nazis and crazy conspiracy theories? Guess what? The Democrats believe that racism is systemic in America, that Jefferson and Washington were racists and sexists and that, therefore, the constitution is a “rape manual,” that the police need to be defunded, and that, ultimately, all of western civilization, its science, languages, and cultures, are riddled with sexism and racism, so that it needs to be cancelled.
The Greeks, somewhat tautologically, defined a hero as someone favoured by the gods. They detached heroism from personality. By this definition, any fool can be an instrument of the gods. Heroes win, not because of self-induced virtues like humility, consideration for others, and the ability to sacrifice for a cause, but because the gods intend them to win. The models for the virtuous sort of heroism would be Hector or Odysseus, family men, fathers, patriots, able commanders. It would not be Achilles, who the great critic Northrop Frye characterized as “a sulky bruiser.”
Some top Republicans, like Graham, think this way. Trump is the man of destiny, though he has “personality problems” that make him “a very damaged team captain.” Trump, Graham says, will have to change: “I don’t see how we can get there without him changing.” To engineer that change so that destiny can be fulfilled, Graham shuttles back and forth between the Capitol and Mar-a-Lago. He plays golf with Trump, trying to ease his mind away from petty revenge against people he is going to need when he runs again, and to involve him in party business — at present by enticing him to choose and endorse candidates for the coming mid-terms. Graham wants his congressional colleagues and other Republicans vying for office to practice their swings, scrub their golf balls, and head for Mar-a-Lago to acquire those endorsements or at least convince Trump that they have his back.
Other top Republicans aren’t so sure Trump is worth the trouble. McConnell, the most powerful of Trump’s supporters during his presidency, is one of these. Good at sarcasm, he has nicknamed Graham “the Trump whisperer.” McConnell thinks, (or hopes, since Trump hates him) that Trump is no longer needed, and that it is a waste of time to court him. He doubts that Trump can change. McConnell is hedging his bets, of course, as he did when he condemned Trump for the January 6 attack on the capitol, but did not vote for a guilty verdict. McConnell told Bob Woodward, on the record, that, now that Trump is gone, he hopes never to have to speak to him again.
There’s a third option, apart from joining the hero or fighting him. You can run away. Paul Ryan, former House Majority Leader and the most prominent of the Wall-Street Republicans, did this after two years of working with Trump and watching his coveted trade deals being attacked. Ryan declined to run for his own seat in the 2018 mid-terms. He was informed by a friend, a wealthy donor-doctor, that Trump had “narcissistic personality disorder” (a diagnosis more or less affirmed by Trump’s psychologist niece). Ryan, ever the policy wonk, researched this and learned that you couldn’t question or contradict Trump in public without making a permanent enemy of him. The trouble with this was that Ryan was not a White-House advisor, he was an elected politician and House leader, so that most of his dealings with Trump would be done in public and accountable to the public. A young man, but with years of political experience, Ryan probably decided, after two years of working with Trump, that sitting out Trump’s presidency would ultimately be a good career move.
It was a good move, obviously; at least, it was good for his present state of mind. Trump lost the House; Ryan’s adversary there, Nancy Pelosi, became the Majority Leader. Also, in 2018, two fanatical Trump Republicans (Margorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert) got elected to the House and started spouting QAnon theories that Trump is battling a conspiracy of pedophilic Democrats headquartered in a pizza parlour. Worse, for anyone leading the House Republicans, these crazies speak out volubly against measures supported by other House Republicans. Ryan would have won his seat had he run, and be expected to ride herd on and account for them
The calculations of the Republican establishment about the value of keeping Trump on board are complex, because it’s hard to guess at Trump’s present political weight among Republican voters. He lost his second election by the same narrow margin he won his first, but the US electorate is pretty much fixed: by the latest count, voters are 44% Democrats, 37% Republicans and 18% swing. Trump got about 74 million votes in both 2016 and 2020, a better turnout than for previous Republican presidential candidates, and pretty much all of these voters remained loyal to him through his presidency. Trump’s most solid vote, a vote that presently comes to the party largely because of him, is the evangelical and white-supremacist vote. One-quarter of the electorate belong to evangelical churches, and just over 80% of them voted Republican in the two elections, a vote that increased from previous elections. Altogether this comes to about 15 million voters voting for Trump, and almost certainly likely to vote for him again.
A recent Washington Post-ABC poll showed that there are 22 million American voters holding neo-Nazi or white supremacist beliefs. Likely, few are actually traditionally Republican, but Trump’s presence is changing that. He has made the Republican party popular among racists. In 2018, in five state and national primaries, two neo-Nazis / white supremacists won and three others ran but lost or were disavowed by the party. Not all of these candidates support Trump — one of the five primary candidates thinks he has been captured by the Jewish lobby — but the others are vocal supporters.
What do his core voters — the white supremacists or the evangelicals — want from Trump, apart from seeing him put down Woke progressives? Jeff Sessions is a prominent politician, and a loyal member of that rock-solid evangelical base, who has stated very clearly what he wants. Sessions thinks the US needs a strongman to save it from the hell of abortion, LGBTQ, the teaching of evolution and critical race theory, uncontrolled non-white immigration, domestic and foreign terrorism, Black Lives Matter, Me Too, and the Woke left born out of the post colonialist university. White supremacists would pretty much agree with Sessions.
In a 2020 interview with New York Times Magazine’s Elaina Plott, Sessions gave examples of strongmen who recently have come along to save Christianity, capitalism and national unity in their parts of the world. They are Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Of Assad he says, “A banker I know from Greece . . . he said you could go to Aleppo, you could do business deals, you could even buy whiskey. Cross Assad, you’re in big trouble, but you could do business before the Arab Spring . . . . There’s a difference between freedom and democracy. You need to understand this . . . . And you know who we want to run Syria? Assad. We are hoping that somehow he can get back in control. And there was no terrorism, no ISIS when he ran the place . . . . He’d kill ’em. And if you didn’t cross him, he wouldn’t kill you. And he protected Christians; they were a part of his coalition.”
About Sisi, Sessions says: “Consider Egypt’s Christian minority under president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi . . . . It’s not a democracy — he’s a strongman, tough man, but he promised to protect them. And they believed him, because they didn’t want the Muslim Brotherhood taking over Egypt. Because they knew they’d be vulnerable. They chose to support somebody that would protect them. And that’s basically what the Christians in the United States did. They felt they were under attack, and the strong guy promised to defend them. And he has.”
Sessions account of Assad is based on a hearsay and false history and is bloody-minded in the extreme. Assad was fighting a war, with the assistance of the Alawite and Shi’a minority, Shi’a Iran, and Russia, against the Sunni majority of his own country, who rose up against him during the Arab spring. It was the Russians and Kurds, assisted by some western countries, who put down the ISIS. And his account of Sisi doesn’t take into consideration that fact that, once the Christians helped get him in, Sisi lost interest in protecting them. But this probably would not matter to Sessions, who is convinced that a dictator is the only way to make America great again, a bad dictator better than none at all. Assad used poison gas and cluster bombs against his citizens, but he kept the country safe for business. The Christians and visiting businesspersons could even get whisky!
The attraction to strongmen has always existed in democratic communities that feel stressed. Earlier republics fell to their generals. Athens did in its struggle with Sparta. Rome, after taking over most of the known world as a Republic, fell to Julius Caesar because of problems holding the empire together and defending its northern and eastern reaches. The Dutch Republic, in the course of the religious wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, sought protection for its puritan faith from the local aristocracy, the House of Orange. The French Revolution was co-opted by Napoleon, the Russian by Stalin.
Finally, supporting strongmen is a familiar feature of US foreign affairs, for example when democratic elections bring to power socialists and communists. In Chile, the Congo and Iran the CIA intervened to overthrow the elected government and bring into power strongmen: Pinochet, Mobutu and the Shah respectively. Far-right groups, like the John Birch Society, are fond of pointing out that one man, one vote = mobocracy, and that the US was founded as a republic, not as a democracy (Iran and other Islamic theocracies call themselves republics).
Though Trump has so far been worth the effort Republicans put into him, he also, like Achilles, caused them no end of pain and discomfort. Sessions would be a prime example of a martyr to the whims of his chosen strongman. A four-term Senator who became Trump’s attorney general, he was turfed by Trump because he recused himself during the Mueller investigation into Trump’s collusion with Russia during the 2016 election. It was generally acknowledged that it was Sessions’ duty to do this: he’d talked to the Russian ambassador during that time. It seems that Sessions’ democratic / bureaucratic / rule-of-law side momentarily took over his sense of loyalty to his hero. Not only did Trump kick Sessions out of his administration, he ridiculed him publicly, and then, when Sessions tried to run for his old seat, Trump ran another Republican against him, sending Sessions into the wilderness permanently.
The calculations of Republican party officials involve not just Trump’s present political weight, but also how well they are likely to be able to manipulate him in future. For ordinary Republican voters, during Trump’s time in office, it was relatively easy to put up with him and justify their support. They didn’t have to deal with him directly. White evangelicals and Catholics had only to avert their eyes from his sexual affairs and lying, and Latino voters had to cover their ears when he described all Mexicans as rapists and drug dealers. Wall street Republicans had to protest Trump’s attacks on trade arrangements, but took comfort in their tax breaks and the rising value of their stocks. Veterans put up with Trumps attacks on his military advisors, his rants about the costs of maintaining the country’s defences, and his isolationist policies. They put on a stiff upper lip because he was, after all, their supreme commander.
Likely only the neo-Nazis were completely happy with Trump. Like Hitler, Trump loves rallies. Like Hitler he believes in the superiority of white people and the nation and the existence of conspiracies undermining the race and nation. The neo-Nazis were disappointed only at the end, when Trump failed to turn up at the Reichstag to help them hang Pelosi and Pence and burn the place to the ground with everyone in it. But this they seem to have forgiven in excited anticipation of his return. Like the evangelicals, they have no other hero in sight.
Trump’s close Republican allies, the ones who actually worked for him, suffered much more than discomfort. The struggles of Republican officials and Congresspersons to manage Trump are detailed in Bob Woodward’s recent books. Fear begins with an account of the Korean-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (KORUS) that illustrates the various techniques Trump’s White House appointees gradually learned: “In early September 2017, in the eighth month of the Trump presidency, Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs and the president’s top economic adviser in the White House, moved cautiously towards the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office . . . .On the desk was a one-page draft letter from the president addressed to the president of South Korea, terminating the United States – Korea Free Trade Agreement. Cohn removed the letter.”
As Woodward explains, Cohn knew that Trump would forget about the letter once it was out of sight. Another tactic was to stall. When Trump dictated a similar letter to Jared Kushner (who would not forget), Staff Secretary Rob Porter told Kushner that the letter had to be drafted into proper diplomatic language. This of course took time. At other times, Rex Tillerson (Secretary of State), General James Mattis (Secretary of Defence), and Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster (National Security Advisor), would argue the security benefits of KORUS: it is tied in with the presence of US military in Korea. Trump would come up with ideas like getting the Koreans to pay for the troops and THAAD installations (as likely as getting the Mexicans to pay for a wall), which the generals would promise to cost out, also buying time. Finally, Trump’s officials negotiated a new KORUS, with the Korean president who was complicit in their planning, and that deal was not much different from the old one. Trump, who does not read, was satisfied that he had won another victory.
This sort of routine was used over and over again, in connection with NAFTA, with the wall on the Mexican border, with the Affordable Care Act (hated by Trump as one of Obama’s successes, and loved by Americans), and (unsuccessfully) with the Iranian Nuclear agreement, which all of his military advisors wanted, largely because it roped all of the permanent members of the Security Council, with Germany, into applying sanctions. The dance around Trump continued right until the bitter end, and ended on the question of who won the 2020 election. On that matter, Trump was totally stonewalled by his staff, ignored by most of the Republicans in Congress, by-passed by his generals who implied to the Chinese and Russians that they would guarantee that Trump’s finger never touched the nuclear button, and disobeyed by his Vice-President.
At the end of the Trump regime, Cohn summed up what he and his colleagues accomplished: “It’s not what we did for the country, it’s what we saved him from doing.”
So, as the Greek army danced around Achilles, the Republicans dance around Trump, and the Democrats, like the Trojans, have to figure out how to take down their enemies while their hero sulks. They don’t have much time. Nor do the Republicans. Is Trump angry enough at the top party officials, who deprived him of his election win, to leave the war? Or would he start his own party (as Theodore Roosevelt did after his defeat for the Republican nomination in 1912), dividing the Republican vote? Or is he angrier at the Democrats who cheated him, so that he remains a Republican and puts together that list that Graham thinks will be the first step in a victorious return to power?
Meanwhile, unstirring and with smouldering heart,
The godlike athlete, son of Peleus, Prince
Achilles waited by his racing ships.
He would not enter the assembly
Of emulous men, nor ever go to war,
But felt his valour staling in his breast
With idleness, and missed the cries of battle.
