Assassination attempt or not, the time to change anyone’s mind about Donald Trump has long passed.  Since 2016 his supporters have been convinced he is the man to Make America Great Again, and since 2020 they’ve been confident that his electoral loss to Joe Biden was engineered by foul means.  Over the same period, his opponents have expended oceans of ink and terabytes of data explaining just why he is catastrophically unfit for the US presidency and a terrifying threat to the rule of law.  No amount of evidence or argument is likely to convert a pro-Trumper to a Never Trumper, or vice-versa.  That said, such is the Never Trumpers’ antipathy that their case has sometimes emerged as an incoherent splutter of indignation and disbelief, which MAGA voters write off as a childish, petulant protest:  “Orange man bad!”  So is it possible to muster one last, logical summary of all the ways Donald Trump truly does represent an insult to the gravity of the presidential role, and a historically unprecedented danger to democratic governance?  

Of course, aspects of Trump’s deficiencies have been anticipated by his predecessors.  Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon were known to be coarse and offensive in their private behavior and speech.  John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton were reckless womanizers.  Dwight Eisenhower played a lot of golf.  Jimmy Carter was ineffectual.  Kennedy, Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and, in his own way, Barack Obama were products of contemporary media, their natural comfort in the spotlight carefully deployed for political appeal.  Reagan, Gerald Ford, and George W. Bush were considered intellectual lightweights, while Bush and his father George H. W. were children of privilege who had little connection with the lives of ordinary Americans.  With Watergate, Richard Nixon broke his oath to uphold the US Constitution and resigned before facing impeachment; hindsight has revealed that most other presidents of the postwar period at least flirted with illegality in various backroom maneuvers.  Yes, Joe Biden is old.  And all of them  – as well as defeated candidates Adlai Stevenson, Barry Goldwater, Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bob Dole, Al Gore, John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Hillary Clinton – were possessed of the inflated egos and outsized ambition unique to politicians on a national stage.    

But they each had two crucial qualities that Donald Trump does not.  One was their basic understanding of civics:  how legislation is enacted, what the different branches of government can and cannot do, the ways that checks and balances are built into the American political system, and the limitations imposed on presidential power.  As an aspiring and sitting chief executive, Trump has demonstrated an almost complete ignorance of what the job actually entails.  For all their flaws, Truman or JFK or Nixon or Reagan or Obama appreciated the responsibilities of the office, whereas Trump seeks only its perks and none of its obligations.  For all their flaws, Eisenhower, LBJ, Ford, Carter, Clinton and both Bushes grasped the intricacies of implementing policy, whereas Trump expects to rule by fiat.  Donald Trump embodies every vice of the men who came before him and none of their virtues.

The second difference between Trump and earlier presidents is that even the most vain among them retained a commitment to the idea of public service.  All had previously been governors, congressmen, senators, vice-presidents, or military personnel, accustomed to taking as well as giving orders, and to working on behalf of a common good.  Their definition of that good varied, of course, and sometimes what they thought was best for the country was at odds with what the majority of the country really wanted.  But they nevertheless shared a sense of duty to others – a sense that they represented their nation to the world, that they were there for the people and not the other way around, that their individual interests came second to those of society’s, and that holding high elected rank came with a special burden even the most influential private citizen would never be weighed under. 

Trump, in contrast, has shown that he sees the presidency only as an extension of his personal and business concerns, just another avenue to build his brand and feed his narcissism.  During his 2016-2020 term, he was found openly soliciting favors and loyalty from American and foreign officials, for no reason other than to boost his approval ratings and avoid political penalty; he didn’t even bother to disguise his corruption.  Harry Truman famously said the buck stopped with him, but Donald Trump is clearly in it for himself. 

In some respects, to be sure, even these seemingly fatal disqualifiers may simply be new manifestations of what historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called “the imperial presidency” in his 1973 book of that title.  Arising during World War II and after, the layers of bureaucracy and delegated authority around the White House (particularly with the advent of nuclear weapons that could only be used on the commander-in-chief’s approval) amounted to a vast extra-Constitutional prerogative assumed by the presidential office.  The legend of JFK’s Camelot and the intrigues of Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men each played on the perception of their protagonists as anointed sovereigns rather than staffers in a democratic hierarchy, beholden solely to fate or their own failings rather than popular will or legal boundaries.  Trump readily adopts this conceit.   

Countless fictional depictions, too, from Dr. Strangelove to The West Wing, have reinforced the generic image of the US president as a Very Important Person in a suit, someone who always gets a lot of attention and deference no matter what he or she actually does or stands for.  By the administration of Bill Clinton, pundits were referring to the role as “Entertainer In Chief,” a sort of postmodern ceremonial station:  the president was merely the country’s biggest star, in essence, whose gaffes, scandals, and fluctuating poll numbers were more meaningful than any bills he might sign or wars he might launch.  An imperial president and a tabloid celebrity, Donald Trump – sworn to serve but practically unaccountable, mentally shallow but endlessly newsworthy – is himself no more than the latest iteration of troubling developments that predated his entry into the political arena.    

Yet these lowered standards are still too high.  Trump’s fans ascribe heroic skills as a dealmaker to him, a purported business mogul who brings the savvy tactics of the corporate boardroom to Congress and the United Nations.  Sure, he’s a crude bully, they say, but he gets things done.  No he doesn’t.  In an era of legislative gridlock, Trump is particularly unsuited to negotiating legislative compromises or rallying bipartisan support for any national initiative that crosses his mind while he nods off to Fox News (a border wall, a Muslim ban, an abortion ban, a transgender ban, etc.).  Likewise, his tenure as president hastened the eclipse of American global dominance, as allies and enemies quietly began to plan for a world no longer anchored by US stability or US commitments. 

While Trump might somehow survive the docket of indictments leveled against him, his transgressions are egregious enough that he must spend more time facing established laws than signing new ones.  As president, again, he’ll be preoccupied not by steering the state but by turning it on his enemies.  Trump demands devotion for himself but has none to give any other post, or principle.  If you want concrete action taken to address whatever you consider to be America’s most pressing issues, there’s been a selection of more or less competent people from left to right who you can get behind.  But if you want the US to sink further into an ungovernable domestic dysfunction and to entrench its status as an international laughing stock, Donald Trump’s your guy.

Maybe that’s the point.  Trump is less a former or future president, perhaps, than he is the most incendiary escalation of the US culture wars.  This time, opponents aren’t being goaded with provocative country music songs or bumper sticker slogans, but with a living, breathing politician.  The intent is not to accomplish anything for the benefit of all Americans so much as to further outrage one half of them.  Indeed, if Trump promised to nationalize industry and decree universal Sharia-sanctioned gay marriage, his supporters would relish the resultant disruption, and it’s only a little stretch to imagine prospective headlines from his cheerleading media:  “Trump Promotes Pedophilia and Dems Lose Their Minds,” or “Video of Trump Punching Old Lady Too Much For Snowflake Lefties.”  He is the presidential equivalent of Boaty McBoatface, the unfortunate name selected for a new naval vessel in an online British poll of 2016 (the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council was forced to nullify the results).  When any preference on anything can be instantly registered and broadcast to a wide audience, inevitably the preferences drift away from sober judgments to fleeting spasms of irreverence, annoyance, and spite.  Hence Boaty McBoatface; hence Donald Trump. 

Spare me the clever ripostes about “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”  Assholes say that.  Trump warrants singular criticism because he invites it.  He is hated for the same reason he is adulated:  his public career has been one long boast about his wealth, his business acumen, his sexual prowess, his fame, and his political instincts, culminating in “Nobody knows the system better than me…I alone can fix it.”  He characterizes all his achievements and all his setbacks in superlatives.  Obviously anyone who brags as pathologically as he does will be challenged; the real derangement afflicts Trump’s apologists, who inhabit a hallucinatory planet where his kind of bluster is never called. 

Say what you will about Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, or any other conventional politician, but they don’t claim to be leading a whole movement.  Blame them for Antifa or drag story readings if you want, but they can’t take the rap for broad trends that for better or worse were going to happen anyway.  Genuinely towering figures like Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill, conversely, felt deep humility about their lasting place in history. Donald Trump, on the other hand, wants personal credit beyond any prime minister’s or president’s capacity to earn, let alone desire.   He doesn’t inspire his fellow citizens; he proselytizes for his cult of personality.

The problem is that, as diminished as the presidential standing may have become, there nevertheless remains a vestige of dignity and honor around it that can’t withstand much more trivialization.  Franklin Roosevelt called the American presidency “pre-eminently a position of moral leadership,” but Donald Trump is not even his boosters’ idea of a moral leader.  By investing himself with such unrealistic potential, he only guarantees that he’ll never live up to it, and the base that misattributes to him such greatness only assures that his adversaries will highlight how short of greatness he falls.  A country that puts a man of such unmoored arrogance in charge is only asking to be humiliated.  Give Trump another four years and the stature of the US Chief Executive will be reduced to a complete caricature – a petty tyrant, a Berlusconi-type buffoon, a hapless crank more imprisoned in the job than ennobled by it – that no successor will ever redeem.  Give Trump another four years and the stature of the US itself will never recover.