Trump's Grandiose Narcissism and Other Chimpanzee Personalities

Donald Trump's Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a reminder of the importance of personality in political life.  This should draw attention to the biological science of political psychology, which includes the biological study of nonhuman animal personalities as showing the evolutionary roots of the personality traits manifest in U.S. presidents and other political actors.

Psychologists have identified two different dimensions of the narcissistic personality--grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism.  Trump is obviously a grandiose narcissist.

Psychologists have studied grandiose narcissism among U.S. Presidents.  Here's the abstract for one study (Watts et al. 2013):

"Recent research and theorizing suggest that narcissism may predict both positive and negative leadership behaviors.  We tested this hypothesis with data on the 42 U.S. presidents up to and including George W. Bush, using (a) expert-derived narcissism estimates, (b) independent historical surveys of presidential performance, and (c) largely or entirely objective indicators of presidential performance. Grandiose, but not vulnerable, narcissism was associated with superior overall greatness in an aggregate poll; it was also positively associated with public persuasiveness, crisis management, agenda setting, and allied behaviors, and with several objective indicators of performance, such as winning the popular vote and initiating legislation.  Nevertheless, grandiose narcissism was also associated with several negative outcomes, including congressional impeachment resolutions and unethical behaviors.  We found that presidents exhibit elevated levels of grandiose narcissism compared with the general population, and that presidents' grandiose narcissism has been rising over time.  Our findings suggest that grandiose narcissism may be a double-edged sword in the leadership domain."

This study built upon the data set of Rubenzer and Faschingbauer (2004), who had 121 expert raters (such as historians and psychologists who have studied the lives of the U.S. presidents) evaluate the personality of the 41 U.S. presidents up to and including Bill Clinton.  Watts et al. (2013) added ratings of George W. Bush from a previous study.  They were then able to rank the first 42 presidents for their grandiose narcissism.  Here are the top seven:

1. Lyndon Johnson
2. Teddy Roosevelt
3. Andrew Jackson
4. Franklin D. Roosevelt
5. John Kennedy
6. Richard Nixon
7. Bill Clinton

This suggests that Trump's grandiose narcissistic personality is not unique among the U.S. presidents, although we might wonder whether Trump manifests a more extreme form of this personality than any other president.  Perhaps this shouldn't surprise us.  After all, shouldn't we expect that the sort of person who would have the driving ambition for power that would motivate him to successfully win the presidency would often have the traits of a grandiose narcissist--such as fearless dominance?

These same personality traits can be seen in other political animals.  I have written about the biology of animal personalities (here), and particularly chimpanzee personalities (here).  For me, this shows that any biopolitical science needs to include the biological biographies of the individual animals in any political community.  The biological study of the political life of any animal community must include not only the genetic history of the species and the cultural history of the community, but also the individual history of the political actors in the community, with each individual having distinct personality traits.

Now, a new article (Weiss et al. 2017) presents a study of the personality traits of the chimpanzees in the Kasekela and Mitumba communities of Gombe National Park in Tanzania.  The New York Times has an article on this study.

The method for identifying the personality traits of these chimpanzees was essentially the same as that used for studying the personalities of U.S. presidents.  The personalities of 128 chimpanzees in Gombe were rated on 24 items from the "Hominoid Personality Questionaire," which is a slightly modified version of questionaires used to rate the personality of human beings as following the "five-factor-model" of personality based on five domains--Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism (OCEAN).  The ratings were made by the Tanzanian field assistants who have observed the chimpanzees at Gombe almost daily for over 30 years.

For each of the 24 items, the raters were asked to rate a chimpanzee on a seven point scale from low to high.  Each item was stated as an adjective along with one or two descriptive sentences.  Here are some examples:

"FEARFUL: Subject reacts excessively to real or imagined threats by displaying behaviors such as screaming, grimacing, running away or other signs of anxiety or distress."

"DOMINANT: Subject is able to displace, threaten, or take food from other chimpanzees.  Or subject may express high status by decisively intervening in social interactions."

"RECKLESS: Subject is rash or unconcerned about the consequences of its behaviors."

"THOUGHTLESS: Subject often behaves in a way that seems imprudent or forgetful."

"VULNERABLE: Subject is prone to be physically or emotionally hurt as a result of dominance displays, highly assertive behavior, aggression, or attack by another chimpanzee."

"BULLYING: Subject is overbearing and intimidating towards younger or lower ranking chimpanzees."

 "AGGRESSIVE: Subject often initiates fights or other menacing and agonistic encounters with other chimpanzees."

"IMPULSIVE: Subject often displays some spontaneous or sudden behavior that could not have been anticipated.  There often seems to be some emotional reason behind the sudden behavior."

These ratings were statistically analyzed for "interrater reliability"--that is, the degree to which the ratings of the same chimp by different raters agree.  For most of the items, the interrater reliabilities ranged from acceptable to good.

There are three important conclusions from this study.  First, this confirms that, like other animals that have been studied, these chimps really do show individual personalities.  Second, the patterns in the personalities of these wild chimps are similar to those found among captive chimps in zoos or study facilities.  Finally, this shows remarkable similarities in personality traits between these chimps and human beings, which suggests an evolutionary continuity in personality traits.

Notice how some of the items in the above list apply to Trump.  Dominant?  Reckless?  Thoughtless?  Bullying?  Aggressive?  Impulsive?  I have written some posts on "Trump's Chimpanzee Politics" (here  and here).

Notice also that the study of presidents found a connection between grandiose narcissism and impeachment resolutions and unethical behavior. If Trump is impeached by the Congress, or if the Cabinet uses the 25th Amendment to declare him "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office," we will have to decide whether Trump's personality traits are so dangerous for the country that he should be removed from office.

Can the president's authority to launch nuclear strikes with thousands of nuclear warheads be trusted to someone with the most extreme form of grandiose narcissism, perhaps even more extreme than Lyndon Johnson or any other previous president?  Or should the Congress declare that the president has no constitutional authority to launch a preemptive attack without a congressional declaration of war?


REFERENCES

Rubenzer, S. J., and T. R. Faschingbauer. 2004. Personality, Character, and Leadership in the White House: Psychologists Assess the Presidents. Brassey's Inc.

Watts, Ashley, et al. 2013.  "The Double-Edged Sword of Grandiose Narcissism: Implications for Successful and Unsuccessful Leadership Among U.S. Presidents." Psychological Science 24: 2379-2389.

Weiss, Alexander, Michael Wilson, D. Anthony Collins, Deus Mjungu, Shadrack Kamenya, Steffen Foerster, and Anne E. Pusey. 2017. "Personality in the Chimpanzees of Gombe National Park." Scientific Data 4, article number: 170146.

Trump's Grandiose Narcissism Explains His Competitive Authoritarianism

Donald Trump is not a protectionist.  He is not an isolationist.  He is not a nationalist.  He is not a conservative.  Terms like protectionism, isolationism, nationalism, and conservatism suggest some kind of social theory or doctrine.  But Trump doesn't do theory.

Sure, as I have indicated in my previous posts, Trump is attracted to the theory of the unitary executive.  But that's not because he's been persuaded that it's a correct theory.  He is attracted to that theory only because, and only so long as, it serves his real priority: the restless search for directing the public attention of the world to Donald Trump.

That explains why he sometimes rejects positions in the afternoon that he took in the morning.  Reversing himself so quickly surprises and shocks us so that we can't take our eyes off him.  And that's the point of it all.

That's why my wife and I need the Wall Street Journal to provide us with a "Trump Tracker" every morning.  This morning, it lists "45 Major Moves in 46 Days."

That's what you do if you're a grandiose narcissist like Trump.

Trump's grandiose narcissism also explains why Trump has decided to try in his second term to change the American regime from liberal democracy to competitive authoritarianism.  Again, this is not because he believes that competitive authoritarianism is in principle a better form of government, but because in the present circumstances of American political history, this form of government offers him the best prospect for keeping public attention constantly focused on himself.

First, I'll remind you of what I have said about grandiose narcissism as a personality disorder displayed by some authoritarian political leaders like Trump and by some other primates who strive for despotic dominance.  Then I'll explain what I mean by "competitive authoritarianism."

GRANDIOSE NARCISSISM

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders describes nine diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD):

A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early childhood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

(1) has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g. exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)

(2) is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

(3) believes that he or she is 'special' and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)

(4) requires excessive admiration

(5) has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations

(6) is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends

(7) lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others

(8) is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her

(9) shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

Who does this remind you of? 

The narcissism of people like Trump can often give them the swagger and charismatic excitement that make them the center of attention in a way that can be translated into political success.   And, as Lincoln observed, many politically ambitious people like this will be satisfied in a liberal democracy to be elected as a congressman, a governor, or a president.  But this will not satisfy someone like Trump who thinks himself a "Towering Genius" like Napoleon who needed to become the Emperor to satisfy the grandiosity of his ambition.

COMPETITIVE AUTHORITARIANISM

As Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way have argued in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, Trump's Napoleonic narcissism is driving him to overturn American liberal democracy and replace it with competitive authoritarianism (Levitsky and Way 2025).  "Competitive authoritarianism" is the term they have invented as a label for a distinctively hybrid regime that combines elements of democracy and authoritarianism, which has emerged around the world over the past 35 years since the end of the Cold War (Levitsky and Way 2002, 2010).

I have written about democracy and autocracy as the natural but not inevitable products of human political evolution.  What Levitsky and Way call competitive authoritarianism is a mixture of democratic competition and autocratic governance.

At one end of the political spectrum, a fully authoritarian regime either does not have multiparty elections for the executive and other offices of government, or it has elections, but they are not free and fair; and basic civil liberties (speech, press, association) are denied.

At the other end of the spectrum, a fully democratic regime has multiparty elections that are free and fair, most adults have the right to vote, basic civil liberties are protected, and the authority of elected governments is not restricted by unelected military or clerical powers.

Somewhere between these two extremes of the spectrum, a competitive authoritarian regime has multiparty elections, but they are not completely free and fair, because the incumbent's abuse of power tilts the electoral playing field against the opposition, and basic civil liberties are restricted to make it hard for the opposition to challenge the ruling party.

Under competitive authoritarianism, opposition forces can compete seriously for power.  And, occasionally, the opposition can win an election, and the incumbents lose.  But this regime is still not fully democratic, because the ruling party uses its power over the government to attack opponents and co-opt critics.

These three regime types are distinguished by the kind of countervailance--power checking power--that they allow.  A fully authoritarian regime allows little or no countervailance.  A fully democratic regime allows strong countervailance.  A competitive authoritarian regime allows weak countervailance.

For example, in a competitive authoritarian regime, the ruling party can politicize and weaponize the government bureaucracy by filling it with party loyalists who will use the power of the government to punish opponents and reward allies.  Levitsky and Way point out:  

One of the first moves undertaken by elected autocrats such a Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey has been to purge professional civil servants from public agencies responsible for things such as investigating and prosecuting wrongdoing, regulating the media and the economy, and overseeing elections--and replace them with loyalists.  After Orban became prime minister in 2010, his government stripped public employees of key civil service protections, fired thousands, and replaced them with loyal members of the ruling Fidesz party.  Likewise, Poland's Law and Justice party weakened civil service laws by doing away with the competitive hiring process and filling the bureaucracy, the judiciary, and the military with partisan allies (Levitsky and Way 2025: 41).

But notice that of all of these examples of competitive authoritarian ruling parties, one of them--Poland's Law and Justice party--lost its majority power in Poland's parliamentary elections of 2023.  So, this illustrates the real political competition in these regimes because the ruling party can occasionally lose to the opposition, even though the competitive playing field is unfairly tilted to favor the ruling party.  In a fully authoritarian regime, the ruling party would never lose an election.

Notice also that the list of competitive authoritarians includes Viktor Orban, who has been Prime Minister of Hungary since 2010, the longest serving prime minister in the history of that country.  For Trump and the right-wing intellectuals advising him, Orban is the model of what Trump would like to become in the United States.

Trump failed to do this in his first term for various reasons.  He did not have enough experience in government to plan ahead what he needed to do.  He appointed some establishment Republicans who were not slavishly loyal to him.  And he did not fully control the Republican Party.  

But now, he has come into his second term with a plan for establishing presidential authoritarian government provided to him by the Heritage Foundation (Project 2025), the Claremont Institute, The Federalist Society, and others.  He has turned the Republican Party into the Trump Party, so that the Republican-controlled Congress will not restrain his authoritarianism.  And he is filling the Executive Branch with his personal loyalists who will be his compliant servants.

Levitsky and Way are right in predicting that even if Trump is successful in doing this, he will not be able to establish a fully authoritarian regime--a fascist or one-party dictatorship.  There will be mid-term congressional elections in 2026 and a presidential election in 2028.  And Trump's opponents could win one or both of those elections.  Because even if Trump establishes a competitive authoritarianism, it will be truly competitive, although the competition will not be fully free or fair.

And yet, as Levitsky and Way say, Trump's success in establishing an authoritarian regime will be limited in at least three ways.  First, American constitutional institutions are stronger than in other competitive authoritarian regimes.  For example, an independent judiciary, federalism, a bicameral legislature, and midterm elections are all absent in Orban's Hungary.

Second, Trump is not as popular as many of the successful elected autocrats have been.  Some of them have had approval ratings of over 80 percent.  Trump has never come close to that.  Until recently, Orban and his party have been very popular.  But now his popularity has fallen behind the opposition Tisza Party, which could win the parliamentary elections in 2026.

A third constraint on Trump is the countervailing power generated by American civil society.  American capitalism generates a larger and richer private sector than is the case in any other country, and that creates dispersed power centers outside the government that are difficult to fully capture or bully.

But then, of course, the richest American is the leader of the Trump takeover of the government--Elon Musk.  That raises an interesting question.  How can a grandiose narcissist share the spotlight of public attention with another grandiose narcissist?  The answer is obvious--he doesn't.

So, at some point, Trump will have to fire Musk.  And he probably will blame Musk for many of the bad decisions made in Trump's second term.

REFERENCES (FOR THIS AND THE PRECEDING THREE POSTS)

Arnhart, Larry. 2009. Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question. Ed. Kenneth Blanchard. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic.

Arnhart, Larry. 2012. "Biopolitical Science." In James Fleming and Sanford Levinson, eds., Evolution and Morality.  Nomos LII. New York: New York University Press.

Arnhart, Larry. 2016. Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Rawls. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.

Calabresi, Steven. 2021. "'A Shining City on a Hill': The Unitary Executive and the Deep State." The Balkinization Symposium on Skowronek, Dearborn, and King, Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive, July 18.

Calabresi, Steven, and Christopher Yoo. 2008. The Unitary Executive: Presidential Power from Washington to Bush. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.

Chabot, Christine Kexel. 2020. "Is the Federal Reserve Constitutional? An Originalist Argument for Independent Agencies." Notre Dame Law Review 96: 1-54.

Chabot, Christine Kexel. 2022. "Interring the Unitary Executive." Notre Dame Law Review 98: 129-209.

Gordon, Scott. 1999. Controlling the State: Constitutionalism from Ancient Athens to Today. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. 1961. The Federalist. Ed. Jacob E. Cooke. Middletown, CN: Wesleyan University Press.

Herndon, William H. 1983. Herndon's Life of Lincoln. New York: Da Capo Press.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2002. "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism." Journal of Democracy 13 (April): 51-65.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2025. "The Path to American Authoritarianism." Foreign Affairs 104 (March/April): 36-51.

Lincoln, Abraham. 1953. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. 8 vols. Ed. Roy Basler. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Lincoln, Abraham. 1989. Speeches and Writings. Ed. Don Fehrenbacher. New York: The Library of America. 

Nathan, Richard P. 1975. The Plot That Failed: Nixon and the Administrative Presidency. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Roberts, Andrew. 2014. Napoleon: A Life. New York: Viking.

Shane, Scott. 2006. "Recent Flexing of Presidential Powers Had Personal Roots in Ford White House." New York Times. December 30.

Shugerman, Jed Handelsman. 2022. "Vesting." Stanford Law Review 74 (June): 1479-1570.

Shugerman, Jed Handelsman. 2023. "The Indecisions of 1798: Inconstant Originalism and Strategic Ambiguity." University of Pennsylvania Law Review 171: 753-867.

Skowronek, Stephen, John Dearborn, and Desmond King. 2021. Phantoms of a Beleaguered Republic: The Deep State and the Unitary Executive. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tillman, Seth Barrett. 2016. "Ex Parte Merryman: Myth, History, and Scholarship." Military Law Review 224: 482-540.

Wilson, Edmund. 1966. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press.

What Might Drive a Grandiose Narcissist Like Donald Trump to Suicide?

 

Recently, Donald Trump posted a video of himself as the Superhero that America needs, another childish expression of his grandiose narcissism.  He said that a "BIG ANNOUNCEMENT" would be coming. 

Over the past month, however, it has become clear that Trump's popular appeal has faded, even among his most cultish followers.  Increasingly, even his fanatical supporters now see him as a pathetic loser.  This will throw him into a narcissistic rage.  As he begins to feel the humiliation of failure and entrapment, will he at some point feel that the only way out is suicide?

I have written previously about Trump's personality as a grandiose narcissist, and how other American presidents and some alpha male chimpanzees have shown the same personality.  Remarkably, Jane Goodall has said that Trump's personality is familiar to her from her observations of some of the dominant male chimpanzees at Gombe.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders describes nine diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD):

"A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early childhood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

"(1) has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g. exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)

"(2) is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

"(3) believes that he or she is 'special' and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)

"(4) requires excessive admiration

"(5) has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations

"(6) is interpersonally exploitative, i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends

"(7) lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others

"(8) is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her

"(9) shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes." 

The narcissism of people like Trump can often give them the swagger and charismatic excitement that make them the center of attention in a way that can be translated into political success.  But once the popularity of this bombastic personality fades, the narcissist can feel such a "severe narcissistic injury" (as the psychiatrists call it) that he can suddenly decide that killing himself is his only escape.

Elsa Ronningstam (at Harvard Medical School) is one of the leading psychologists in the study of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and she and her colleagues have noted that the most severe narcissists have a high risk of suicide.   She has observed: 

". . . suicides in individuals with NPD can be sudden, carefully implemented and with high lethality. . . ."

". . . In one such type of sudden suicide, a need for superiority over life and death, with triumph over fear and pain, and with fantasies connecting lethal self-harm with control, active mastery and self-esteem, can endorse suicide.  In this context, there is a detachment in the narcissistic mental processing between the suicidal act and its real meaning, that is, the end of life. . . . a combination of affect dysregulation with self-enhancement and vulnerability can readily trigger suicide-related behavior in the context of interpersonal or life-related narcissistic injuries, limitations, trauma, or defeats" (Ronningstam et al. 2018: 501-502).

After all, what alternative is there for a grandiose narcissist like Trump when he faces humiliating defeat and no way to escape from this except by killing himself?

Trump might kill himself at any time.  Or he might wait until he is in jail, like Jeffrey Epstein.

Oh, and what was the BIG ANNOUNCEMENT promised by Trump?  Donald Trump Digital Trading Cards with pictures of Trump as a Marvel Superhero.  You can begin your collection with a credit card and pay only $99 for each!

But you should hurry.  Because Michael Anton, Curtis Yarvin, and other Trump enthusiasts at the Claremont Institute will be buying up these trading cards as a record of Trumps profound authoritarian statesmanship. 

REFERENCE

Ronningstam, Elsa, Igor Weinberg, Mark Goldblatt, Mark Schechter, and Bejamin Herbstman. 2018. "Suicide and Self-Regulation in Narcissistic Personality Disorder." Psychodynamic Psychiatry 46 (4): 491-510.

Realigning Presidential Elections: 1920, 1932, 2020 (?)

100 years ago today, on November 2, 1920, Republican Warren Harding was elected president, defeating Democrat James Cox, in the biggest popular vote victory in American history--60% to 34%.  This was a devastating repudiation of the presidency of Democrat Woodrow Wilson that signaled a political realignment favoring the dominance of the Republican Party.  This was the first of three overwhelming presidential defeats for the Democratic Party.  This was also the beginning of a decade in which Republicans had large majorities in both houses of Congress.  We have to wonder whether the election tomorrow will bring another realignment--this time signaling repudiation of the Trump Republicans and dominant majority power for the Democratic Party.

Coming after the end of World War I in 1918, the last two years of Wilson's presidency had been some of the most turbulent in American history.  The world suffered the worst pandemic in human history--killing as many as 675,000 people in the United States alone.  As a proportion of the population, the equivalent number for the U.S. today would be over two million people dead.  Even President Wilson and the Prime Minister of Great Britain were infected by the flu, although they recovered.

It was also a time of violent social unrest.  The migration of many rural blacks from the South to northern and western cities sparked racial violence, including race riots in over 25 northern cities in the summer of 1919, in which over 100 people died.  Blacks organized marches protesting white violence against blacks.  Anarchists and left-wing radicals mailed packages with bombs to 36 government officials.  One bomb exploded outside the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.  Federal agents arrested some 5,000 radicals.  Americans had reason to fear that the Communist revolutionary ferment in Russia might spread to the U.S.  Cities were shut down by general strikes led by the radical International Workers of the World.  There were more labor union strikes than ever in American history.  In addition to all this disorder, the country fell into a deep economic recession with over 20% unemployment.

The theme for Harding's successful campaign for the presidency was his promise of a "return to normalcy."  Sound familiar?

Remembering this history should teach Americans two lessons.  The first is that the social and political turmoil in our lives today is not unique, and that the country has recovered from much worse disorder in the past.

The second lesson is that the evolution of the American two-party system has produced two major parties that are so adaptive in their resilience that they can survive devastating electoral defeats and then find ways to return to dominance.  And so it was, that the realigning election of 1920 that made the Republican Party the dominant party was followed by the realigning election of 1932 that reversed the positions of the two parties and elevated the Democratic Party to majority status. Franklin Roosevelt's 57 to 40 percent victory over Herbert Hoover was the largest Democratic majority up to that time.  And this was the first of five consecutive presidential elections won by the Democratic candidate.  In 1934, the Democrats gained House seats and increased their majority to 319-103, which was the only mid-term election between 1838 and 2002 in which the president's party gained House seats.

If the Republican Party does suffer a defeat tomorrow comparable to what the Democratic Party suffered in 1920, some pundits will wonder whether this is the end of the Republican Party, or at least the beginning of a long period in which Republicans will be a minority.  This could happen.  But if the Republican Party is still as adaptive in making innovative changes as it has been in the past, it can turn away from Trump's illiberal populism and find new leaders that can broaden the party's appeal to voters.

That will require a moral appeal to voters.  The Trumpist Republicans have decided that moral character does not matter--that Trump's immoral character does not matter, as long as one agrees with his policies.  Trump boasted about this when he said that even if he murdered someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue in New York, his supporters would still love him.

Against this, Joe Biden's claim that this election is a "battle for the soul of the nation" argues that Trump's immorality does matter because it corrupts America's moral identity.  Presidential statecraft is soulcraft. If Trump and the Trump Republicans lose in a big way, that will confirm Biden's argument that a president must provide moral leadership that manifests and shapes the moral character of the country.  The Republican Party will then have to persuade Americans that it will never again embrace the political leadership of a grandiose narcissist like Trump who lacks the moral and intellectual virtues.

I have written previously about Trump's grandiose narcissism.

Mary Trump on Donald Trump: The Man and the Myth Created by Fred Trump

One of Donald Trump's favorite statements is "Nobody knows more about [fill in the blank] than me."

Trump receives a perfect score on a mental acuity test: "Person. Woman. Man. Camera, TV"  Amazing!  What a genius!  Joe Biden could never do that!


Mary Trump is Donald's niece--the daughter of Fred Trump, Jr., Donald's oldest sibling.  In her new book--Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man--she explains how Donald's father created his mental disorders and his myth of himself as the self-made successful businessman--who knows more about everything than anybody.  In doing that, she supports two of the themes in my past commentary on Trump--the biopolitical study of his personality and the Aristotelian study of his rhetorical myth.  This also illustrates the importance of understanding the individual history of political actors for biopolitical science.

In this one hour interview with George Stephanopoulos, Mary speaks about most of the main points in her book.

In a way, Mary's book is less about Donald Trump that it is about Fred Trump--his father.  Speaking from her knowledge of the Trump family and her knowledge as a psychologist with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, she says that Fred Trump was a "high-functioning sociopath" (24).  He had no real human feeling for anyone.  He was incapable of empathy.  He cared only about what was important to him--his real-estate business.  He was interested in other people only if they could help him in his business.

Fred did not think it was his job to care for young children.  He was not much interested in his two daughters--Maryanne and Elizabeth--because as women they were inferior.  He was more interested in his sons--Freddy, Donald, and Robert--but only if they could work in his business and show the "killer" personality necessary for business success.  He made all of his children uncomfortable with either expressing or confronting deep emotions, because he scorned this as showing weakness.  Being a "killer" meant being invulnerable.

Fred became a fan of Norman Vincent Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking, and he joined Peale's Marble Collegiate Church, although he rarely attended.  He had not read the book, but he liked the idea in the title--that the key to success was to always think positive.  Mary calls this his "toxic positivity"--the insistence that the best response to human suffering is to declare that everything's just great.  Fred's wife was sick for much of her life.  Because of her osteoporosis, her bones were so brittle that she often suffered excruciating pain from broken bones.  Whenever she was suffering, Fred would say something like "Everything's great.  Right. Toots?  You just have to think positive," and then he would leave her alone with her pain.  Mary repeats that line more than once.  It's even the last sentence of the book (93, 161, 211).

Fred hoped that his oldest son--Freddy (Mary's father)--would succeed in his business and carry on the Trump empire.  But when Freddy did not satisfy his expectations, he demeaned him as a failure.  Freddy enjoyed flying, and he became a pilot for TWA, but his father ridiculed this as an unimportant job.  Freddy was forced to quit that job because of his alcoholism.  His health suffered from the effects of his excessive drinking and smoking.  He died at the age of 42 in a hospital with no one from the family around him.  On the night that he died, Donald and Elizabeth went out to see a movie.

Once Freddy began to fall out of his father's favor, Donald saw the chance to take his place as the manager of the Trump businesses.  His father had built his empire of rental housing in Brooklyn, but he had never tried to enter the more glamorous real-estate world of Manhattan.  So when Donald began building projects in Manhattan, and became famous as a wildly successful builder in Manhattan in the early 1980s, this fulfilled his father's desire for recognition, although his father always told the news media that he had done little to help his son, and so Donald's success was all his own.

Until a few years ago, Mary herself believed this story of Donald as the self-made billionaire businessman with a genius for making deals.  But then one day in 2017, she answered the door at her house and met Susanne Craig, a reporter for the New York Times.  Craig told her that she was part of a team of reporters investigating the financial history of the Trump family.  When Fred Trump died in 1999, there was a long legal battle over the inheritance of his estate, because Mary and her brother had had their father's portion of the inheritance taken away from them.  They finally were forced to accept an unfair settlement based on false estimates of Trump's worth.  The New York Times reporters believed that the documents collected by Mary's lawyers could reveal the truth about Trump's financial history.  At first, Mary refused to cooperate.  Finally, she agreed, and she was able to deliver 19 banker's boxes of documents from her lawyer's office to the reporters.  This was crucial for the stunning revelations in the New York Times article published on October 2, 2018.

This was the longest article (almost 14,000 words) in the history of the New York Times, and it earned a Pulitzer Prize.  It showed that for decades, Fred Trump had been using shell companies to channel almost $1 billion to his children without having to pay gift taxes.  Donald has said that "my father never gave me much money."  This is a lie, because Donald at age 3 began receiving money from his father, and by the time he was 8 years old, he was a millionaire.  Donald received the equivalent of $413 million in today's dollars.  Moreover, his father bailed him out in all of his projects in Manhattan and Atlantic City when he could not pay his debts.  This showed that Trump was a failure in all of his business ventures, and it was only his father's money that hid the depth of his failures.

This supports Mary's claim in her book that Donald is utterly incompetent in doing anything other than shameless self-promotion of his myth of success.  As I have argued in a previous post, this refutes the rhetorical enthymeme that ran through his presidential campaign of 2016:

Major premise: Because of stupid politicians, America no longer wins; and America will not win again until a successful businessman who know how to win is elected president.

Minor premise: Donald Trump is unique in his business success and his prudence in knowing how to win, because he is a self-made multi-billionaire.

Conclusion: Therefore, Americans need to elect Trump president.

Even without the evidence from the 2018 New York Times article, one might have expected that voters in 2016 would have seen Trump's extraordinary record of 6 bankruptcies as exposing the falsity of his myth.  But the brazenness of his deceptive rhetoric was powerful enough to hide the truth.

As president, Donald has continued to lie about his intelligence and success despite the obvious evidence of his mental incompetence and failure.  Of course, his very success in lying so shamelessly testifies to his skill for rhetorical manipulation--the kind of skill that is often displayed by a narcissistic psychopath.

In previous posts, I have written about Trump's grandiose narcissism (here), about psychopaths (here and here), and about how how Trump's rhetorical success shows some of the techniques of "chimpanzee politics" (here).

Here are the diagnostic criteria for "Narcissistic Personality Disorder" in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders:

"A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:

"1.  Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).

"2.  Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.

"3.  Believes that he or she is 'special' and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).

"4.  Requires excessive admiration.

"5.  Has a sense of entitlement (i.e., unreasonable expectations or especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations).

"6.  Is interpersonally exploitative (i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends).

"7.  Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.

"8.  Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.

"9.  Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes."

Mary says that Donald meets all nine criteria.  She also believes, however, that Donald is even more complicated in that he also satisfies the criteria for antisocial personality disorder (psychopathy), dependent personality disorder, some learning disabilities, and perhaps a self-induced sleep disorder (12-13).

But if he is so disordered, then how has he managed to survive and even succeed--to the point of becoming president of the United States?  Mary's answer is that he has been "essentially institutionalized" for most of his adult life.  First his father and then the people in government have sheltered him from the consequences of his disordered mind and behavior.  He has never had to live in the real world.

Mary's ultimate explanation is that Donald is the product of his father's abusive parenting:

"Nothing is ever good enough.  This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism; Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be.  He knows that he has never been loved" (198).

"Though Donald's fundamental nature hasn't changed, since his inauguration the amount of stress he's under has changed dramatically.  It's not the stress of the job, because he isn't doing the job--unless watching TV and tweeting insults count.  It's the effort to keep the rest of us distracted from the fact that he knows nothing--about politics, civics, or simple human decency--that requires an enormous amount of work" (199).

"Every time you hear Donald talking about how something is the greatest, the best, the biggest, the most tremendous (the implication being that he made them so), you have to remember that the man speaking is still, in essential ways, the same little boy who is desperately worried that he, like his older brother, is inadequate and that he, too, will be destroyed for his inadequacy.  At a very deep level, his bragging and false bravado are not directed at the audience in front of him but at his audience of one: his long-dead father" (202).

"Donald withdraws to his comfort zones--Twitter, Fox News--casting blame from afar, protected by a figurative or literal bunker.  He rants about the weakness of others even as he demonstrates his own.  But he can never escape the fact that he is and always will be a terrified little boy" (210). 

In previous posts (here), I have argued that the bad character of a politician really does matter.  Conservative Republicans used to believe that, but now those who have embraced Trump no longer believe that.  There are some Republicans, however, who do believe that Trump's bad character--his lack of any moral or intellectual virtues--does matter.  Some of them are supporting the "Lincoln Project"--a group of leading Republicans who are sponsoring political ads recommending that Republicans should vote for Biden and against Trump--and against the Republican leaders who have enabled Trump.  For example, Jimmy Tosh is a wealthy lifelong Republican in Tennessee who has often contributed to Republican candidates, but now he is contributing to the Lincoln Project.  He was recently quoted as saying "I agree with 80% of the things he does.  I just cannot stand a liar."

Mary Trump's book supports this position by showing the depth of his bad character.

Is Donald Trump God's Chosen One--Like Cyrus?

Donald Trump at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Holding Up Stephen Strang's Book God and Donald Trump

Lance Wallnau Hears from God in May of 2016 that the 45th Chapter of Isaiah Identifies Trump as the 45h President, God's New Cyrus

If America is a Christian nation chosen by God, and if God providentially enters history to carry out his purposes, is it possible that the miracle of Donald Trump's election in 2016 was an act of God to save America from its decline into secularism?  Many American evangelicals say yes, and they point to the evangelical prophecies of Trump's victory, when almost no one thought he could win.

Although most of us might be skeptical of this, it is true that almost a third of the votes cast for Trump came from evangelical Christians, most of them in the states that were crucial for Trump's electoral college victory.  If many of these evangelical Trump voters were motivated by their belief that Trump really was God's chosen one, then it would seem that this was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We now have the story of how this prophetic vision of God's providential intervention changed American history in the new book by Stephen Strang--God and Donald Trump--which has been endorsed by evangelical politicians such as Mike Huckebee and Michelle Bachmann.  In the picture above, you can see Trump proudly waving his copy of the book at the World Economic Forum in Davos.  Strang is a leading Pentecostal evangelical who publishes Charisma magazine, and part of his story is how the Pentecostals were the first Christians to support Trump.  As early as 2003, Paula White Cain, a Pentecostal television minister, became Trump's spiritual advisor after he had seen her TV show.

Here is a video of Cain and other charismatic ministers laying hands on and praying for Trump in his Trump Tower office on September 30, 2015, six months before the first presidential primaries:

This appeals to the grandiose narcissism of Trump's chimpanzee personality, which has been a topic of my post here.

Christians like Strang who believe that Trump's election came from a miraculous intervention by God must make at least two kinds of arguments--an interpretation of the American founding and an interpretation of the Bible.

First, they must argue that the American founders established America as a Christian nation specially chosen by God to be under his providential care.  So, Strang refers to "Benjamin Franklin's surprising declaration during the Constitutional Convention of 1787, when he said famously, 'God governs in the affairs of men'" (xiv).  And Strang says that the purpose of his book in telling the story of God's intervention in the election of 2016 is to confirm this idea "that God is involved in the affairs of men" (184).

Remarkably, however, Strang is silent about the circumstances of Franklin's declaration at the Constitutional Convention.  Franklin was proposing that the Convention should have daily prayers and Bible reading so that God would providentially intervene to help them write the Constitution.  The members of the Convention refused to even allow a vote on his proposal, and Alexander Hamilton quipped that they "had no need for foreign aid"!  I have written about this previously here.

Christians like Strang must also argue that identifying Trump as God's chosen one is consistent with the Bible.  Is there any evidence in the Bible that God would choose someone like Trump--who is not a Christian--to act as the savior of God's people?  Well, yes, as Lance Wallnau explains in the video above, God could chose Trump just as God chose the pagan Persian Cyrus as his "anointed one" or "messiah" to liberate the people of Israel from their Babylonian captivity.  In fact, God spoke to Wallnau and noted the connection between the 45th chapter of Isaiah and Trump becoming the 45th president of the United States.  In that chapter of Isaiah, God speaks to Cyrus as his "anointed one," although "you do not know me."  Although Cyrus does not worship Yahweh--he worships other gods--Yahweh can use him for his purposes.  Likewise, then, God could use Trump to bring America back to God even if Trump himself is not a believer.  And that is what many evangelicals decided: Trump's sinful character and lack of any clear belief in Christianity need not weaken his claim to be chosen by God to carry out God's plan for saving America from Hillary Clinton!

There is a problem here, however, that Strang briefly mentions and then passes over without resolving it (75-76).  As the evangelical Tom Horn has pointed out, God used the pagan leader Nebuchadnezzar as "the servant of the Most High God" to punish Judah by taking them into the very Babylonian captivity from which Cyrus would later liberate them (Jeremiah 25).  So if God is using Trump, we can't be sure whether Trump is to be America's savior (like Cyrus) or America's punishment (like Nebuchadnezzar).  And indeed many Christians who refused to vote for Trump worry that the Christians supporting Trump are showing a shameless lack of moral authority.  Is God punishing these Christians for their hypocrisy?

There is another problem for the Christian here: if Cyrus was the "messiah," does that deny the claim of Jesus that he was the fulfillment of these prophecies in Isaiah?  As I have indicated in a previous post, that's a problem for Handel's Messiah, which was an attempt to refute the deistic denial of providential prophecy.

And, of course, there is the fundamental problem with all claims of prophecy that they are stated in such vague and confused ways that they cannot be verified, or if some seem to be verified, they are mixed up with others that are falsified.

Consider, for example, this claim by Strang: "As far back as 2007, the late Kim Clement had prophesized, 'Trump shall become a trumpet. . . . I  will raise up the Trump to become a trumpet, and Bill Gates to open up the gate of a financial stream for the church.' The first has come true, but we'll have to wait and see about the second part" (69).

The first prophecy is ridiculously vague: "Trump shall become a trumpet"?  The second prophecy that Bill Gates will give his money to the church is false.

If you go to Kim Clement's Elijah's List for April 14, 2007, which is Strang's source, you will see that Clement issued hundreds of prophecies every year, most of them in vague language, and most of them have not been plausibly fulfilled.  Here is the passage from which Strang quoted an excerpt:

"I am God and you have called to Me, and many from this Nation has said, 'Enough--enough of religion, and enough of dead speech.'  The Spirit of God said, 'This is a moment of resurrection.'  For the Spirit of God says, 'Honor Me with your praise and acceptance of this that  I say to you.  This that shall take place shall be the most unusual thing, a transfiguration, a going into the marketplace if you wish, and into the news media.  Where Time magazine will have no choice but to say what I want them to say; Newsweek what I want to say; and The View, what I want to say.'"

"'Trump shall become a trumpet,' says  the Lord!  'I will raise up Trump to become a trumpet, and Bill Gates to open up the gate of a financial realm for the Church,' says the Spirit of the Living God!'"

It's been 11 years now since the Spirit of God prophesized that Time, Newsweek, and ABC's The View would become outlets for God's message.  How long should we wait for the fulfillment of this  prophecy?  Strang is carefully silent about this and many other dubious prophecies from Clement.

Many of us find it hard to take this stuff seriously.  But many evangelical Christians do take it seriously.  For example, Strang reports that during the 2016 election, Cindy Jacobs, a Charismatic prophet, mobilized tens of thousands of people to "prayer walk" through the seven critical states that helped to elect Trump (20-21).  These "prayer warriors" walked around courthouses and centers of towns praying for God's intervention in the election.  We cannot ignore the fact that many of the millions of evangelical Christians who voted for Trump could have done so with the belief that he was God's chosen one; and if so, that would mean that this belief in divine intervention could have been the deciding factor in giving the presidential election to Trump.

As an alternative to the view of God as a providential interventionist in the world, which creates these problems, we might consider returning to the deism of the American founders, whose deity was not the God of the Bible but Nature's God.  That's the topic for my next post.

The Resistance to Trump inside the Trump Administration: Bad Character Does Matter

The New York Times has just published a remarkable Op-Ed essay that is anonymous, because the author is a senior official in the Trump administration identified as "part of the resistance inside the Trump administration."  It is said that the author must remain anonymous to keep his job.

The author claims that "many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations," although they "want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous."

The author says:

"The root of the problem is the president's amorality.  Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making."

"Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets, and free people.  At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings.  At worst, he has attacked them outright."

I agree that the root of the problem is the president's amorality.  In previous posts (here and here), I have argued that the fundamental problem with Trump is that he lacks both the moral and intellectual virtues of a good person, and that he suffers from a grandiose narcissism.  I am shocked that many conservatives don't see this as a problem, but I am encouraged to see that some of the conservatives in his administration do recognize this as a dangerous problem for the country, and they are doing what they can to frustrate Trump's bad impulses.

I was also encouraged to see the author of this essay paying tribute to John McCain, as I did in my last post.  "Mr. Trump may fear such honorable men, but we should revere them."

How Leo Strauss Predicted the Nietzschean Nihilism of Trump's Intellectuals

                                                                          Leo Strauss

Francis Fukuyama has published an essay for Persuasion on "A Chilling Prediction by Leo Strauss."  He reproduces an excerpt from a lecture on "German Nihilism" that Strauss gave in 1941 at the New School for Social Research.  In his prefatory remarks, Fukuyama says that we should find this text "chilling" because Strauss's intellectual analysis of the young German nihilists supporting Hitler's Nazism describes perfectly the thinking of those far-right intellectuals who today are supporting Trump.

Just like the German nihilists described by Strauss, Fukuyama observes, American far-right thinkers today--like Adrian Vermeule, Patrick Deneen, Curtis Yarvin, and Costin Alamariu ("Bronze Age Pervert")--want to destroy liberalism because it is morally degrading in promoting the soft hedonism of the open society rather than the hard heroism of the closed society. 

This points to Strauss's primary claim in his lecture:  "German nihilism desires the destruction of modern civilization as far as modern civilization has a moral meaning." He explained: 

It is a moral protest.  That protest proceeds from the conviction that the internationalism inherent in modern civilization, or, more precisely, that the establishment of a perfectly open society which is as it were the goal of modern civilization, and therefore all aspirations directed toward that goal, are irreconcilable with the basic demands of moral life.  That protest proceeds from the conviction that the root of all moral life is essentially and therefore eternally the closed society; from the conviction that the open society is bound to be, if not immoral, at least amoral: the meeting ground of seekers of pleasure, of gain, of irresponsible power, indeed of any kind of irresponsibility and lack of seriousness.

Strauss saw that the intellectual godfather of this German nihilism is Friedrich Nietzsche--the Nietzsche who scorned the ignoble pleasure-seeking life of the "Last Man" based on the slave morality dictated by the Christian principle of the equal dignity of all human beings, which denied the master morality of the few noble masters fit to rule over the multitude of inferior human beings.  In foreseeing the future emergence of a new nobility of those few superhuman higher men entitled to enslave the many subhuman lower men, Nietzsche has had a seductive appeal to those young nihilists who imagine themselves becoming the masters at the top of the natural order of rank in a new hierarchical closed society at war with its liberal enemies.

As Strauss indicated, what made this intellectual attitude "nihilistic" was that while it was clear about what it denied--liberalism--it was not clear about what it affirmed because its preferred alternative to liberalism was vague.  Since its No was more emphatic than its Yes, it was nihilistic in its passion for destruction--for Nothing--without offering any vision of what exactly would replace liberalism.

Similarly, Fukuyama suggests, today's "post-liberals" have no coherent conception of what should replace liberalism.  On the one hand, Deneen and Vermeule seem to want something like Catholic integralism--a Catholic theocracy enforcing a religious morality.  On the other hand, Yarvin and Alamariu are atheists who want to return to some kind of pagan hierarchy enforced by a strong, even tyrannical, government.  All that the two sides have in common is their hatred of liberalism.

This hatred of liberalism is also what moved the German nihilists to support Nazism.  And, as Fukuyama indicates, Strauss seemed to clearly reject Nazism in his 1941 lecture when he identified it as the "lowest, most provincial, most unenlightened and most dishonorable form" of German nihilism.  But still, Strauss argued, liberals needed to understand the nihilistic roots of illiberal politics in order to see the power of the Nietzschean nihilistic critique of liberalism.  Fukuyama thinks the same is true today in America: liberals need to understand why the American far-right intellectuals hate liberalism and why that hatred of liberalism as rooted in Nietzschean nihilism has such an appeal for many people today--particularly, the young men supporting Trump.  

Actually, Fukuyama does not explicitly mention Trump in his remarks, but the implicit reference to Trump is clear.  It should be noted, however, that while Fukuyama explains the far-right intellectuals supporting Trump as illiberal nihilists, he has explained Trump himself as motivated not by any ideology but by what Nietzsche called ressentiment--"acute resentment of others based on wounded pride, perceived disregard, fears of inadequacy, and a desire to exact revenge on those who had earlier failed to pay adequate respect."  I have explained this resentment as an expression of Trump's chimpanzee grandiose narcissism.  Moreover, Fukuyama has suggested, the core of the MAGA movement is mostly moved not by any ideology--like the illiberal nihilism of the far-right intellectuals--but by the shared resentment of people who think they have not been respected by those who belong to the elites and look down on them with disdain.  This explains why Trump's staunchest supporters will remain loyal to him even when they suffer economically from his policies--such as high tariffs that will harm many of Trump's voters.

I agree with everything Fukuyama says here.  By the way, I also agree with Fukuyama's defense of liberalism as first announced in his 1989 "End of History?" article.  

But I do think Fukuyama misses three crucial flaws in Strauss's reasoning that should come out of a careful reading of his "German Nihilism" lecture that are pertinent to our understanding of, and our response to, both German and American nihilism.  

First, Fukuyama does not notice Strauss's quiet endorsement of the "young nihilists" that Will Altman and others have identified as evidence that Strauss was attracted to the nihilism of the Nazis.  

Second, Fukuyama also does not notice that in naming Nietzsche as the godfather of illiberal nihilism, Strauss failed to recognize Nietzsche's support for liberalism in the writings of his middle period (particularly, Human, All Too Human).  

Third, Strauss had also failed to see how philosophic proponents of liberalism like John Locke and Adam Smith had shown that liberalism cultivates the moral and intellectual virtues, which refutes the charge of the illiberal nihilists that liberalism must be ignoble and degrading.

Since I have previously elaborated each of these points, I will only briefly summarize them here with links to previous posts and references to the 4th edition of Political Questions (PQ4).

STRAUSS'S NAZISM?

Fukuyama's excerpt from "German Nihilism" does not include this passage:

I have tried to circumscribe the intellectual and moral situation in which a nihilism emerged which was not in all cases base in its origin.  Moreover, I take it for granted that not everything to which the young nihilists objected was unobjectionable, and that not every writer or speaker whom they despised, was respectable. . . . Let us then not hesitate to look for one moment at the phenomenon which I called nihilism, from the point of view of the nihilists. . . . A new reality is in the making; it is transforming the whole world; in the meantime there is: nothing, but--a fertile nothing.

Notice that in taking "the point of view of the nihilists," Strauss actually goes a long way towards endorsing their position: some (most?) of that to which the nihilists objected really was objectionable, and some (most?) of the writers and speakers whom they despised really were despicable.  This is one piece of evidence cited by Will Altman for his provocative claim that Strauss supported Nazi nihilism in its attack on liberalism (PQ4, 491-99).

In "German Nihilism," Strauss took "the point of view of the nihilists" in explaining their argument that an illiberal "closed society" was ennobling, while a liberal "open society" was degrading.  Any reader of Strauss will know that he often embraced this idea that every healthy society--and particularly, the premodern societies like Athens and Sparta--was a closed society as opposed to the modern open societies of liberalism that inevitably became corrupt.  Actually, as I have argued, Athens was a much more open and liberal society than Strauss was willing to admit--that's why the philosophical schools of Plato and Aristotle could flourish in Athens but not in Sparta.

Strauss did not allow "German Nihilism" to be published while he was alive.  It was not published until 1999 (in Interpretation), which was 26 years after his death in 1973.  Was this because he feared that it was too open in suggesting his sympathy for German nihilism?

Similarly, Strauss's praise of Martin Heidegger in "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism" was not published until 1989 (in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism), 16 years after his death.  Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933.  He offered vigorous philosophic defenses of Hitler and the Nazi Party.  And he never apologized for his support of the Nazis--right up to his death in 1976.

Strauss had been a student of Heidegger, and he praised Heidegger as the greatest thinker of the twentieth century.  In "Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism," he left his reader doubting whether there was any good refutation of Heidegger's Nazi attack on liberalism:

All rational liberal philosophic positions have lost their significance and power.  One may deplore this, but I for one cannot bring myself to clinging to philosophic positions which have been shown to be inadequate.  I am afraid that we shall have to make a very great effort in order to find a solid basis for rational liberalism.  Only a great thinker could help us in our intellectual plight.  But here is the great trouble: the only great thinker in our time is Heidegger.

Notice how emphatic Strauss is in using the word "I" here.  He once explained that one form of esoteric writing was to use the word "we" to seemingly endorse a common opinion, rather than saying "I," which suggested that one was truly endorsing that opinion. 

This is part of the evidence supporting Altman's argument that Strauss saw himself as the culmination of the "Third Wave of Modernity" that overthrew liberalism--first Nietzsche, then Heidegger, and finally Strauss.

Although I am not fully persuaded by Altman, I am persuaded that he has proven that Strauss often implied some endorsement of the Nazi attack on liberalism, and he never publicly and emphatically rejected Nazi nihilism and affirmed liberalism--as did some of his friends like Hans Jonas.  That was a moral and intellectual failure on the part of Strauss. 

NIETZSCHE'S DARWINIAN LIBERALISM

Another of Strauss's failures was in saying that Nietzsche initiated the Third Wave of Modernity that would lead to the illiberal nihilism of Nazism.  Although this might be true for the early and late writings of Nietzsche that were so often praised by the Nazis, it is not true for the writings of the middle period, and particularly Human, All Too Human.

In this book, Nietzsche defended a Darwinian liberalism that rejected many of the main ideas of his later writing--such as the celebration of the Ubermensch (the Superman or Overman), which became a theme for the Nazis.  

One can make a good case (as Bruce Detwiler does) for "Dionysian aristocratic radicalism" as the political teaching of Nietzsche in his early and late writings.  But one also needs to recognize that Nietzsche's endorsement of liberal democracy rooted in Darwinian evolution in the writings of his middle period contradicts what he says in his other writings.  Then, if one compares those two teachings, one can make a good argument that Nietzsche's Darwinian aristocratic liberalism is morally and intellectually superior to his Dionysian aristocratic radicalism (PQ4, 457-60).  This is Nietzsche's defense of liberalism against the attack of the German nihilists.

Strauss failed to see this.

LOCKE AND SMITH ON LIBERAL VIRTUES

Strauss also failed to see how Locke and Smith had made powerful arguments for liberalism's moral and intellectual virtues.  One of Strauss's most influential pieces of writing--particularly among the far-right intellectual critics of liberalism--is his interpretation of Locke in Natural Right and History, which presents Lockean liberalism as promoting a vulgar and soul-deadening soft hedonism, which Strauss famously called "a joyless quest for joy."  This is the Locke that "post-liberals" like Patrick Deneen have scorned.

But as I have argued, this ignores much of what Locke wrote about how a free society secures the liberty that allows for the cultivation of moral and intellectual excellence--including the freedom to live the philosophic life (for people like Strauss!) (PQ4, 489-91).  So, while critics of liberalism like Deneen insist that Lockean liberalism teaches "pursuit of immediate gratification" and the "absence of restraints upon one's desires," he says nothing about how Locke contradicts this claim in Some Thoughts Concerning Education.  In that book, Locke stresses the importance of parents educating their children so that they have a sense of shame in caring about their good reputation (secs. 56, 61, 78).  Locke says that "the great principle and foundation of all virtue and worth is placed in this, that a man is able to deny himself his own desires, cross his own inclinations, and purely follow what reason directs as best though the appetite lean the other way" (sec. 33). "It seems plain to me that the principle of all virtue and excellency lies in a power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own desires where reason does not authorize them" (sec. 38). Children must be taught that "covetousness and the desire of having in our possession and under our dominion more than we have need of" is "the root of all evil" (sec. 110). 

Above all, Locke insists, children must be taught and habituated to show "civility"--respect and good will to all people (secs. 66-67, 70, 109, 117, 143-44). Here Locke's emphasis on the need for "civility" is part of what Norbert Elias identified as the "civilizing process" promoted by early modern liberalism to overcome the incivility, violence, and corrupt manners of medieval pre-modern Europe.  Deneen and Strauss are silent about all of this.

They are also silent about Smith's argument about how a liberal society--"allowing every man to pursue his own interest his own way, upon the liberal plan of equality, liberty, and justice"--promotes the moral and intellectual virtues.  Strauss said almost nothing about Smith, but Strauss's thinking about liberal political philosophy shaped the interpretation of Smith developed by Joseph Cropsey, Strauss's student and colleague.  Cropsey claimed that in Smith's "commercial society," commerce takes the place of virtue.  But as I have indicated, Cropsey ignored or played down everything Smith said--particularly, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments--about how the moral and intellectual virtues are cultivated in a free society (PQ4, 340-48).

Moreover, Cropsey was completely silent about how Charles Darwin saw that Smith's moral philosophy was confirmed by his scientific theory of moral evolution, and how this has been deepened by the evolutionary studies of morality over the 150 years since Darwin's Descent of Man (PQ4, 316-28).

Strauss and the Straussians have failed to see how a careful reading of Nietzsche, Locke, and Smith can reveal the nobility of liberalism in securing the liberty that makes virtue possible, thus refuting the moral critique of liberalism by the illiberal nihilists, including those today who try to provide the intellectual justification for Trump's illiberalism.

Can Trump Use His Military Forces to Murder Americans with Impunity?

As I have indicated in my recent posts, one of the primary charges against Charles I at his trial was that he was guilty of murdering his own people in the Civil War that he started, and since murder was a capital crime, he could be rightly executed.  "Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed" (Gen. 9:6) is both a law of God and a law of nature.  And like any law of nature, it is an impartial rule: anyone who commits murder shall be punished, which includes the king.  The impartiality of law must therefore deny the maxim of the English common law that "the king can do no wrong," so that the king is above the law.

If President Trump begins murdering Americans, will he be able to claim, as Charles I did, that he is immune to criminal prosecution for murder?  He could use military forces or paramilitary forces (like ICE officers) to do this.

On January 23, 2016, in a campaign speech at Dordt College in Iowa, Trump bragged about the loyalty of his voters, and he explained: "I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, ok?  It's like incredible."  Of course, Trump's defenders have said that he was just joking.  But in 2019, Trump's lawyers argued in a federal court that since Trump had total immunity from criminal prosecution for anything he did while President, this would include murder.

Now, until recently, it was generally understood that the presidency as established by the Constitution does not have the immunity from criminal prosecution that had been claimed by the British king.  In Federalist Number 69, Alexander Hamilton explained how the President is "liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law," and how this distinguishes the President from the King of Great Britain, who is "sacred and inviolable" and thus above the law in not being subject to legal punishment.

In the North Carolina Ratifying Convention, James Iredell compared the British King and the American President.  The King "has great powers and prerogatives; and it is a constitutional maxim, that he can do no wrong."  By contrast, the President can be punished for his bad behavior.  He can be impeached.  And "if he commits any crime, his is punishable by the laws of his country, and in capital cases may be deprived of his life."  So the President could be tried for the capital crime of murder and executed if convicted.  As far as I know, no one in any of the ratification conventions disagreed with Iredell about this.

But last year, in the case of Trump v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the original meaning of the Constitution and effectively amended the Constitution (in a 6 to 3 decision) to declare that the President has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his "core constitutional powers"--that is, powers that belong exclusively to the President.

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sotomayor warned: "in every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law."  She explained:

The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President. . . . The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world.  When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority's reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution.  Orders the Navy's Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival?  Immune.  Organizes a military coup to hold onto power?  Immune.  Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon?  Immune.  Immune, immune, immune.

Although Chief Justice Roberts ridiculed Sotomayor for "fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals," we now see Trump setting into motion the very criminal actions--perhaps including murder--that Sotomayor warned about.

Recently, The New Republic has published a secret memo from the Department of Homeland Security about a secret meeting between Philip Hegseth (brother of Pete Hegseth), Liaison Officer to Department of Defense, and all the senior people at the DoD.  A few weeks ago, Trump ordered National Guardsmen and a contingent of Marines to deploy in Los Angeles to help ICE officers facing resistance from people protesting the kidnapping of people identified as illegal immigrants.  Now, at this meeting, the participants talked about orders from Trump that "our joint work in L.A." should be expanded across the country "for years to come." According to one part of the memo, "SECDEF Hegseth wants this meeting to be a message to the uniform side of DoD emphasizing the urgency of the homeland mission."

Notice what this means: the military forces of the United States ("the uniform side of DoD") will be deployed for the "homeland mission" of targeting those Americans who resist the enforcement of Trump's domestic policies.  Can't we expect that this will mean military attacks on Americans peacefully protesting Trump's policies, which will include killing some of those Americans?

Presumably, under the majority's decision in Trump v. U.S., Trump ordering his soldiers to kill Americans will come under the President's "absolute immunity" because his power as Commander in Chief belongs to his "core powers."

Is this "fear mongering on the basis of extreme hypotheticals"?  Or is this fear justified by what we know about Trump's grandiose narcissism, his belief that he is God's Chosen One to save America from it's enemies, and the belief of Trump's intellectuals like Curtis Yarvin that something like the absolute monarchy of the Stuart kings would be best for America?