Donald Trump Gave Us a Moment of History

Donald Trump is a man spiritually from the Gilded Age. From his taste in gold leaf and massive buildings, to his outrightly abrasive no-nonsense persona, to his interest in tariffs, to his domestic social liberalism and hedonism, to his Fortress America ideas pertaining to trade and immigration, he is a man from an earlier century. He is, in a strangely anachronistic way, reminiscent of the men who built the greatest industrial superpower in the cusp of the late nineteenth century.

The cognoscenti fail to understand his appeal to the masses for the simple reason: they don’t understand what an elite from an earlier era would have been like in our unmanly age of interconnectedness and internationalism. It is no coincidence that Great Man Theory was the most prevalent causal theory of history in the late 19th century—the quote “history is the biography of great men” etched in one of the Library of Congress windows—a theory that slowly lost its importance in the academy to the rise of amorphous, unaccountable structuralism, and to wars, and time. 

Blond wispy hair, an ear dripping red, a white shirt, and a navy blue jacket—Trump had better reflexes than most men of advanced age, and gave us a moment for history. He got up, and barked at the secret service with a hoary voice of a momentarily shaken man, “Let me get my shoes.” And then there was that instinct: “Wait, wait, wait,” he said, and then, despite the hapless servicemen around him trying to protect his head from the line of sight of a potential second sniper, he raised a fist and shouted three times, “Fight.” 

There was no Teddy Rooseveltian speech (“it takes more than that to kill a bull moose”). The forces and protocols of our time do not allow that. But the image was every bit Rooseveltian in every pixel showing every drop of Trump’s blood. 

True leaders are often products of circumstances. Fortitude does not reside in every leader of men. “The freaks of chance are not determinable by calculation,” as Thucydides wrote. Donald Trump, whatever fate bestows upon him in November, marked himself as a proverbial “great man of history” in the images that will live for posterity and will guide this country to whatever destiny is in front of it in the coming centuries. 

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