The Remarkable Uniqueness of Donald Trump

Historically speaking, he’s even a bigger deal than you may think.

April 19, 2024 by Bruce Bawer, FPM

On June 16, it will be nine years to the day since Donald Trump rode down that golden escalator in the Manhattan tower bearing his name and announced his candidacy for president of the United States. During those nine years, his name and image have dominated not just American political discourse but the entirety of American culture, and even world culture,  in a way that may well be without precedent in the entire history of the Republic. Yes, the name and image of Franklin D. Roosevelt loomed over the country during his twelve years in office, just as the name and image of Abraham Lincoln were ubiquitous during his four-year presidency. But FDR’s centrality was wrapped up in the Great Depression and, then, World War II, and to think of Lincoln is to think, first and last, about the Civil War. By contrast, Trump’s predominance is in one sense just about Trump himself – Trump as symbol – and in another sense about something even larger than the colossal historical events associated with FDR and Honest Abe.

Trump didn’t become iconic by presiding over an economic crisis or prosecuting a major war; he became iconic by doing something that no president before him had ever done: he took on the establishments of both major political parties, told some harsh truths about the ways in which those establishments had betrayed the American people and their Constitution, and rooted his presidential campaigns, and his entire term in office, in a determination to restore to the people the kind of government that the Founders had intended. In doing so, he also became an emblematic figure for people around the world whose own governments were betraying the freedoms on which they had been founded.

What about Reagan? Yes, he too was a revolutionary hero: in the wake of the appalling Jimmy Carter, that master of malaise, the Gipper spoke of morning in America, speechified ardently about the evils of Communism, and championed with gusto the cause of freedom around the world. Still, it must be admitted that during his two terms he did precious little to drain the Swamp. He didn’t even go so far as to abolish the perfidious Department of Education, which Carter had just created in 1979, and which Reagan had inveighed against passionately. Perhaps Reagan sensed that if he’d tried to do any more than he did to try to challenge the Deep State, he’d have ended up as Trump did several decades later, with the whole D.C. apparatus out to destroy him, bankrupt him, and put him behind bars. Besides, Reagan had his hands full bringing down the Soviet Union. So I’m not here to diminish Reagan. He was a giant. But even at the height of his popularity he didn’t take up as much space in the minds of people around the world as Trump has done during the last nine years. In his heyday, Reagan shared the international stage with Thatcher and Gorbachev, as FDR did with Churchill and Stalin; Trump shares the world stage with no one. As for most of the other modern presidents – Ford, Carter, Bush Sr. – they were, by comparison to Trump, utter pygmies. The point is that the Trump ascendancy is, in modern times, unique. To find a rough counterpart to his utter domination of the society and culture, you have to look to the great dictators, from antiquity right up to the twentieth century – Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Mao. The big difference, of course, is that Trump, whatever his detractors may say, is the furthest thing from a dictator: he’s a liberator. Besides, dictators have no sense of humor about themselves; and their admirers, unlike Trump’s fans, don’t feel safe making affectionate jokes about them.

In his Farewell Address, President Eisenhower – who had led the Allies to victory in Europe during World War II, ushering in an era when the U.S. was by far the most powerful nation in all of human history – famously warned us of the dangers of that power. “Throughout America’s adventure in free government,” he said, “our basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among people and among nations.” In the postwar era, the U.S. enjoyed an unprecedented opportunity to achieve these goals. Yet it was unwise, he counseled, in the name of finding government-funded cures for every ill, to allow “the public economy” to fall out of balance with the private. In particular, while it was vital to maintain a strong military, it was potentially worrying that Cold War circumstances had compelled the establishment of “a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions” and necessitated annual military expenditures that exceeded “the net income of all United State corporations.” This new state of affairs, observed Eisenhower, posed the threat of “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” – in short, “the disastrous rise of misplaced power” that could ultimately “endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” America’s involvement in World War II, a brilliantly prosecuted conflict with a crystal-clear motive and goal and two exceedingly powerful enemies that had conquered and subjugated much of the earth’s surface, lasted only four years; what would Eisenhower have made of our eight confused, pointless, and ultimately futile years in iraq and twenty years in Afghanistan – the latter of which ended with billions of dollars worth of military equipment being left in the hands of the enemy?

A warrior by profession, trained in the art of deploying military power, Eisenhower the president was more concerned with placing limits on the menace posed by unrestricted power to individual freedom. What, then, would he have made of the Patriot Act, which was ratified after 9/11 in the name of protecting Americans from foreign enemies but which, as was obvious from the start, had the potential of impinging on Americans’ own freedoms? What, for that matter, would Eisenhower have made of the formation of the Homeland Security Department, the very name of which, at the time, sounded outrageously un-American? Then there’s this. While Ike’s warning about the military-industrial is well known, less familiar is the fact that, in the same speech, he warned about the downside of the scientific and technological revolution – namely, “the danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” How aghast would he have been at every aspect of the COVID lockdown – from the severe rules about masks and distancing to the draconian limitations on freedom of movement and assembly? What would he have made of the pathetic readiness of so many millions of Americans to knuckle under to these unconstitutional mandates and to shun relatives, friends, coworkers, and neighbors who, asserting their fundamental rights as Americans, admirably refused to do so?

One thing Eisenhower didn’t mention in his Farewell Address was America’s intelligence services. The Central Intelligence Agency, founded in 1947, grew out of the wartime Office of Strategic Services. The National Security Agency came along in 1952, the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1961. Not all that long ago, many of us were watching the TV series Homeland (2011-20) and cheering on the exploits of CIA agents Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), because we thought of the real-life counterparts of these characters as working for us. Of course, all of these intelligence agencies were Cold War creations, purportedly necessitated by what was quite genuinely an existential face-off with the Soviet Union; and for most of us who lived during the Cold War, almost anything that the CIA did to keep us one step ahead of the Soviets and to prevent the expansion of Communism was worth it. Yes, we used to read about the CIA’s suspected role in certain revolutions and assassinations, and we may have felt twinges of confusion or discomfort about some of these actions; but whatever CIA agents did, we told ourselves that they understood these matters better than we did and that their long-term motives were admirable – that, in other words, they were fighting for our freedom in the struggle for global dominance against Soviet totalitarianism.

After the Cold War ended, new antagonists emerged. But what had been – or had, at least, seemed – a relatively clear big picture became a muddle. Why was our government spending blood and treasure to fight Islamic enemies in the Middle East even as unpleasant but strategically relevant facts about Islam were being systematically scrubbed from military and intelligence training manuals, insufficiently vetted Muslim immigrants were being welcomed to America in huge numbers, and politicians of both parties (with the unwavering aid of the legacy media) were constantly reassuring us that Islam was a religion of peace?

Meanwhile, what had once been the Steel Belt – a region of cities that, thanks to their booming manufacturing sectors, had previously been populated by some of the most affluent factory workers on the planet – was gradually being transformed into the Rust Belt, as jobs were exported en masse to China, Mexico, and elsewhere. Politically, these blue-collar workers were left high and dry. The Democrats (once the party of labor, or at least of labor unions) were now more interested in cultivating certain minority groups who were officially considered to be oppressed. As the party moved from traditional liberalism to something that bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Communism, it also increasingly became the political home of corporate bigwigs and other high-income types who’d been brainwashed at elite colleges by far-left professors. As for the members of the Republican establishment, the large-scale betrayal of decent, hard-working middle Americans mattered less to them than the lower prices of goods that were now being produced by underpaid drudges in China and Mexico. Meanwhile, both parties were perfectly happy with mass illegal immigration – the Democrats because they wanted the votes, the Republicans because this phenomenon meant the suppression of wages for low-skilled jobs.

For blue-collar voters who’d been financially ruined by the drastic decline of American manufacturing, Trump was a godsend – a politician who, unlike the entire Washington establishment, was actually on their side. And for those of us who hadn’t really been paying much attention to the plight of those blue-collar voters, Trump was an eye-opener. Among other things, he made some of us recognize for the first time the extent to which, in practice, the two parties were, to a remarkable extent, one. I remember not so many years ago seeing a photograph of George W. Bush in a cozy moment with Hillary Clinton. I can’t stand either of them, but I have to admit, to my great embarrassment, that my reaction to the picture at the time was to admire the ability of political opponents to treat each other not just with respect but with what looked like genuine affection. Today, needless to say, I see that picture in an entirely different light. It’s a picture of two people who were and are part of the same exclusive club, who have profited (and whose families have profited) from the same system, and who, while supporting different candidates in elections, were content with the results so long as the winners were reliable insiders who had no intention of trying to change the game.

It was, as I say, Trump who opened the eyes of millions of us to this sordid, cynical reality. Some of us may have been at least somewhat aware of the extent to which America’s government was in the hands of a permanent Deep State, and some of us may even have recognized just how much of a betrayal this was of the Constitution and of the people. But Trump, with his passionate denunciations of the Swamp, focused our attention on this outrage. He forced us to realize that for a long time it hadn’t really mattered all that much whom we voted into national office, given that a significant amount of the real power in Washington was actually in the hands of the executive departments, the intelligence community, and agencies like the IRS. This was why the issues that really mattered to American voters – such as mass immigration and the mass export of blue-collar jobs – had consistently been ignored by both parties and unmentioned in campaign speeches.

But it wasn’t just Trump who opened our eyes. So did his enemies. The desperate effort by Obama, the Clintons, and their cronies to tie him to Russia – a charge that was ridiculous on the face of it, but that was pushed by the media without surcease – only served, in the end, to show just how much of a threat to their power they recognized him to be. Ditto the unprecedented attacks on Trump, even while he was in office, by military and intelligence officials who were technically under his command. The two baseless impeachments of Trump, the raid on Mar-a-Lago, the blizzard of ridiculous prosecutions directed at him, and the attempt by New York’s attorney general to seize his properties all underscored both the political establishment’s desperation to remove him from the chessboard and the nakedly undemocratic lengths to which public officials all over the country and at every level are willing to go in order to preserve the Deep State in its current form. And there are many more developments, of course, that have demonstrated the fierceness of Trump’s enemies’ determination to crush him and everything he represents – among them the long-term detention of January 6 protesters, the over-the-top raids on the homes of Trump allies like Roger Stone, and the angry, disturbing speech that Biden gave in September 2022 against that blood-red background. All of these events showed just how much contempt the Democratic elites have for the white working-class Americans who dare to recognize in Donald Trump a champion of the people and of America’s founding values. And nothing reflected that contempt more  powerfully than a single word uttered by Hillary Clinton in 2016: “deplorables.”

Trump and his movement, say his enemies, represent a “threat to our democracy.” The fact is that Trump is the symbol of everything that stands in the way of the efforts by the legacy media and social-media giants (X excepted), as well as by the United Nations, European Union, World Economic Forum, and other international organizations,  to undermine democracy – by, among other things, silencing dissent from the progressive agenda and plotting to remove beef from our diets, deny us air travel, and confine us to “fifteen-minute cities.” In short, the very people who label Trump a “threat to our democracy” are the ones who are intent on dismantling democracy – not just in America but throughout what we used to call the free world. Take Justin Trudeau’s freezing of the bank accounts of truckers who protested the COVID lockdowns. Note how British police give free rein to protestors who call for Jewish genocide but arrest patriots who dare to wave the Union Jack. And witness what happened just the other day in Brussels, where local authorities sent a battalion of police to close down a gathering of top-flight conservative leaders from around Europe, including Nigel Farage, Éric Zemmour, and Viktor Orbán.

For many of us, the chilling abuses of power by left-wingers who are determined to bury the MAGA movement and its international counterparts haven’t just led us to worry about the present and future of American freedom. They’ve caused us to wonder just how free we’ve really been during the last half-century or so. It was in 1961 that Eisenhower gave his Farewell Address. He was succeeded by John F. Kennedy, who among other things wanted to shutter the CIA, which he recognized as having gotten out of control. He was assassinated in 1963. The Warren Commission, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the killer of JFK and had acted alone, was the ultimate Deep State entity, consisting of the Chief Justice, the head of the CIA, the former head of the World Bank, two Congressmen, and two veteran Senators. Over the years, Roger Stone and other investigators have not only shown the Warren Commission’s conclusions to be utterly at odds with mountains of evidence but have also provided a great deal of information in support of the hypothesis that the murder was, in fact, the ultimate Deep State crime, involving LBJ, the CIA, and the FBI.

There are those who, reading backwards from the current treatment of Trump by his powerful enemies, now say that the JFK assassination was the moment when the free Republic that Eisenhower spoke of with such reverence and concern in his Farewell Address underwent a dramatic behind-the-scenes transformation. Stone and others have pointed out that our involvement in the Vietnam War, however legitimately motivated by a desire to contain Communism in southeast Asia, also was of great personal profit to LBJ, who stepped up our war effort almost immediately after entering the Oval Office. Deeply troubling questions have even been raised about the 1981 assassination attempt on President Reagan, which may, after all, have had less to do with Jodie Foster than the news reports would have it.

Yes, splashy books presenting revisionist theories about the JFK assassination and other historical crises of the last half a century are nothing new. But not until Trump came along and pulled back the curtain on the extent of Deep State shenanigans in our own time did it become much easier to believe in the hypotheses put forward in those books. Yes, we’ve always known that American history, like all of human history, has been full of corruption: the 1919 World Series was fixed; any number of elections, including, famously, the one that first sent LBJ to Congress, were rigged; everybody knows that JFK won in 1960 because the Mob took care of Illinois and LBJ took care of Texas. But although most of us maintained a healthy American cynicism about professional politicians and big government, we still basically trusted the system and believed that our votes (usually) counted. No, the U.S. government was scarcely perfect. But what human institution is? America’s founding documents were based on an unblinkered recognition of the depth of human moral frailty. Not only, moreover, could we hardly expect contemporary politicians to measure up to Adams and Jefferson; the fact was that even Adams and Jefferson were not without blemish: the former had signed the Alien and Sedition Act, and the latter’s purchase of Louisiana had no constitutional warrant.) But it was the advent of Trump, and the extraordinary scale of the campaign to take him down, that made many of us realize the degree to which our leaders in Washington had rejected the dictates of the Constitution.

Some observers gripe that we all think and talk too much about Trump – that we make more of him than he is or deserves, that our preoccupation with him serves to obscure the importance of other figures on the political scene and reflects a severe lack of a sense of historical proportion. On the contrary, I don’t think that most of us, however much we may love (or hate) him, fully appreciate the extraordinary scale of the revolution he has wrought. Other figures on the political scene? What political scene? Trump transformed the political scene, and there’s no going back. It’s beyond strange these days to try to read most of the veteran inside-the-Beltway commentators, both Democrat and Republican, because they genuinely seem to believe – or to hope against hope – that somehow the clock can be turned back, the genie put back in the box, and pre-Trump politics as usual restored.

Such thoughts are nothing short of delusional. Tens of millions of decent, patriotic Americans are not magically going to unlearn what they’ve learned in the last nine years. They’re not going to forget the vile lies, poisonous acts, and outright treason of Obama, the Clintons, Adam Schiff, Jerry Nadler, Rachel Maddow, John Brennan, Merrick Garland, Antony Blinken, Alejandro Mayoras, and a host of others. They’re not going to go back to believing in the good faith of the D.C. establishment any more than you and I are going to go back to believing in Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Because Trump did indeed effect nothing less than a revolution – a revolution of the American mind and heart and soul. He woke us up. He educated us, in a way that a teacher with a more sober and restrained classroom manner would never have been able to do. He showed us who our leaders really are and showed us who we, if we dare to take heart and take action, might be. He encouraged us – inspired us – to take our country back, all the while believing in its principles, its history, and (in spite of everything) its enduring promise.