It’s hard not to circle back to the circus that is Donald Trump.
Trump’s pull is not the pull that Richard Nixon exerted on his critics and enemies. Nixon was psychologically complicated, visibly tortured by resentments but also desperately seeking respect, frustrated by the easy ways of the privileged and fearful of being seen as vulgar, aware that his adversaries were often unprincipled and allowing that to license him to outdo them tenfold.
It’s not the pull that George W. Bush exerted either, which was really mostly about trying to discern what the ministers behind the boy-king’s throne were really up to.
Trump in the end doesn’t pose a great mystery in terms of his character. He is exactly what he seems to be from the deepest of his depths to the most visible of his surfaces: a helplessly pathological liar drawn to cruelty the way a moth is drawn to flame, a toddler’s id almost completely unconstrained by adult responsibility or caution, an instinctive coward who takes extraordinary risks simply because he’s incapable of delaying gratification, a disordered mind who soaks up whatever informational sewage washes through him albeit usually changing it so that it flatters him in some fashion or another.
The mystery of Trump is really not about him, it’s about why people continue to work for him and with him. Bush was no mystery at all: he had the same attraction to Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rove and others that Louis XIII had for Cardinal Richelieu. It made perfect sense for them to want to work with Bush because they could comfortably work through him. But Trump doesn’t offer that to anyone. No one is getting their agenda accomplished through Trump unless their agenda is Trump. Which means not “Trump will do a certain policy”, but Trump will have a certain effect (whether President or not): he will destroy systems, practices, understandings the way that Godzilla destroys a city, the way that Al Czervik and Carl Spackler destroy Judge Smails’ golf club. It’s supervillain logic: you let the monster loose out of revenge, for the pleasure of watching everything burn, or maybe at the outer edge of some form of desperate calculation in the belief that you will be able to step into the burning ruins as the savior when the monster’s gone. (In the comic books, that usually goes awry in that the supervillain is often the first to be trampled by the random gyrations of his monster.)
And yet almost no one who has signed on with Trump seems to grasp any of this. Before his presidency, men signed up to work for him, whether they were carpenters hired for work on his hotels or executives and lawyers hired to work with his businesses. It never seemed to matter that Trump’s reputation for stiffing people and paying pennies on the dollar or using his own people as sacrificial victims was well-known. People always thought they’d be the exception.
The usual crowd in Washington might be forgiven not knowing all of this, perhaps, for being naive and thinking that they had another George W. Bush pinata on their hands who could be whacked with a bat to produce policy goodies and to satisfy a personal agenda. That is, assuming they didn’t watch the Republican primary debates in 2015 and 2016, where Trump emasculated his rivals with an instinctive verve. Dogs may not be able to smell fear, but Trump could smell out the weakness of men who were playing at being strong, that none of them would have the courage to pay back his cruelties and inanities with interest. In his own presidency, he didn’t even have to do anything that incisive: he just had to please himself with every momentary impulse and plow right over anyone who was trying to actually do something or govern in any meaningful way.
But after 2020? Who in their right mind would sign on to actually work for him? Even the supervillains who just want to gloat as the city burns in the wake of the monster can do it from afar: no need to try and winch a saddle around Godzilla’s tail and ride along. That just ends up getting you smashed into buildings and shot up by the fighter jets. You save that for the henchmen. Perhaps that’s the issue: too many people think they’re the masterful supervillain, when all they are is a disposable henchman.
I’ve written about this thought before and I just can’t shake it. Why would you agree to be Donald Trump’s lawyer? You’re not going to get the money you’re owed, you’re likely going to end up a criminal accomplice (knowingly or unknowingly) and you may well end up losing your ability to practice law. Why would you manage his property, take care of his finances, advise his campaign? He doesn’t even need you to do any of that shit, really. His campaign doesn’t need management beyond “get me on the ballot”. His finances are half-hallucinatory anyway: being his accountant must be kind of like being the person who has to clean the litter box for Schrodinger’s cat, it’s empty for weeks and then unexpectedly full of radioactive shit one day. He’s got Uday and Qusay to manage properties and all that if he really needs it.
I suppose I could see someone who was really really desperate. I once met a young lawyer in Philly who was just representing people in small civil suits for penny-ante fees (and losing a fair amount of the time) and who was one of the stupider people I’ve ever encountered. I could see him thinking that representing Donald Trump would be a slight step up from his existing gig. That guy would have some stories to tell later, in any event, albeit some of them to the FBI. Maybe some of Trump’s current henchpeople are similarly such eighth-raters that they think “anything’s better than what I was doing before.”
As with so many things in the modern Republican party, you can see that what they claim to fear in their adversaries—sexual violation, corruption, violations of civil liberties, violence and disorder—is a tip-off to their own shame or their own ambitions. But the reverse is also true: what they claim to uphold for themselves is always a tally of what they fail to do, a confession of ongoing breaches. The chest-thumping would-be tough guys turn out to be so weak that they let a snivelling, whiny coward run all over them (and they’re doing it again this primary season). The men who talk about restoring honorable manhood to American society roll in the reek of impulsive dishonor without a second thought. And people who celebrate loyalty through thick and thin stand dumbfounded when the capo not only sells them out, but does so capriciously, for shits and giggles, not even just to save his own hide or accomplish some purpose. Before 2016, both Republican and Democratic leaders sometimes sold their own people out or broke faith with loyal supporters, but they generally remained loyal and discreet to those people, and had that returned in kind. Trump hacked all that off with an ax a long time ago, but the phantom limbs somehow keep on twitching nonetheless.
When the will-to-power is so strong that it demands pervasive weakness, it has gone way past being the tree bending in the wind in order to avoid breaking; it becomes a tree that cuts itself to spare the forester the effort of revving up the chainsaw. The monster hardly needs to clumsily rampage through the city now: people blow themselves up obligingly before he gets there, or failing that, compliantly walk into the shadow of his descending foot and wait to be crushed.
I tentatively suggest that Trump has some weird and fortunately rare people skills that normal people can't understand. That's just a short version of your question, though.