Trump & The Politics of Personality

Reflections on a debate that it's time to move beyond

Those of us of a certain age remember well the days when Bob Knight was the basketball coach at Indiana University. Knight constantly confronted the media. He said the things aloud that most coaches wanted to, but just kept under their hat. He was often crude. Some of the arguments and fights he picked were worthwhile. Others were just foolish or even self-indulgent.

The loud façade was polarizing and college basketball fans were divided between those of us that loved of him and those who thought he was the devil incarnate. Underneath the facade of what he said, Bob Knight did what a college basketball coach is supposed to do—he produced winning teams and he required that his players go to class, graduate and be good citizens.

Of course the media couldn’t stand him. And at some point in the early 2000s, I was listening to a talk show where a college basketball analyst who tended to be more sympathetic to Knight was talking about what it was like discussing the coach within the media. The commentator said that, contrary to what many of us might have thought, that it was okay to be in the media and like Bob Knight. But, the reporter continued, there was an unspoken obligation to follow up any words of support by saying this—I don’t agree with everything he does.

In that way, Donald Trump is the political version of Bob Knight.

We all know the downside of the Trump package. He can say things that are either inappropriate or downright embarrassing. He makes battles about himself rather than the issue at hand. The notion of staying above the fray often seems not to enter his mind. When he was president, whenever there was a run of favorable news—e.g., good economic developments—it was a sure bet that Trump would rain on his own parade by picking a useless fight on Twitter.

So, in this way, there can be a tendency for those us who have come to like Trump to feel obligated to follow any expressions of support with “I don’t agree with everything he does.”

But I’ve also come to feel the same way the pro-Knight college basketball journalist said he felt about the need to give this constant disclaimer. That there’s a lot of people whom I like where I don’t agree with everything they say or do. Why is Donald Trump so unique that this constant disclaimer or defensiveness is necessary?

This is particularly galling in Republican circles where no one who supported, and continues to support the figures who promoted the Iraq War (Liz Cheney, Mike Pence, etc.) ever feels the need to condition any kind words given to these candidates with a simple “But I don’t agree with everything they do.” Particularly when at least one of these things was the fact that they either deliberately lied or recklessly ran down a primrose path that cost this country trillions in dollars and even more in humanitarian loss.

Apparently, the need for constant disclaimers only applies to those who say inappropriate or embarrassing things, not those who do reckless or dishonest things.

Furthermore, this disclaimer comes off as sanctimonious. Sure, I don’t like everything Trump says or does. You know else does things I don’t like? Me. You. Everyone I know.

This doesn’t mean everyone is obligated to overlook the failings of political figures in making voting decisions on the grounds that none of us are perfect, but perhaps it might be done with a little more humility. A simple “Yeah, I don’t really like him”, will do. We don’t need the endless display of pearl-clutching and lamenting that such-and-such a person has failed to meet some exacting standard that we presumably do.

That brings us to a recent column by Rich Lowry. The editor of National Review, Lowry has long been a conservative commentator. His recent contribution explained how Florida governor Ron DeSantis is the template for a post-Trump Republican Party. Is it possible to agree with 90 percent of a column while still being completely rubbed the wrong way by it? That was my reaction to Lowry’s article.

I loved his central tenet—that DeSantis is a fighter who gives no quarter, and that a demand for this quality is going to be a longstanding feature of post-Trump Republican politics. I agreed with his comments that with DeSantis, fights on are on significant issues and don’t come off as personal vendettas. It all adds up to why I believe that, over time, a DeSantis presidency will hold the key to getting American politics where it ultimately needs to get.

But Lowry’s column also implies that the vast majority of Trump’s fights were merely an indulgence in narcissism. That’s simply not true. Donald Trump really was the subject of a witch hunt on the subject of Russia Collusion and taking to Twitter was his only avenue of public defense. The media in this country really is corrupt. Given their power, the use of social media to unload frequent attacks on this corporate apparatus and its prominent purveyors was not only justified, it was (and remains) necessary.

Lowry also called Trump’s focus on the 2020 election indefensible. My own view on that is well-documented here. At this point, in light of the formal reports and sworn affidavits that are on the books, any reporter who calls the claim of election fraud “indefensible” is either lazy or dishonest. But let’s leave that alone, because even without this snide little aside, Lowry’s column would still have rubbed me the wrong way.

The reason is this--If Lowry were simply writing a column explaining why he preferred Ron DeSantis as his ideal Republican candidate moving forward, I can agree. What I cannot agree on is this undertone of the column that implies some unique level of desperation to move on from Donald Trump.

It’s worth noting that Lowry could have favorably compared DeSantis to South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, who caved and vetoed a bill protecting women’s sports from transgender athletes in the face of corporate pressure. Lowry could have favorably compared DeSantis to Nikki Haley, who is an advocate of the kind of interventionist foreign policy that led to the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles. Lowry could have favorably compared DeSantis to Ted Cruz, who’s better at finding a TV camera to get in front of than he is at doing hard legislative work.

Those are the names that DeSantis is vying with for control of the post-Trump Republican Party. The fact Lowry instead ignored all of these figures and instead chose to set up a contrast with Trump—who is far more aligned with DeSantis on both policy and approach than any of these other figures--leads me to think there’s other motivations going on.

Those motives could be on policy—perhaps the Republican leadership class that Lowry writes for believes DeSantis will be easier to control than Trump was, particularly on issues of trade and military interventionism abroad. It’s a lot easier to pretend you’re worked up about someone’s mean tweets than to admit you’re really riled up about his stance on these issues—especially when his stance is supported by a majority of voters, both within the Republican Party and the broader electorate.

And it’s also possible that Lowry is indulging in the kind of sanctimonious pearl-clutching that’s become all too common among Republican politicians and donors. The type of pearl-clutching that leaves you more worried about the fact someone may have said something mean than the fact they actually did something disastrous.

So, to bring this all full circle—I’m done with giving disclaimers about how I don’t agree with everything Donald Trump says or does. It’s true that I don’t. There is quite literally no one that I agree with 100 percent of the time and no one who always advocates for their view in exactly the manner I want. If I praise any political figure, you can just assume that it merely means that I agree with them more often than not and I think they’re reasonably likely to fight for what they believe.

As far as those in Lowry’s wing of the Republican Party go—when you put at least as much into effort into figuring out why you led this country down a disastrous path in the Middle East as you do into lamenting Donald Trump’s failings, then I’ll hear you out. Not before. And using my man Ron DeSantis as cover isn’t going to fly.