When Donald Trump met privately with a group of CEOs in Washington earlier this month, he promised them mammoth tax cuts. That reckless pledge didn’t dominate the news coverage; in fact, it barely registered.
Instead there was dramatic reporting of the CEOs’ evaluations of Trump’s mental state during the meeting. Andrew Ross Sorkin relayed one summary on CNBC: “Remarkably meandering, could not keep a straight thought. Was all over the map.”
There’s a fundamental mistake embedded in that reaction. Trump is guilty of many things; lack of focus is not one of them.
Apply philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s typology of the fox (who knows many things) and the hedgehog (who knows only one big thing) and Trump falls, with a thump, on the hedgehog’s side of the line.
The one big thing Trump grasps is what could be called the “politics of appetite.” Trump wants more. He knows that tomorrow, and every day after that, he will still want more. More of what doesn’t really matter. And “want” means “need.” That is all the mental organization Trump requires.
His policies may be crazy, or contradictory, or both. Bizarre allies may be impulsively adopted, then shed, attacked, humiliated, and then adopted again. Speeches explaining all of this may degenerate into word salads featuring sharks and powerful batteries. The identified means to the end will indeed be “all over the map,” but the end itself never shifts.
In this vision, the “presidential immunity” that Trump sought in the Supreme Court is not important because it promotes the functioning of the presidency; the presidency itself is important only because holding it is what confers the presidential immunity. Satisfying today’s appetite while staying confident of satisfying tomorrow’s forms an entirely sufficient foundational principle — a North Star.
The decision the American electorate faces is not, as the CEOs apparently believe, whether 81-year-old Joe Biden or 78-year-old Donald Trump is the more senile grandpa. Trump presents a radically different alternative, one that evades conventional media practice.
But Trump’s mindset was perfectly captured by a scene near the end of Roman Polanski’s cinematic masterpiece, “Chinatown.” The detective Jake Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, finally confronts sinister oligarch Noah Cross.
After Cross confesses his massive corruption scheme, Gittes asks, “Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can’t already afford?”
“The future! Mr. Gittes,” Cross replies. “The future!”
This is Trump’s orientation, and in fact he may lack the cognitive equipment to manage any other. It is now also the orientation of the political party that Trump has captured. The traditional furniture of political discourse — the ideologies, policies, positions, allegiances, even personal identities — has become scenery, a temporary arrangement of evanescent phenomena.
Media observers describe this as a “chaos caucus.” They obsess over how Ted Cruz and Jim Jordan and Tommy Tuberville and Marjorie Taylor Greene and others can say such things. How can they subject themselves to these humiliations?
But to imagine that any of these figures ever actually cared about Ukraine or “wokeness” or tariffs reflects a fundamental misunderstanding. Preservation of absolute license to sate tomorrow’s desire, binds the giddy carnival together — not any policy or practice, let alone any conviction.
For these players, what you say or do today doesn’t matter. In fact, the whole point is to not let it matter. All that does matter is having the power to do what you will like tomorrow. “Libertarianism” is sometimes appropriated to label this approach, but “sociopathy” works too.
Understanding the choice offered by the Trump-led Republican Party isn’t a matter of assessing what its leaders believe, or even cataloging what they say they believe. The question is simply what they will want, and, of course, who will be willing to provide it.
James Doyle is a lawyer and author in Boston.