Aeneas in Washington

The 21st Century has not produced a Great Man of History until now

…I stood in the rain, far from home at nightfall
By the Potomac, the great Dome lit the water,
The city my blood had built I knew no more
While the screech-owl whistled his new delight
Consecutively dark.

Stuck in the wet mire
Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city
I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.

-Allen Tate, Aeneas at Washington

I. The Age of Anti-Heroes

When I tell people that I love Donald Trump, they think I am joking or at least exaggerating. When I say this to liberal friends and family they think it is a put-on, a kind of elaborate troll to make them uncomfortable. “You couldn’t possibly love him,” they say. They draw the word “love” out when they repeat it back to me and usually laugh in the condescending, self-satisfied way liberals treat all kinds of right wing opinions. Even right wing friends, some of them anyway, those who stake their reputation on being “reasonable,” think I am egging them on.

“No. I actually love him,” I insist.

The conversation usually stops there. How or why anyone would love Donald Trump is too impenetrable a mystery to inquire about any further. 

Granted, this is an odd thing to say, let alone earnestly feel. Americans are not meant to love their politicians. Secular liberal democracies stand in opposition to these kinds of sentiments. To love a man like Trump is to fall victim to a “cult of personality.” Devotion, loyalty, deference to a man––a mere man––is considered pathological. Something to be mocked, for the chuds. Instead, we are supposed to regard our politicians with suspicion, even contempt. And it’s true that politicians are, for the most part, uninspiring people. That has always been my impression of them. I cannot think of a single politician in my lifetime, other than Trump, that I have felt any positive emotion toward at all. At best, like a good referee, I don’t notice them at all.

Historical figures are another matter––or used to be. We were once allowed a certain reverence for the founders: Jefferson’s fierce independence, Washington’s selflessness, Franklin’s eccentric genius. These men were as near to demi-gods as a Christian nation will allow. I was in awe at Remini’s Jackson when I encountered the abridged biography in high school. Here was a true man of history. I had similar feelings about Teddy Roosevelt. Lincoln, too, though I have revised my view of him in recent years, is a man who nonetheless stood above his time and circumstances.

But would any of us say this about their modern counterparts? About either of the Clintons? The Bushes? Romney? McCain? Kerry? It’s laughable. Not too long ago, some liberals may have believed Obama would go down as a historically significant figure, but that star appears to be fading. He will be remembered as the first black president, sure, but his accomplishments are unimpressive, his legacy entirely overshadowed––and largely undone––by his successor, and as this last election demonstrated his cultural influence is minimal. More importantly, does anyone love him? Does he stand above the mundane cultural circumstances of his time in office? Could he fill Madison Square Garden to capacity with adoring fans, and with tens of thousands more waiting outside?

Even Obama’s most ardent supporters know the answer is no.

One might conclude, simply, that the Age of Heroes is over. We have become too disenchanted and too cynical to accommodate them. Public life is much too transparent for one thing. The problem with high definition TVs is that they reveal every flaw and blemish of the actors on the screen. Even the most beautiful woman, the most angelic face, at a sufficient level of clarity shows the wear and tear of age. I mean this literally, but it also applies to the microscopic scrutiny to which all public figures are subjected. Every indiscretion, every pronouncement, every faux pas, every cringe and regrettable thing anyone has ever said or done is recorded and remembered, made permanent and instantly retrievable by the perfect memory of the machines. We become our imperfections.

Likewise, the great heroes of the past are dug up and their corpses re-examined in the harsh light of modern political sensibilities. Are we allowed to hold the same reverence for the founders that I was taught in school? They were all racists and misogynists, after all. Anti-semites. Chauvinists. Benighted science-deniers. Do you know Lincoln wanted the freed slaves deported back to Africa? Look this up for yourself. FDR, the giant of modern progressivism, referred to blacks as “semi-beasts,” said Asians were biologically unassimilable, and remarked that the Germans’ complaints about Jews were “understandable.”

Conservatives and “classical” liberals find themselves caught in an impossible bind when confronted with the revisionist histories of the left. The 1619 Project was wrong about a lot of things, but it’s dead right that the men we elevate to the pantheon of history were, ultimately, just men—with beliefs that would make them pariahs in modern America. As my friend Covfefe Anon puts it, “Woke more correct.”

The problem is much deeper than this of course. The problem is not just one of technology or the chattering class’s petty moralism, but a spiritual emptiness that has hollowed modern life to its core. The world has been flattened. It has become measured, quantified, cataloged and made to be managed. A world that gets mapped according to the spreadsheets does not lend itself to the sublime. The global village, its hot-pot of undifferentiated slop, offers only mere life, sustenance for its own sake. Great men, and the veneration they inspire, have no place here.

Put simply, our civil religion is dead and so are its gods. If it is true what John F. Kennedy said that “a nation reveals itself by the men it honors, the men it remembers,” or Carlyle’s version that a nation’s heroes tells us what that nation “longs inexpressibly to be,” then what does it say about us if we no longer have the capacity to honor anyone? 

Erik Erikson, the mid-century psychologist, came up with the concept of “charisma hunger” to describe what happens in a society that has given up on religion, civil or otherwise, and given up on the notion of national heroes. We become like oprhaned children, wayward and terrified, clamoring for guidance and protection from parental figures that are nowhere to be found. We become deranged and frenzied in their absence, unmoored from meaning and incapable of true self-understanding. Who are we exactly? Where did we come from? What do we aspire to become?

This feeling of loss is not new and resonates in every corner of the culture: 

“Where is my John Wayne?
Where is my prairie song?
Where is my happy ending?
Where have all the cowboys gone?”

This is the charisma hunger talking. The archetypes handed down by the Greeks––the embodiments of Aristotelian poetics like Achilles and Odysseus––or their later iterations in Shakespeare, in Tennyson, in Racine and countless others (I’ll spare you the complete lineage), they have long since passed. 

It is no coincidence that just as Nietzsche declared the death of God, the classic hero vanished with Him. The two are not the same but run along parallel tracks and describe a similar terrain. In the 19th century, a new archetype emerges as the dominant character of our narrative imagination: the so-called anti-hero. This figure appears in many forms. Most of us picture him as gruff, troubled, rudderless, casting about in a darkened, chaotic world. He is misunderstood, a victim of circumstance, but is offered redemption, if he gets the “good ending,” in the opportunity to demonstrate his courage (however reluctantly) and improve our fallen world by just a little bit. In the “bad ending” he is resigned to further alienation, his efforts a meaningless whimper amidst the great sucking sound of cosmic indifference.

Musil called him the “man without qualities.” That’s partly right. He is defined by an absence, but not so much of “qualities” as the absence of a divinity to guide him. The anti-hero, unlike his Greek predecessors, is hemmed-in by the world as it appears to us. There is nothing outside. There is no heavenly realm to appeal to. Whereas the hero is an instrument of the gods, subject to their explicit commands, the anti-hero is profoundly alone. There is no intervention from above or beyond. There is no conference with the angels. There is no descent into the underworld to retrieve wisdom and bring it back to the world, or perhaps (an even more grim possibility), there is only the underworld, hell-baked through and through. 

“What does any of this have to do with Donald Trump?”

If you asked me a year ago, I would have probably said something like this: Trump is the anti-hero of our age. It’s an argument that practically makes itself. Trump stands-in as the ultimate expression of society’s decadence even as he postures against it. I mean “ultimate” here in both senses, the fullest embodiment of our cultural decline, but also its final chapter. Trump is the final boss of the boomers, representing the triumph of 20th century Pax Americana and also the opportunities it squandered. He is not Washington. He is not Caesar. He lacks their disciplined gravitas. He is a showman and a real estate mogul. He is a celebrity, as a vocation. More parvenu than aristocrat. Mostly he is a fuck you to the self-serious scolds and mediocrities who presume to rule us. He is crass and undignified and exactly what we deserve. He is earthly and low, so far from god and the numinous the notion is a joke.

I have always liked Trump. I have always supported Trump. I have always thought Trump was a very good politician, a much better president than he gets credit for, and also a much better person, a much better character than his public image suggests, but he is an anti-hero if he is anything at all. That’s what I might have said a year ago.

II. Peripeteia

This all changes at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, on the evening of July 13, 2024 at approximately 6:15 p.m. when eight shots are fired in the direction of Donald Trump, grazing his right ear and fatally wounding Corey Comperatore. Trump falls to the ground. He is swarmed by his secret service detail. The crowd is oddly subdued. Everyone seems to be waiting for something to happen, for history to make a choice…

This is the image that sticks with me more than any other. The more famous one, the image of him standing defiantly with his fist in the air, as well as all that has come after (and all that came before), is a consequence of whatever was happening down there. You can tell by the blood streaks on his face that he had yet to wipe any of it away. His hands are in penitent repose, palms slightly up. Out of context he appears to be in genuflection. It is at this moment, in all likelihood, that he first tasted the blood, first realized he’d been shot, first became aware that his life had been spared.

It’s almost a minute before he stands up again. There is a decision to make. The secret service are almost certainly telling him to stay low and crawl off the stage to safety. By now the shooter is dead but who knows who else might be out there. We know from the audio that Trump has lost his shoes. The secret service is telling him that he needs to get to the car.

“Wait,” Trump commands them.

He pushes himself out from the scrum of agents and raises his fist to the stunned audience. This is where he yells fight. What compels him to do this? This is a Trump we have never seen before. There is anger in his eyes. There is rage. We have seen Trump speak sternly, speak with hostility, but never like this. At this moment he is no longer Trump the showman, Trump the comedian, or even Trump the president. He is something else, something unexpected, an older and more elemental type. History indeed makes a choice, and in sparing him, confers upon him a new role, one of strange consequence that is not so easily explained, but rather felt.

We would come to find out that the bullet that grazed Trump’s ear should have, in all but one chance out of a million, split his skull open and ended his life, his candidacy, and the MAGA movement forever. But for a random turn of the head at just the split second the trigger was pulled, it all would’ve been over, everything changed. 

Some have suggested that Trump’s assassination might’ve sparked a civil war. I highly doubt it. Most likely, we would’ve entered into a period of uneventful malaise. There would have been a few somber retrospectives on Fox and maybe CNN, Joe Biden shuffling to the Rose Garden podium to slur through five minutes of an unintelligible eulogy, bi-partisan pleas to “tone down the rhetoric.” This brief stage of national mourning, mostly insincere, would be followed by admonishments to begin our “national healing.” The Republican Convention would have been a bizarre exhibition of grief-stricken loyalists juxtaposed with manic and impotent appeals for optimism. There would be no agreement on a successor. J.D. Vance had not yet been chosen as the V.P. and would have been wise to bow out of contention. Trump’s Silicon Valley donors would have quietly stepped away from the wreckage. The MAGA base would have retreated back to their natural home of political apathy. Mourning would have given way to despair. Then resignation. The conservative media, with some muted relief, would have comfortably slipped back into their doom loop. Biden in absentia would have cruised to reelection, virtually unopposed, and we would have sunken deeper, perhaps permanently, into cultural and political decay…

III. Retrocausality, Virgil the prophet, Rome again…

The miracle of July 13th, and it was a miracle, is the most significant political event since 9/11. Like 9/11 it initiated a kind of radical break from the course of events that preceded it and will affect all others that come after. I do not think it will resonate in quite the same way as 9/11. I do not think the date of July 13th will hold much significance in the collective consciousness even a year from now. It will be largely hidden away from view. There will not be any memorials, holidays, or anything like that. July 13th will recede into the background. Future generations may not think of it at all, except the famous photo which will likely grace high school textbooks, a minor curiosity––among many––of what will almost certainly be called the Trump Era. 

One runs the risk of over-indexing an event like this. Recency-bias is another way to describe this trap. I am aware of the problem. But my theory of why the assassination attempt creates an inflection point in history is not so much what it means for the future, or even right now, but what it means for the past.

What we have experienced is a rare instance of retrocausality. We think of the arrow of history only running forward. We can never be unburdened by what has been (this was always a strange and nonsensical rhetorical indulgence), but surely what has been will always remain unburdened by what will be. Events of the past must remain unaffected by whatever comes after them. This is basic stuff. Except, well… one starts to wonder.

I have been rethinking the meaning of Trump over the last four months––his pre-political life, his unlikely candidacy, his even more unlikely presidency, his persecution while in office, his loss, his exile, his resurgence, his further persecution, his near death, his return, his victory, and now, it appears, his quest for vengeance. The narrative arc looks very different now than it did before July 13th. It is like an optical illusion where a change in perspective reveals that an array of disjointed dots is actually a dynamic scene of figures and forms that were always there.

The future does not merely follow the past, but instead influences the past in ways that revise its meaning and its purpose. In the case of Trump, the near-death experience acts as a hinge on which the entire structure of his legacy turns, shifting him from a symbol of our period’s decadence and tragi-comic death-march, to a potential, even inevitable catalyst for its rebirth.

What I am groping at is the realization that Trump is not, and never was, an anti-hero. Or he is both that and something more than that. The assassination attempt has reached back in time and revealed––actually reconfigured––a very different story to tell about his life and about the time we are living in. It has remade history.

Again, some prudence is in order. Trump is just a man. And it is Trump the man on which most analysis of his presidency and historical significance ought to be framed. It is Trump the man making policy and personnel decisions. It is Trump the man who diagnosed the American situation and through some combination of once-in-a-generation political instinct, guile, and showmanship defeated both the Clinton and Obama factions of the Democratic party, defeated the Bush, neocon, and Koch factions of the GOP, and out flanked the media on every important question of public sentiment from the time he came down the escalator to announce his candidacy in 2015.

But there is another dimension, one that Henry Kissinger anticipated in his reflections on Trump as a “phenomenon” rather than simply an individual man. What Kissinger sensed is that Trump has come to subsume and symbolize a moment in history—a confluence of forces that transcends any single person’s talents or intentions.

I will leave it to the wonderful writer, Librarian of Caelano, to describe the critical turning point:

By pure coincidence, shortly after it became manifestly clear that Joe Biden was unconcealably senile and would obviously lose the general election, a young man with no criminal background, whom despite studying computer science had no social media presence whatsoever, decided for reasons about which law enforcement remains solidly uncurious to assassinate Trump at a rally. His bullet missed by centimeters, leaving one man dead and Trump with a bleeding head wound. Before the whole world he stood and shook his fist at death. He told his supporters to fight.

Everything changed at that moment. I knew then that whatever else happened Trump would win the election. I felt the difference. Rising from what had been certain death and continuing was a demonstration of his total commitment to hazard his life for his people. Trump was no longer running for president. Trump had become a king.

I don’t mean that in the literal sense that he made some claim to monarchy. I mean that in that moment he transcended politics to become a figure beyond party or cause. The Emperor of Austria once told Theodore Roosevelt that his job was to protect his people from their politicians. It was to this ideal, this archetype that Trump ascended. If it can be said of a man in his seventies, he matured, but went far beyond that in becoming a kind of patriarch, possessed of more charisma, gravitas, and personal authority. The Mandate of Heaven settled upon him.

In other words, Trump became a hero in the classical sense. He became, though unbeknownst to us had always been so, an instrument of fate. That’s what I mean by retrocausality. Fate is not forward facing. It is not oriented in one direction or the other. It is fixed in place and outside of time.

The Homeric heroes like Achilles and Odysseus are more complex, more agentic, and better epitomize universal poetic virtues. Rather Trump, like Virgil’s Aeneas, is more purely the expression of manifest destiny. To the question of Roman v. Greek, Trump is clearly the Roman type. Trump, like Aeneas, does not profess to understand nor even desire his fate. No one would confuse Mar-a-Lago for Carthage, or a retirement of golf and filet-o-fish for Dido, but Trump was plenty comfortable in Florida and after his initial attempts to refound Rome were rebuffed, he could have and probably wanted to stay put.

In 2020, Trump had been challenged and defeated. He had made a good run at it but his enemies in D.C., the “occupational class” to whom he was meant to be a direct rebuke, won out in the end. His loss in the reelection campaign, amidst the almost supernatural fact of a global pandemic and however suspicious the circumstances, should have been the end of it. In all meaningful respects he was removed from public life, facing bankruptcy, and counted few remaining allies. Had they left him alone, he may have never returned to the campaign trail, but the zealous lawfare against him gave him no choice. It was win or go to jail. It was as if his enemies, however unwittingly, had intervened on his behalf. Much like for Aeneas, who finds himself shipwrecked by Juno’s storms, it was only through the malign influence of his antagonists that the necessary path to his return was set in motion.

Aeneas does not found Rome without first failing. His hardships are not obstacles, but prerequisites for his eventual triumph. Trump’s success now––the electoral sweep of the swing states, the popular vote, control of both houses, and the taste for revenge that animates him and his newfound allies, the titans of Silicon Valley who would have otherwise remained sidelined––does not happen had Trump and Pence and his former team of bellwether hangers-on somehow prevailed and limped through another four years of lawfare and administrative obstruction. In that version, Trump, for all his merits, is still just another president, his legacy marred by scandal and legal trouble, and mostly thwarted in his administrative agenda. The swamp obtains.

But that’s not the version we got. That’s not the version fate had in store for us. The world that Yeats describes of his Seanchan, which conditions the destiny of ordinary men, is transcended by Trump the phenomenon. A superior and higher authority pulls him forward and out from modern life’s rigid and pedestrian constraints. It pulls him back into a past of grander heroes. Into the mythic. I don’t know how else to describe it.

IV. “Love. It’s about Love.”

I can feel myself reaching for a feeling that cannot be fully articulated. Perhaps not by me, or not quite yet. For one thing, the story is not over. Much of it is untold, and just as July 13th had the effect of reconstituting the past, so too might future events reconstitute what I am describing about Trump. I am as charisma hungry as the next man and it is possible I have imagined an oasis where there is only more sand.

The story of Aeneas, as the embodiment and symbol of Rome, rests on the credo, vincit amor patriae. “The love of my fatherland prevails.” 

For both Trump the man, and Trump the phenomenon, this is equally apt. If there is anything I can say with certainty about Trump it is that he loves America and the American people. It is his primary quality, and is as authentic and apparent as anything about him.

A friend wrote to me shortly after Trump’s acceptance speech:

My main observation watching the speech was his complete emotional control. It seemed that he knew it would happen. There was no sense of relief or emotional release. It was as though this was his destiny and he had fully expected and been prepared for it.

He continued on:

I have a level of respect and love for Trump that is pretty primal. My feelings for him are as close as I can imagine to the reverence one might have felt for Caesar or a long serving monarch. I can imagine the country accepting him as a “Great Father.”

As another friend put it, “Trump is the living Constitution.”

Time will tell. It is not ours to judge. Whether Trump ushers in a reawakening of our civil religion and the proper conditions to accommodate a hero, a man of destiny, a man who stands above his circumstances, and comes to initiate and symbolize whatever God has in store for our nation as it stumbles out of its End of History hangover, I cannot say. The signs are there, the story is pre-formed. I am certainly optimistic. I have never felt even close to this level of positive potential for America in my adult life. It has been a long time coming and I can see clearly out to a very bright future, one literally among the stars. American dynamism has been tamped down for decades by bureaucratic dead weight and the spiritual lethargy of the longhouse. The doorway out is now opened, and we need only to walk through it. The Good Timeline is right in front of us.

And even still, if it is only a mirage, if it is only Trump the man we are graced with, the ultimate anti-hero, I will love him no less. At least he made us laugh.