One benefit of the Trump era is that it has conveniently encapsulated every behavior I find abhorrent. What might be the most immoral behavior in any given situation? Well, What Would Trump Do? The man is a human superfund site. 

One example: the relentless sorting of humans into winners and losers. 

Here he is on the 15th day of December, the day after the electoral college certified the presidential election for Joe Biden:

The closest Trump has come privately to admitting where this is heading, the source added, is to say, “If we don’t win, I don’t say lose. I say ‘I don’t win.'”

It’s not just that he doesn’t say lose. He can’t say it. It goes against his own mental programming. Life is a constant sorting machine of winners and losers and he decided long ago that he was a winner always and so he cannot conceptually recognize loss. 

But loss is a way of life. Is it loserish of me to say this or a mere recognition of reality? Games, contests, and yes, even elections, have winners and losers. They actually are binary structures that sort their competitors into camps. Not everyone gets to win the tennis game, etc. Some people can verifiably run faster than other people, etc. But life is not a game. Typically people are shaded into large pools of ambiguity. No one life is purely pancakes all the way down. There is always some rain delay, some grit of disappointment, some betrayal, some collapse of circumstance. Otherwise you’re a robot or lying to yourself or a psychotic. 

One change I’d like to make in the new year is to think about Trump less. He’s too much on my mind. I even think about his poor and horrible children. Horrible because they’ve gone from being absurdly fortunate civilians, ostensibly adjacent to an elected official and worthy of ignoring, to becoming cannons in the culture wars, machines in the discourse factory. Of the two most prominent children, one has become an unelected and unqualified White House advisor and another has become a television screamer. If you agree with Trump’s behaviors, then his children are satisfying sequels, I guess. Perhaps it simply comes back to my disagreement with the father. But I also feel sorry for them. 

Here is a brief excerpt from “The Real Story of Donald Trump Jr.” by Julia Ioffe: 

When a Brazilian journalist asked Don in 2010 whether there was much pressure being Donald junior, he replied, “There probably shouldn’t be. But there is for me, because you want to please someone like that, and he’s a perfectionist. There’s definitely always that shadow that follows you around, like how is this guy, the son of someone so good at what he does, going to act?”

According to his first wife, Ivana, Donald Trump was never keen on bequeathing his name to anybody. It was Ivana who wanted to call their newborn Donald junior. “You can’t do that!” Trump is quoted as saying in Ivana’s memoir, Raising Trump. “What if he’s a loser?”

Don tells his own story about coming into the world on December 31, 1977. “I like to joke that my dad wanted to be able to claim me as a dependent on his taxes for 1977,” he once told Forbes, “so he told my mom she had to have me before midnight and, if she didn’t, he’d make her take a cab home.” (Ivana wrote about her labor being induced by doctors.)

There are two curses contained here: the child as tax-avoidance device and the ruthless paranoia of that child being a loser. The first is the purely instrumental view of fatherhood. Does Trump love his children? I guess. Probably? But this aside, told here as a joke, and perhaps apocryphal, speaks to a subterranean truth: Trump’s view of other people is purely transactional. What can they do for me? What’s the most they can do for me? His rage at the Governor of Georgia for not calling a special session of the legislature to reverse the outcome of the election in that state has the echoes of a dissatisfied customer. The nomination of Justice Barrett had the same eerie, place-betting vibe. These individuals are investments, he seems to think, that will earn him a return. And when those investments don’t mature as expected, don’t pay him back, he’s enraged. From his point of view, it makes a vicious kind of sense. Why else would he have stumped for that Governor? Nominated that Justice? In this light having children for him is mostly downside. 

What if he’s a loser? The statement is such a blatant explication of so many eons of procreative struggle that it’s overwhelming to see it so baldly stated. It took Faulkner nearly 400 pages to write Absalom, Absalom! and Trump boils it down to a haiku. Props where they’re due: the man possesses a kind of idiopathic genius. He’s the most transparently self-interested animal in existence. My dog exhibits a more developed sense of decorum. It seems that Trump Junior has decided that the best way to outrun his father’s shadow is to be even grander, more father than his own father, his father’s disposition distilled into an even more corrosive substance. His whole existence is subsumed by his father’s presence. It must be a horrible way to live. 

This reminds me of my old note about Jeb Bush and his helpless aside four years ago about disappointing his own father. Yet another problem of political leadership consisting almost wholly of dynasties is that America has to weather these Oedipal storms. Would George W. Bush have begun the Iraq War if Saddam Hussein hadn’t attempted to assassinate his own president father? Probably. But it’s impossible to know for sure and there is the queasy Shakespearean undertow, the addressing of generational grievances, sons jockeying for favor. It feels slightly less than productive to think of major American foreign policy mistakes in terms of generational grudges handed down, but that’s where we are — a dynasty of grudges, a family tree of resentments. We the people merely live in its shade. We don’t have a royal family in this country but our collective Id seems to want one desperately, so we have all of these mini royal families with their chins and wealth and tragic vacations. Do we have to keep watching this show?

It reminds me of those new Star Wars movies, which I watched recently with my own children. There is a brief moment of dramatic freshness in The Last Jedi when Rey is informed by Kylo Ren that she comes from nothing, nobody, that her parents sold her for booze money, this abandoned child who grew up in the ruins of old Empire weaponry, like so many in the audience. The trick of the earlier movies was the discovery of course that Luke Skywalker was the son of Darth Vader, that he was the correction of the mistakes of his father. The father redeems himself by saving the son and, thus reborn, dies in true tragic fashion. Big, hearty themes, heavy enough to call a moving company. But now we have the sequels to the prequels and of course Kylo Ren has to be Solo and Leia’s son who’s gone and pulled a Vader on them. I appreciate the thematic echo as much as the next middle-aged nostalgist, but combined with the repeating Death Stars, I’m starting to fear a general lack of innovation. One can re-microwave the same leftovers for only so many nights. The charm of the earlier movies was that they showed us new worlds. Now the movies just filigree the franchise. And so the big question: who is Rey and why is she important? Ren’s sister, lover, something else? Turns out she’s a nobody. But then the next film in the series arrives (The Rise of Skywalker), and we learn we’re wrong; we’ve been tricked. She’s actually Emperor Palpatine’s granddaughter! And Emperor Palpatine’s not dead! He’s back and he looks just like Mitch McConnell! And there are a bunch of Star Destroyers somehow stored under the surface of some planet! Beats me!

It’s a bad movie but perhaps a better representation of what life is really like: the bad guys never really die, their children are out there making the same mistakes as their parents, we keep re-fighting the same wars like amnesiac soldiers, we keep uttering the same tired jokes, unable to devise new punchlines. In the endless cineplex of modern American society, we are all losers. As another movie from my 80s youth had it: The only way to win is not to play.