January 25, 2025

ROGER KIMBALL: Donald Trump is a Great Man of History: Is he defining the Zeitgeist, or merely riding it? You might as well ask the same question of Napoleon or Caesar.

I know that sounds odd. A year ago, Trump was finished. The swank people who tell us what to think had written him off. There he was, staggering under scores of indictments in at least four separate jurisdictions. Would he not be bankrupted, incarcerated, swept ignominiously into the dustbin of history?

Somehow, Trump not only survived but thrived. Did he merely ride the cresting wave of the Zeitgeist or also help define it? The same question might be asked of Caesar, Napoleon, FDR, or Ronald Reagan.

There are still some flaccid, hand-ringing mutterers who can’t absorb the reality of what Donald Trump represents. He represents beneficent change. The anti-Trump whiners congregate in their faculty lounges, their DEI workshops, their climate-change seminars in Aspen. Here and there one finds pods of sad people like Chris Mayes, the Attorney General of Arizona, who has vowed to resist aspects of Trump’s immigration efforts. One might as well vow to resist a tornado.

Roger Kimball
Roger Kimball
Related Topics

Donald Trump, US Election, Republicans, Immigration, Migrant crisis

24 January 2025 2:52pm GMT
207

Donald Trump at his inauguration
Thomas Carlyle would have admired Donald Trump Credit: Morry Gash/AP Pool

Thomas Carlyle would have been impressed by Donald Trump. The author of On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) thought that history organised itself around great men the way that iron filings form patterns in a magnetic field.

The eighteenth century, Carlyle thought, had lost its moral elasticity and spiritual tautness. He prophesied that his own time would be a crucible of renewal in which “the world will once more become … a heroic world”.

Over the last year, Donald Trump has emerged as a Carlylean figure, an historic man of action who, having triumphed over extraordinary adversity, has become a totem of the age, a man through whom the highest ambitions of the country find expression.

I know that sounds odd. A year ago, Trump was finished. The swank people who tell us what to think had written him off. There he was, staggering under scores of indictments in at least four separate jurisdictions. Would he not be bankrupted, incarcerated, swept ignominiously into the dustbin of history?

Somehow, Trump not only survived but thrived. Did he merely ride the cresting wave of the Zeitgeist or also help define it? The same question might be asked of Caesar, Napoleon, FDR, or Ronald Reagan.

There are still some flaccid, hand-ringing mutterers who can’t absorb the reality of what Donald Trump represents. He represents beneficent change. The anti-Trump whiners congregate in their faculty lounges, their DEI workshops, their climate-change seminars in Aspen. Here and there one finds pods of sad people like Chris Mayes, the Attorney General of Arizona, who has vowed to resist aspects of Trump’s immigration efforts. One might as well vow to resist a tornado.

Elsewhere, in the real world, what had been an anti-Trump consensus is disintegrating. Even Politico has absorbed an inkling of the truth. Trump is, a recent column tells us, “someone with an ability to perceive opportunities that most politicians do not and forge powerful, sustained connections with large swaths of people in ways that no contemporary can match. In other words: He is a force of history.”

He is a powerful figure, but he is also a vehicle for the Normals, at home and abroad, who have finally had enough.

Posted at 8:29 am by Glenn Reynolds

SPANK THEM HARD:

Posted at 7:41 am by Glenn Reynolds

#JOURNALISM:

Posted at 7:30 am by Glenn Reynolds

THIS ISN’T WRONG:

Posted at 7:16 am by Glenn Reynolds

IT’S NOT LIKE WE DIDN’T WARN THEM:

Posted at 7:00 am by Glenn Reynolds

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