S itting there on a table, several feet from where the 2016 Michigan GOP primary winner was holding forth, the meats were just beautiful. For the first time in world history, an election victory was accepted with an infomercial, presenting a delicious, I mean really terrific array of “Trump steaks,” which were once sold at the Sharper Image. The winner also touted Trump water bottles, Trump wine, even a “Trump magazine” (a wealth-porn glossy actually called The Jewel of Palm Beach). He neglected to mention that some of the products weren’t especially successful. (For some reason steaks just didn’t sell at the Sharper Image.) But because Mitt Romney had questioned Donald Trump’s business acumen a few days earlier, and because it’s a sore topic, like the size of his fingers, Trump hoped to reassure us that he definitely was a businessman and totally knew what he was doing.
This is truly funny, but Trump doesn’t seem to see it. He doesn’t see that his claim of being a brilliant businessman might invite the question of whether selling steaks for $50 a pound (he even touted the high price) at the Sharper Image was a sound business proposition. (Jerry Levin, former CEO of the Sharper Image, has said, “We literally sold almost no steaks.”) Plus he was so serious. Oblivious and very serious. Behold the ass-clown, who is telling the joke but somehow not in on it.
For the showman, all is pretense for entertainment rather than for deception.
The ass, among types of persons, is slow to understanding. Perhaps he’s dull, stubborn, entrenched in his position, or just plain stupid. The clown, by contrast, seeks to entertain an audience with playful pretending or comedic exaggeration, with sharp sensitivity to what others find amusing or delightful or shocking. Putting these two types together, there is such a person as an ass-clown, someone who seeks an audience’s enjoyment while being slow to understand how it views him.
Trump is amusing, and we can all relate to feeling like an ass. This makes the man relatable, as a fellow human, and even likable, for a moment. His display of the asshole arts — as schoolyard bully, as cut-down boxer — is unrivaled, and its own spectacle. This is part of his appeal for many. The question is why we — enough of us — are not flatly revolted. The answer is that we — most of us — really like an ass-clown. Trump the ass-clown is partly oblivious, and this is genuinely funny, and in a way all too human; he’s like slapstick, a pure form of comedy. We are thus drawn to him even in revulsion, and his supporters forgive or overlook his transgressions. Our pleasure in the spectacle, and our confusion about his type, leave us unsettled in our feelings and him free to do pretty much as he likes.
T he asshole is the guy (they are mainly men) who systematically allows himself advantages in social relationships out of an entrenched (and mistaken) sense of entitlement that immunizes him against the complaints of other people. He’s the guy who acts out of a firm sense that he is special, that the normal rules of conduct do not apply in his case. He may not deliberately exploit interpersonal relations but simply remain willfully oblivious to normal expectations. Because the asshole sets himself apart from others, he feels comfortable flouting social conventions, almost as a way of life. Most importantly, he lives this way more or less out in the open. He stands unmoved when people glare or complain. He is immunized against anyone who speaks up, being quite confident that he has little need to respond to questions about whether the advantages he allows himself are acceptable and fair. Indeed, he will often feel indignant when questions about his conduct are raised. From his point of view, such questions show that he is not getting the respect he deserves.
For example, consider Steve Jobs. Jony Ive, his colleague and friend at Apple, once told Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson, “When he’s very frustrated … his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody. And I think he feels he has a liberty and license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him.” But even taking into account his achievements, which transformed the world within his lifetime, it is hard to see why Jobs was justified in parking his luxury car in handicapped spaces. And yet despite such well-documented bad behavior, we still didn’t get angry, because Jobs seemed like some sort of force for good.
One can understand how Jobs might have been tempted by grandiose rationalizations. Trump’s sense of entitlement comes in a newer style, which freely produces thin rationalizations, but with no loss of confidence. As for why he should have special entitlements (if someone asks, “Yeah, what makes you so special?”), his own view can be as simple as “The beauty of me is that I’m very rich.” Why should any further reason be needed? I’m rich. I’m a winner. I’m the best.
Trump’s supporters do not deny that he is an asshole. They simply forgive him, like we forgave Jobs, in the hope that he’ll be a force for good. Progress, in our degraded political system, can at times seem to be a matter of winning an Asshole vs. Asshole contest. So one genuinely can wonder: Might a top-dog, alpha-asshole bring order by subduing the other assholes, restoring some sort of cooperation? For Thomas Hobbes, assured cooperation was possible only under an absolute sovereign ruler — a dictator — whose chief qualification is his ability to “over-awe” those who would otherwise be unruly or prone to self-interest and anarchy. For the job of Asshole in Chief, then, the bigger the asshole, the better. In a system where officials routinely thwart the public interest, capitalizing on their position for power and profit, only an asshole so skilled as to school the other assholes properly, and so to awe them into submission, would restore order and peace, for the greater good of everyone.
F rom this point of view, it is important that Trump be nothing like the usual politician. He is indeed quite the showman, and especially good in one sort of performance. He’s a major bullshitter, in philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt’s definition: someone who speaks without regard for the truth. What he says is sometimes true. When it isn’t, he often cares not, since truth or falsehood is beside the point. He’s not deliberately asserting what he knows to be false, hoping to get others to believe what he knows is not true. He often just doesn’t care about what is true and what is not. For the showman, all is pretense for entertainment rather than for deception.
Which is not to say there aren’t real standards for good or bad bullshitting. In a “bull session,” merely spouting “hot air” won’t cut it; you’ve got to say something good and authoritative sounding about the president or Congress or the old days. Trump is especially admirable in this respect (his fans proclaim, “I was just saying that same thing yesterday!”). Indeed, the master bullshitter can be so good at bullshitting that, like the banker who invests in his own Ponzi scheme, he may well believe the stuff he’s saying, at least for the moment. He’s so good that he eats it, with gusto and conviction, for the sake of dramatic performance.
Paradoxically, in the GOP collective bull session, Trump the bullshitter disrupted the party by being a truth teller. It was refreshing to hear truths stated plainly — about Iraq, progressive taxation, the problems of money corruption — despite “conservative” political correctness and groupthink, which won’t allow you to say things such as, “George W. Bush was president during 9/11" (for if that were true, it would also be true that he did not “keep us safe” from terrorism). That flagrant disregard for truth displays contempt for the citizenry of a republican democracy. The impulse to destroy that which displays contempt explains why so many wish to take their chances on Trump. To his supporters, Trump offers hope of either taking over the GOP or blowing it up for something better.
Trump, surely without intending it, has been a wake-up call to the republic. He has forced us to reckon with much that was previously hidden. He has brought what used to be implicit racism out into the open, for sunlight and criticism, ending (for the moment) the dog-whistle racist politics invented by Richard Nixon. Despite our real insecurities, Trump’s depiction of Mexicans and Muslims is vile and has been rightly condemned. That condemnation has in turn upheld their status as moral equals, affirming publicly the inclusive principles on which our country was founded. However mixed our feelings, we can be grateful that the fog has lifted. I must say, the clearer air is rather pleasant. William Burroughs captured our time of rueful clarity in his definition of “naked lunch": “a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.”
That is not to say Trump portends further gifts. Should we push our luck and elect him? We’d need luck, and a lot of it. When an asshole is a force for good, he is not reliably doing good things for the reason that they are good, or right things for the reason that they are right. The coincidence is only partial or fortuitous, and only when the asshole and the stars align. Any good the asshole has done was probably inadvertent. And if we were lucky once, would we get lucky again? Are the stakes low enough that a gamble makes sense? Or are the odds too long and stakes too great?
If Trump makes a giant mess of things, in part for being oblivious to how much he is disrupting, why assume the disorder would be contained to politics? He really could make needless war and bring much bloodshed, along with an ever-deepened distrust that ensures what could be an irreversible devolution. America has always been a democratic republic. It is founded not on Hobbes’s authoritarianism, but on Rousseau’s idea of democracy, a republic of equals, ruled by law and not men, from common reason. It is founded on John Locke’s idea of limited government that would protect freedom against tyranny, whether the tyranny of an arbitrary monarch or an impulsive, easily angered asshole in the White House. As James Madison suggested, the system that has preserved us for centuries is one of delicate checks and balances, which have worked only through faithful cooperation by our country’s better angels, who rose up against the devils that would push our system into constitutional crisis.
Despite winning the nomination of our conservative party, Trump, then, is a deeply unconservative proposition. We need political reform desperately. But with the very foundations of our democratic republic potentially broken, and with everything to lose and little upside, should we play republic roulette?
Aaron James is a professor and the chair of philosophy at the University of California at Irvine. He is author of Fairness in Practice: A Social Contract for a Global Economy (Oxford University Press, 2012), Assholes: A Theory (Doubleday, 2012), and Assholes: A Theory of Donald Trump (Doubleday, 2016).
