Trump Stands Alone

What’s Truly Unique about Donald J. Trump

   “With his bombastic swagger, changing policy positions and larger-than-life persona, Mr. Trump has proved to be an irresistible subject for writers and political satirists,” thus in the New York Times of July 4. That’s a partial explanation for the endless stories that are being written about him, sometimes as many as three or four in the same issue of the Times. I, too, am essentially hooked and read most writings that I come across about The Donald.

   Trump is indeed unique, no doubt about it. But when you come down to it, only somewhat “more so” than anyone else. (The scare quotes because you can’t be more or less unique; there are no degrees of uniqueness.) To bore you some more, every human being is, strictly speaking unique, meaning that everyone has a combination of traits—a specific bundle of attributes (and not just of secondary characteristics such as location in time and space) that together are not to be found in anyone else, with perhaps some identical twins as close as you can get to an exception.

   Without losing sight of the little lesson in the paragraph above, we must look at what one might call the significance of a person’s uniqueness. If Joe is unique because he has a peculiar shade of red hair together with an unusually long nose, that, in the scheme of things, does not make Joe significantly unique, to make up another label. Well, Trump, with his bundle of weighty characteristics, is, for sure, significantly unique.

  Others have inherited tons of money from their parents. Others have developed hotels, golf courses and much more; others have succeeded in showbiz on TV. How many have done all of the above? Only very few, if anyone. Clearly I’m piling up traits that attest to the ways Trump is distinguishable from everyone else, and probably enough of them.

   I’m no historian, but I have no doubt that many another candidate for high office has been an oddball, if not like The Donald, then in his or her own particular way. Moreover, there have surely been aspirants for important offices, including the presidency, who did not have the qualifications to serve successfully in the positions they sought.

   And Trump is clearly not qualified to be president of the United States. He lacks the temperament, he lacks both the experience required to be a president and he lacks the knowledge of issues that a president has to deal with. All this and more has been widely discussed. Indeed, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, in a rare political comment for a Supreme Court Justice, refreshingly expressed her dismay at the candidacy of one so unqualified. Still, all this makes Trump’s uniqueness significant, while he is surely not alone as a candidate for a job for which he (most of the time “he”) is not qualified.

   But there is still another and very important way in which Trump is unique. As an unqualified candidate, Donald Trump has attracted the support of voters in the recent primaries to beat off more than a dozen others who aimed to become the presumptive Republican candidate for the presidency. I don’t know how many others can tell the same story, but I do believe that it is quite remarkable.

   A recent very long and excellent article in the New Yorker¹ (among many other accounts) gives a good description of the people who are fervent Trump supporters. Their enthusiasm has them ignore the issue of qualification—not in the sense that they discount it, but in that they don’t think about it in the first place. Moreover, their support of Trump is not so much rooted in a set of beliefs, such as his proposed policies on immigration or what he proposes to do about international trade, etc. Rather, his supporters are jazzed by sound bytes, to conclude with language of yore.

   I don’t think that Trump will win the election on November 8, but that is by no means a sure thing. Justice Ginsburg has, jokingly, threatened to move to New Zealand, were he to become president. I don’t have to pull up stakes to get out from under a Trump presidency, since I’ve already absconded and live with my daughter and family in Mexico. But for all of our sakes, I hope he remains a private citizen and his comet-like appearance goes the way of all comets.

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¹ George Saunders, “Trump Days,” The New Yorker, July 11 & 18, 2016.