Donald Trump, Man Of Destiny

Trump is probably the least ideological person to ever be in politics. He’s almost pure pragmatism. He doesn’t have any political principles.

Now this is important, because we usually say that an unprincipled person is immoral, or wicked. You have to have principles, right? You have to have morality? 

Political principles and morality aren’t the same thing. Some of the most immoral people in the world today have very strong political principles. Their principles replace their morality. 

There are people who have nothing inside them, nothing moral, nothing principled. They are howling voids where a real person resides, because they are sociopaths or psychopaths, or because they are so fundamentally corrupt that everything they wear as a principle or a moral is an act. 

I’d say the majority of people in politics today are such people. 

And I’d say the more someone talks about political principles, abstract principles, or pure Platonic abstract ideals like Hope or Change or Equality….the more those principles are a mask for the howling void. 

There are howling voids on both the Left and Right. But far more of them on the Left. 

Because the Left have a hundred masks. Progress, Equity, Compassion, Inclusivity, a frantic constant manufacturing of new masks, new labels, an entire theoretical system of masks for the howling void. 

Communism and Islam are what might be described as systems of mask making. They attract the people of the Void, and they give them a whole language and toolbox, a set of theoretical and rhetorical tools, for presenting the Void as principle and progress. This is what all the academic languages of the Left have been. This is what Islamic taqiyya is. 

This is why either can present themselves as altruistic, utopian, more principled than capitalism, or Christianity, more moral….while always using the most loathsome tactics and always unleashing the most loathsome savageries. It’s a mask. 

Underneath, the void is howling. 

Now a man entirely devoid of theory, a man without a single political abstraction to cling to, a man who works solely with the real, the world as it is….that guy can look like the Void too. 

But Trump has a moral code. And it’s a real thing. 

That code is America. The USA. Working with whatever the USA is, loving the whole, and trying to make it great again. 

The slogans are the entire sum of his ideology. MAGA and America First. Everyone assumes these are masks. Masks for personal greed. Masks for huge vanity and ego. Masks for self glorification and self enrichment. 

Trump doesn’t need that. His ego is indeed vast. It’s so vast you could put him in McDonald’s slinging fries for real, for months or years instead of a one day campaign stunt, and Donald Trump would still be Donald Trump. He’d still think he’s the smartest, funniest, strongest, handsomest man in America, or the world. 

You aren’t ever shaking THAT belief system. Which is why they could hit him with more insult, more mockery, more hatred, more loathing than any President (far more even than the assassinated ones received prior to their murders) has ever had…..and Donald Trump slept like a baby and kept waking up, walking forward like a tank, and crushing it. 

So we really have two things that explain Trump and encompass him entirely: America and Trump himself. These are his undying and eternal principles. He doesn’t need to use the first to benefit the second. The first isn’t a mask for the second. They are a shared entire universe. 

He assumes America will always win in the end. Because it’s America. 

And he assumes that he will be the one to save it. Because he’s Donald Trump. 

There are very, very few Men of Destiny in the annals of history. The last one in Britain was Churchill. The last one in Europe was Hitler, and before him, Napoleon. The last one in America before Trump was Lincoln.founders of religions are Men of Destiny. History’s greatest generals and warlords are Men (more rarely, women) of Destiny. Mass murderers are, indeed, Men of Destiny. Combine a Void and a Destiny and you get Mao, Hitler, Stalin, etc. But if it’s all Destiny with no Void you get Jesus. You get Christian Saints. You get great monarchs like Henry V and Elizabeth I. 

The ancient world produced lots of them. The 19th century was still churning out a fair few, or people half invested with it. The modern world produces fewer and fewer Great Men, Men of Destiny. We get people with a bit of it, and they stand out. JFK, possibly. Thatcher, Reagan. But modern society is not conducive to Greatness, which is part of what makes Trump’s intent so spectacular and so inexplicable to the small minds and void trained souls of the modern world. 

Trump has the full deal. I don’t mean he’s smarter than Thatcher, more charming than JFK, or a better man than Reagan. 

I mean he sincerely thinks that God deflects bullets for him, because he has a purpose. And he’s not saying that to get the Christian vote. He says it because he believes it. 

The purpose is saving America. And everything else is pragmatic. Because he has the goods, he has the Destiny. Art of the Deal was a love letter to his own sense of Destiny, as much as it was the description of a technique. 

This is both an incredible, almost superhuman strength, and a fatal flaw. Trump can survive things that would break a normal man and certainly things that would break a normal politician, and do it again and again while hardly caring. But he’s also going to assume every time that he himself can’t be played, can’t be fooled, and can’t be beaten. He’s going to take risks. He’s going to shake hands with whoever he needs to because surely people must know he’s Trump, and he will win. 

He could shake hands with McConnell. He can shake hands with Graham. He can shake hands with Mamdani. Because he does not have a set of abstracts saying don’t do that. The only abstracts that tie him are ‘is this the real situation?’, and ‘can I move this in America’s favour’. 

And his answer is always yes. Because America is destined to win. Because Donald Trump is destined to win. 

That’s what lets him shake hands with anyone. Not a howling void inside. An absolute sense of Destiny. 

I have more abstract principles than Trump. I couldn’t shake the hands of mob bosses in New York to get a building done. I couldn’t shake the hand of Mamdani. Trump knows what they are just as much as I do. He knows Mamdani’s a Communist and a threat. 

But Mamdani’s Mayor elect. Trump’s a pragmatist. Deal with it. All with the absolute certainty that if a smile is offered to an enemy, it’s Trump that will win in the end. 

Because he’s Trump. 

If I was in the same room as Mamdani I’d call him something I can’t repeat here. 

But I’m not a Man of Destiny.