After a couple of weeks in Washington DC, my rueful report is that Trumpworld is even stranger close up. Arriving after the president ordered the army to take over the capital, we were met by the visual shock of armoured vehicles guarding the Union Station forecourt. National Guard troops strolling along Massachusetts Avenue completed the coup imagery.
Yet the cheerful young soldiers enjoying beautiful weather didn’t have much to do apart from chat and laugh with their fellow citizens. An optimistic view is that Trump’s authoritarianism tends to be performative, a “secondhand reproduction of the strongman aesthetic of other strongman states” as one commentator described it.
Sending in the troops is meant to signal power and control. Yet many locals saw it as a lesser example of the president’s peccadillos. The mild response reflects America’s reverence for its military and for the office of president, whatever the nature of the man at the top.
In a town obsessed by politics, power and policy, the president’s personality always matters. Trump is using his power to pulverise Washington, pole-axing government departments and budgets and pushing thousands of public servants out the door. Trump supporters believe the president acts to smash the “deep state”; Washington sees more nihilistic destruction than policy purpose.
Trump as the rampager from New York was given sporting expression at the baseball when I saw the New York Mets thrash the Washington Nationals at the start of a three-match series. The Nationals won the series 2–1 over the following nights, so the deeper symbolism is the capital’s resilience. (Beyond sports razzmatazz, baseball is the natural setting for a hotdog with the lot, an American culinary masterpiece only beaten by crabcake in a diner. Always with beer.)
For Trump, bashing Washington is as American as apple pie. Americans are even more jaundiced about Washington than Australians are about Canberra. The way Americans distrust their government drew this lament fifty years ago from one of the nation’s great chroniclers: “I do find curious and disturbing the constant hatred of government which is of course a hatred of themselves.”
The sage was the writer Gore Vidal (1925–2012), who grew up in Washington, where he lived with his grandfather, a US senator. Vidal’s fascination with politics saw him stand for election to both the US House of Representatives and Senate, and produce a seven-novel series, Narratives of a Golden Age, tracking America’s history from 1775 to the cold war.
Seeking to understand Trump’s place in that history, I reached for Vidal’s 1300-page brick of a book, United States: Essays, collecting his reporting and commentaries from 1952 to 1992.
Vidal would be fascinated and infuriated by President Trump, just as he was by Richard Nixon (one of his plays was An Evening with Richard Nixon). Vidal saw Nixon as “too gorgeous and outsize an American figure for any contemporary to put into a clear perspective.” That’s Trump to a capital “T,” gorgeously gaudy and as outrageous as he is outsized.
As he demonstrated in an essay on Nixon, Vidal would applaud the “No Kings” protests against Trump’s regal pretensions. While the sovereign of Britain was known to her subjects as Our Queen, he wrote, “the emperor of the West is known to us aficionados as The Goddamned President.” Vidal mused that the US president “is ours in a way that the Queen is not England’s, because she was invented by history, while Nixon made himself up, with a lot of help from all of us. As individuals, the presidents are accidental; but as types, they are inevitable and represent, God help us, us. We are Nixon; he is us.”
Now there’s a thought for any American to contemplate: “We are Trump; he is us.”
Pondering such an equation, Vidal wrote, “the fact that Nixon was corrupt some of the time, and complex and devious all of the time, is constantly emphasised in order to make him appear uniquely sleezy — and the rest of us just grand. Yet Nixon is hardly atypical. Certainly his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, far surpassed Nixon when it came to mendacity and corruption… Actually, corruption has been more the rule than the exception in US political life.”
In Trump, Vidal would see the same sense of personal grievance that Nixon brought to politics, and the same eagerness to use the government to go after all the hated enemies. Rough language and vicious politics can express paranoia as well as serve authoritarian aims.
Vidal called Nixon “an infamous man who has done great deeds for his country” by striking a detente with the Soviet Union and embracing China. Using that infamous-man/great-deeds standard, Vidal would find much to applaud in Trumpworld. He would disdain the red Make America Great Again cap, but his essays advocated MAGA policies; he would detest the Trump personality but embrace his America First vision. Indeed, Vidal was arguing American First long before Trump decided politics was a great business opportunity.
Vidal thought America should fix its own problems, not those of other countries. Dismantle the National Security State and the military-industrial complex. Abandon the “American empire.” Junk military alliances and fight no more foreign wars. Vietnam’s enduring lesson, he thought, was that “we have no right to intervene militarily in the affairs of another nation.”
Shunning great power responsibilities would be a turn towards America’s economic interests. Like Trump, Vidal thought America best served itself by making a profit out of foreign friends and foes. Vidal pinpointed a key moment of decline as 1985, when America became an international debtor nation: “Like most modern empires, ours rested not so much on military prowess as on our economic primacy.”
Vidal’s deep distrust for America’s vast military establishment meant his simple recipe for budget repair was to slash defence spending. Reared in the isolationist tradition, he saw the second world war as the moment when America opted to become a garrison state. By the 1990s, Vidal wrote, old isolationist arguments were alive again. Referring to what is now the Trump dichotomy, Vidal said Americans divide “between those who think America comes first versus those who favour empire and the continued exertion of force everywhere in the name of democracy, something not much on display here at home.”
Today the foreign policy commentators lament how Trump is dismantling the tools of diplomacy and abandoning alliances so the US can stand alone. For Vidal, that would redeem much else about Trump’s crassness.
As Vidal portrayed US history in his Golden Age books, the land of the free and the home of the brave has always mixed crude politics with soaring rhetoric. Trump is just one more character in the cacophonous cavalcade of American leaders — a cavalcade with lots of conniving and corruption mixed with the conviction and the courage.
Vidal would salute Trump’s political career as “one of the most interesting events of our time” (a line he used about Nixon). He would see Trump not as an aberration but an exuberant expression of the way America always does politics.
The Vidal-flavoured bumper sticker for Americans is that judgement, both gleeful and ironic: Trump is us. This sharpest of shafts rests on the optimism of a writer who loved America for all its faults. The “us” of America is always greater than even its strongest presidents. And America will absorb and then outgrow Trump as it has all its leaders. •
