It’s high time for candor. Donald J. Trump’s presidency was not causally misdirected. Rather, by design, it spawned and sustained a still-accelerating existential crisis, not just a crisis of meaning, but one of survival. Taken together, the most evident components of this three-pronged crisis were Mr. Trump’s incessant attacks on law, justice and American national security.
There are multiple explanatory details. In 2024, Donald Trump’s sordid past could quickly become prologue. “Trump I” was not only ridden with expansive nepotism, crime and corruption. It also endangered our physical continuance as a nation.
From the beginning of Trump I, Americans had ample reason to worry about making such an unstable candidate the ultimate custodian of nuclear weapons authority.[1] If there is to be a “Trump II” – and this is an increasingly plausible prospect – the nation would once again have to confront a dissembling national leader’s shallow reasoning, belligerent rhetoric, empty witticisms and blithe lawlessness. Could any such self-inflicted confrontation make intellectual or ethical sense?
It’s a silly question.
For deeper answers, history would deserve some prominent pride of place. During Trump I there were far-reaching challenges of pathology. Significantly, Covid-19 did not disappear miraculously (Trump’s own preferred argument), but became manageable as the calculated result of science-based reasoning. To be sure, the pandemic never yielded to a tawdry impresario’s sleight of hand.[2]
Credo quia absurdum, said the ancient philosopher Tertullian. “I believe because it is absurd.” Now that Donald Trump is once again a serious candidate for the presidency. there is no longer any point to further clarifying his prior errors and derelictions. Whether considered one at a time or serially, Trump’s analytic and moral shortcomings are simply irremediable, or integral to the man. In essence, far-reaching and once-unimaginable, these debilities express a dissembling fait accompli; accordingly,they can be dealt with only by keeping Trump distant from a second White House residency.[3] Understood in more conceptual terms, this rabidly anti-intellectual “mass man” must be kept detached from any renewed presidential power.
A generic questions arises: Who is this “mass man?” As humankind was warned earlier by Jose Ortega y’ Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses (1930), this inglorious figure “has no attention to spare for authentic reasoning.”
Donald J. Trump is this quintessential mass-man in the flesh. Apropos of the Spanish philosopher, he “learns only in his own flesh.” Inevitably, such celebration of visceral eruptions is exactly how a Trump II administration would choose to “learn.”
There are further details. Indifferent to law at every level, domestic and international, Donald J. Trump remains the undisputed champion of anti-reason and insidious falsehood. Though most Americans might resist any too-stark comparisons of Trump’s leadership with examples from the Third Reich, there are still certain obvious points of commonality. Among other things, these points ought never to be dismissed out of hand.
“Intellect rots the brain,” shrieked Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels at a Nuremberg rally in 1935. “I love the poorly educated” intoned Donald Trump during his 2016 campaign for the presidency. What these assertions have in common is a potentially tragic disdain for science and education. They point also to a mutually deformed national ideal, one that favors mindless public obedience to seemingly authoritative leadership commands. That such a twisted ideal must be both vulgar and impermissible was established unequivocally at Nuremberg in 1945-46, and later at the post-war Tokyo Trial.
There is more. Robotic Trump minions remain generally undisturbed by their master’s gleeful indifference to law, justice and American national security. For them, documented facts and binding statutes are always just minor matters. For these manipulable citizens, the servile phrase “I believe” is all that counts. For them, the more nuanced “I think” is either completely unknown or manifestly unworthy.
For the self-parodying faithful caught up in Donald Trump’s always-rancorous deflections from serious issues, independent thought remains anathema. For them, the Cartesian “cogito” (“I think”) might just as well never have been fashioned.[4] For them, merely to think independently is unpatriotic on its face.
Consistently “learning only in his own flesh…,” former US President Donald J. Trump still demonstrates his glaring antipathy for history, learning, art, law and logic. Earlier, when he had returned from his Singapore summit with North Korea’s Kim Jung Un, Trump declared that the calculable risks of a bilateral nuclear war had been removed. This was because, he alleged, the two leaders had fallen “in love.”
What does a thinking American citizen say to such a grotesque metaphor? For the United States, any such a nonsensical and stream-of-consciousness excursion into gibberish by an American president represents more than superficial ignorance. Later, during our fearful Covid time of biological “plague,” these declensions became widely life-threatening. In law, they came verifiably close to becoming genocide-like crimes.[5]
Until recently, mass-death scenarios of relentless pandemic were especially riveting, but the more “normal” dangers of nuclear war and terrorism[6] did not simultaneously disappear. In plausibly expected worst case narratives, war, terror or perhaps another pandemic could occur more-or-less at the same time, with harshly interactive results that are not simply intersectional but also “synergistic.” Here, by definition, the whole of any potential catastrophe would be greater than the sum of its parts.[7]
In the most optimistic scenarios, there would be nothing expressly murderous or genocidal in Trump II policies, whether foreign and domestic. Unambiguously, however, there would remain a far-reaching indifference to basic legal expectations regarding human rights and human welfare. “All men have my blood and I have all men’s,” wrote American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Self-Reliance,”[8] but any such cosmopolitan sentiment would be alien and incomprehensible to Donald J. Trump or his enthusiastic believers in “America First.”. As with other difficult matters of intellectual judgment, this re-aspiring president’s near-total lack of empathic feelings reveals a worrisome level of personal “emptiness.”[9] Among other things, this lack portends an authoritarian national leader of stunningly breathtaking vapidity.
Where should Americans go from such a prospectively unbearable point of departure? Whatever else we might conclude, Donald Trump displays numerous and incontrovertible clinical derangements. Still, rather than continue to approach them as if they were singularly meaningful and correspondingly remediable, all should now finally understand that (1) there exists no feasible “fix” for such complex concatenations of presidential behavior, and (2) the danger posed by this former and potentially future president is overwhelming for law-based governance and is also “imminent in point of time.”[10]
Though Trump believes that anything he does is undertaken with absolute purity of heart, similarly felt convictions were detectable among the 1930s managers of Third Reich propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
Facing the 2024 presidential election, there is already far too much “noise.” Among those many citizens who strenuously loathe refined intellect and jurisprudential thought, it is an acrimonious noise made on behalf of a patently destructive American political showman.[11] So what happens next?
To begin, there will be existential lessons to be learned. For all Americans, the most ruinous evasion will be to seek comfort and succor in any Trump II forms of coming-together; that is, to seek escape from any moral and legal judgment as private citizens. This search won’t work.
“In eternity,” reminds Soren Kierkegaard, “each shall render account as an individual.“[12] If the 19th century Danish philosopher was correct, there will be at least this residual sort of “last judgment.”
Words matter. Strong language need not be hyperbolic. “Monster” is a reasonable term of judgment for any re-aspiring American president who openly encourages insurrectionary crimes against the United States and against other nations.[13] Even without mens rea, or what the jurists would call “criminal intent,”[14] Trump’s casual unconcern for science-based judgments on disease, law[15] and war could sometime result in the death of millions. In effect, such Trump II unconcern would exhibit a uniquely hideous species of “vice,” a species so vastly defiling that it would overwhelm any more “measured,” “balanced,” or “objective” sorts of description.
A core obligation arises, one that is both legal and intellectual. We must ask promptly: What has been happening in politics and society? For a tentative answer, we may consult Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Man:” “Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, as to be hated needs but to be seen; Yet, seen too often, familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
The Trump presidency was certainly not the first to flout or disregard considerations of law, justice and national security, but it was the most egregious. Back in 2016, Donald J. Trump was viewed widely as a vaguely humorous and eccentric candidate, but certainly not one to be taken seriously.[16] Over time, however, and despite multiple successive infringements of law and justice following his incoherent entry into the White House,[17] Trump revealed that our most sacred legal and political institutions can become impotent in the face of a determined presidential fool or tyrant.
With this sobering revelation, Americans should now ask themselves a previously unimaginable question: “Can we reasonably re-elect a former president who places greater value on “personal popularity” than on America’s national welfare?” For many, the answer, which really ought to be obvious, is nonetheless problematic. In that lamentable fact lies the basic explanation of Trump II.
[1]See by this author, Louis Rene Beres, https://www://thebulletin.org/2016/08/what-if-you-dont-trust-the-judgment-of-the-president-whose-finger-is-over-the-nuclear-button/; and (Pentagon) https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/nuclear-decision-making/
[2] In this connection, reminds Sigmund Freud: “Fools, visionaries, sufferers from delusions, neurotics and lunatics have played great roles at all times in the history of mankind, and not merely when the accident of birth had bequeathed them sovereignty. Usually, they have wreaked havoc.”
[3] One should recall that Donald Trump’s core philosophy of belligerent nationalism (“America First”) is contrary to all basic principles of international law. International law is an integral part of the legal system of all states in world politics, and assumes a reciprocally common obligation of states to supply benefits to one another. This assumption of jurisprudential solidarity is known formally as a “peremptory” or jus cogens expectation, that is, one that is never subject to question or reversal. It can be discovered early in Justinian, Corpus Juris Civilis, Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace (1625) and Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations or Principles of Natural Law (1758).
[4] Cogito ergo sum, “I think therefore I am.” The exact reference here is to the “universal doubt” encouraged by René Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637).
[5] Professor Beres is the author of several major books and many law journal articles on genocide-like crimes. See, for example, Louis René Beres, “Genocide and Genocide-Like Crimes,” in M. Cherif Bassiouni., ed., International Criminal Law: Crimes (New York, Transnational Publishers, 1986), pp. 271-279. On the crime of genocide under international law, see: See Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, opened for signature, December 9, 1948, entered into force, January 12, 1951, 78 U.N.T.S. 277. Although the criminalizing aspect of international law that proscribes genocide-like conduct may derive from a source other than the Genocide Convention (i.e., it may emerge from customary international law and be included in different international conventions), such conduct is clearly a crime under international law. Even where the conduct in question does not affect the interests of more than one state, it becomes an international crime whenever it constitutes an offense against the world community delicto jus gentium.
[6] Under international law, terrorist movements are always Hostes humani generis, or “Common enemies of mankind.” See: Research in International Law: Draft Convention on Jurisdiction with Respect to Crime, 29 AM J. INT’L L. (Supp. 1935) 435, 566 (quoting King v. Marsh (1615), 3 Bulstr. 27, 81 Eng. Rep 23 (1615) (“a pirate est Hostes humani generis”)).
[7] See, by this writer, at Harvard Law School: Louis René Beres, https://harvardnsj.org/2015/06/core-synergies-in-israels-strategic-planning-when-the-adversarial-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts/ See also, by this writer, at West Point (Pentagon): Louis René Beres https://mwi.usma.edu/threat-convergence-adversarial-whole-greater-sum-parts/
[8] We may think also of the corresponding Talmudic observation: “The earth from which the first man was made was gathered in all the four corners of the world.”
[9] See by this writer, Louis René Beres, at The Daily Princetonian, https://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2018/02/emptiness-and-consciousness
[10] In jurisprudence, this phrase appears as the solitary permissible justification for national acts of “anticipatory self-defense.” This principle of customary jurisprudence has its modern origins in the so-called Caroline Case, which concerned the unsuccessful rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada against British rule. Following this landmark case, even the serious threat of an armed attack can sometimes be taken as sufficient justification for defensive military action. In more narrowly technical jurisprudence, the criterion of permissibility revolves around a danger presumed to be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment or deliberation.” Of course, during the first third of the nineteenth century, there could have been no conceivable thought of forestalling a nuclear aggression.
[11] In a wholly negative assessment, twentieth century German writer Thomas Mann would have called Trump a “magician.” See for example, his classic novella on the rise of Nazism, “Mario and the Magician.”
[12] The Kierkegaardian concept of “crowd” is roughly analogous to philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s “herd,” psychologist Car G. Jung’s “mass,” or Sigmund Freud’s “horde.”
[13] Regarding US legal obligations toward other nations, see for example, by Louis René Beres: https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/jurist-us-abandons-legal-obligations-syria; and
[14] Professor Louis René Beres is the author of many law journal articles at Harvard National Security Journal; Yale Global Online, Oxford University Yearbook of International Law (Oxford University Press); World Politics (Princeton) and Jurist.
[15] One must remember here that pertinent obligations of international law are also generally obligations of US law. In the precise words of Mr. Justice Gray, delivering the judgment of the US Supreme Court in Paquete Habana (1900): “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained and administered by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction….” (175 U.S. 677(1900)) See also: Opinion in Tel-Oren vs. Libyan Arab Republic (726 F. 2d 774 (1984)).Moreover, the specific incorporation of treaty law into US municipal law is expressly codified at Art. 6 of the US Constitution, the so-called “Supremacy Clause.”
[16] “The man who laughs,” says playwright Berthold Brecht, “has simply not yet herd the terrible news.”
[17] These infringements include assorted incorporated violations of human rights law. To wit, Article 6 of the US Constitution clarifies, inter alia, that “…all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land….” The United States is a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, which contains (at Article 33) the basic principle of non-refoulement: “No Contracting State shall expel or return (“refouler”) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”