The Man of the Decade
There is an old story about Donald Trump creating a phony Time’s Person of the Year cover to hang in one of his golf resorts. When we all heard that, we felt it was a pathetic sign of what a narcissist Trump is and how desperately he craves adoration and attention. This week, Trump has legitimately made it to the cover of Time magazine with the headline, “If he wins”. To be fair, he has, in one form or the other (many in caricature and not always in complimentary fashion) been on the cover of Time 34 times. One of those times, in 2016, the year he won the election for president, he was Time’s Person of the Year (like every U.S. President has been since FDR). The Person of the Year designation is about impact, not about righteousness. That’s why people like Putin, Hitler, Stalin, Khrushchev, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Rudy Giuliani have made the cover and Richard Nixon was on the cover for one reason or another 55 times.
This week’s cover story about Trump is all about the shocking set of actions that he has laid bare for us to examine that represent what he plans to do if he wins the 2024 election. Long gone are the days when people talk about a moderating presidency from Trump. He has shown his colors and we all know that he will both wreak havoc across the country and that he will no longer feel constrained by any of the normative guardrails that may have hemmed him in a bit during his prior presidency. He will not be surrounded by any moderates or institutionalists, but will rather stack the deck with loyalists to help him implement his authoritarian agenda. We have heard this story for some time now, but now it is put on full display or all of America to consider on the cover of the country’s most ubiquitous remaining Middle-American publication. This is a magazine not for the elite, but rather the masses, and it will be hard for anyone to say that they were unaware of what another Trump presidency would likely entail. That makes this a moment of truth for America. We are all being forced to ask ourselves, “Is this what we want in our country?”
All of the Trump narcissism notwithstanding, we are at a point where we must say to ourselves and to posterity that no one since perhaps FDR has had such a persistent and impactful presence on American life. While those of us from the New York City business community have been aware of Donald Trump for forty years and most Americans have had him as a regular visitor into their lives via his reality TV show, The Apprentice, which aired from 2004 to 2017, it has been the last decade where his presence had been most noteworthy. During that decade, Donald Trump has become a global phenomenon of the ultimate order. Last year’s Person of the Year was Taylor Swift and while she has tremendous cultural influence across the brand spectrum of our lives, Trump’s impact is far more pervasive and based on absolute power, unlike any that the modern world has ever seen before. Hitler was pretty pervasive for Europe for fifteen years, Putin has a further reach than his perch probably deserves. Not since perhaps Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan or Queen Victoria, has anyone been on the precipice of such power as Donald Trump will possesses if he wins in 2024. For all the reasons I mentioned that reigned himself in during his prior term, this term would be vastly different and unconstrained.
I imagine that while those noteworthy and power-hungry leaders commanded vast swaths of the known world of their times, the lack of ubiquitous mass communication and the relative simplicity of life in those days made the impact on the Everyman of those eras perhaps less significant. It seems likely that regular people were given little or no choice about their leadership and probably were generally less aware of how their lives were dramatically changed by the reach of the powerful leader under whose reign they lived. That is all different today, which is somehow better and yet worse. It seems that awareness and choice are always good things when it comes to self-determination. But most people in the ancient world were far more constrained by nature or simple economics to be so much affected by leadership edicts. They may have had children conscripted to fight the next battle, but that child was only so likely to survive their childhood anyway and the value of life was somehow less. Brutality by the leader was relatively less brutal because the brutality of the world at large was so great. But today, everyone in the world more or less knows everything, thanks to the internet more than anything else. While it is harder to know where truth lies in this environment, it is out there to find if people want to search hard enough,,,certainly in the United States.
It is shocking the degree to which we are confronted today with such fundamental choices in the form of leadership we prefer. The issues seem all to be on the table and nothing makes that more clear than the recent Time story. There have been numerous books about autocracy and democracy written over the last few years and they seem to be accelerating by the day. I tend to believe that of those who support Trump at this point there are three types, somewhat evenly split. Only a third of his supporters fall into the category of those who actually WANT Trump to be given total power, as they are calling it, a mandate for dictatorship. Another third don’t really want that and suspect that he will be able to be controlled much as he was during his first term and thus, that all the anti-democracy rhetoric from the left is just political fear-mongering. The last third of his supports are simply not thinking about the bigger picture issue and just like the performative aspects of Trump that brings entertainment to their otherwise boring lives. They are more like those constituents of ancient times who just don’t feel that their leaders impact their lives very much.
If I am anywhere near right about the the composition of his supporters, his Time story seems like an incredible, perhaps campaign-defining, mistake. Trump needs no help in galvanizing the third who want a dictator. The last third that don’t really understand and don’t care seems unaffected by such a piece. But the middle third will have a hard time denying the warnings that are being circulated about what is to come. People like to say that Trump is a brilliant political tactician, but I am not so sure. I have to admit that he is easily the most impactful politician of my generation, regardless of how this election goes. I tend to think that some leaders rise based on their intrinsic skill sets, but that others are products of the times. I put Trump squarely in the latter category. He has skillfully used social media to misinform the electorate and that is less a skill and more a cultural phenomenon. His political skills are like his legal maneuvering skills, they have worked better than they should have to date, but they also seem close to coming to the end of their effectiveness. Nonetheless, as ashamed I am to admit it, if we tried to nominate a man of the decade at this moment, Trump would win hands down.