Trump and charisma
By 
I spent an hour reading the extremely long interview [gift link] the NYT published with Tucker Carlson a couple of days ago, and I have a lot of thoughts about it. Let me lay down a marker here: Eleven years ago, I wrote a post about how Donald Trump had a non-trivial chance of being the next president of the United States. There were around 140 replies to that post and every single one that expressed an opinion on the question told me I was being totally absurd, and that the chances of this happening were essentially zero.
So yeah . . . Tucker Carlson, I’m sorry to say, is somebody to watch in terms of the 2028 presidential election. He’s positioning himself to make a run at it, and, if he does, his chances of winning are non-trivial. That’s all I’m going to say about that now, but I’ll have more on that later.
For now, I want to focus on just one very discrete question, which for me at least is fascinating in a morbid way, which is, what is it specifically about Donald Trump as an individual that has got him elected president twice, and counting? I’m well aware of the structural factors here: I realize Trump is president because a huge number of Americans wanted an unambiguous white supremacist, misogynist, and ethno-nationalist to Own the Libz, in the context of an un-ambigously reactionary and authoritarian political project. This is especially true of white evangelical Christians who felt like they were losing “their” country, but it was true of a lot of other people as well.
These structural factors are well known. Donald Trump exists because if he didn’t it would have been necessary to invent him: this is, on some level, obvious. But there was, eleven years ago, no shortage of white supremacist, misogynist, ethno-nationalists eager and willing to Own the Libz, so why this guy? Yeah Mark Burnett and that stupid TV show is a huge reason. Still, a lot of people are on TV and have big audiences and name recognition. Tucker Carlson for example. Again, why Trump? Carlson himself is clearly fascinating by this question:
Tell me what you’re getting at when you say the president of the United States, the most powerful country in the world, had no choice [in regard to his decision to attack Iran?} I don’t know what I’m getting at. I’m just telling you what I observed. That’s the question. What I’m fascinated by is the lack of curiosity on display into how exactly this happened. What are the mechanisms by which a guy who’s supposedly sovereign, in charge, granted this authority by voters, tens of millions of them, can’t make a decision in the country’s interest or even in his own interest? He knew, and I know he knew because I talked to him about it directly, the potential consequences were profound and profoundly bad — the end of his presidency, to start, which I think it has proven to be. He knew that. This is my read and I could be completely wrong — I don’t know what’s in his head and I don’t want to overstate my knowledge at all. But this is my strong perception on the basis of many conversations on this topic.
He felt he had no choice and he said to me, Everything’s going to be OK. Because I was getting overwrought. Don’t do this. The people pushing you to do this hate you. They’re your enemies. This will destroy you. This will gravely harm our country. We’ve got kids. I’m hoping for grandkids. Let’s not go there. And he said, It’s going to be all right, and he said, Do you know how I know that? And I said no, and he said, Because it always is. There’s a kind of Teddy Rooseveltian optimism there, but that’s not really what it was. This is my read. That was more a justification from a man who feels he has no choice. That is my strong view. And not just my strong view, the view of others who are around him and involved in this deliberation to the extent it was a deliberation, which is not much.
Who were the other people around him who had that view? I can’t speak for the views of others, but I will just say once again that I never saw, nor did I hear about anybody who works for the Trump administration, who was enthusiastically pushing this war on Trump, being like: “You want to make this country great again? We need a regime-change effort in Iran.” Instead there were a lot of cowardly people, as there always are, and Trump engenders cowardice in the people around him through intimidation. And there is a kind of quality that he has that’s spellbinding. And I think it probably literally is a spell. And the effect is to weaken people around him and make them more compliant and more confused. And I’ve experienced this myself. You spend a day with Trump and you’re in this kind of dreamland. It’s like smoking hash or something. It’s interesting, very interesting. And there may be a supernatural component to it. I’m not a theologian, but it’s real, and anyone who’s been around him can tell you it’s true. But whatever the cause, no one around him was weighing in strongly, as far as I know, on either side, for or against. But people from the outside were strongly weighing in, calling him constantly.
That’s pretty interesting. Tucker Carlson is a rich and famous guy who has been around a million celebrities, political and otherwise, for his whole adult life, so when he says being around Trump is like smoking hashish that’s notable I think. (I’ve only smoked hashish once in my life, in the summer of 1982, while lying on the hood of an Oldsmobile 88 in a field in the Salinas Valley, listening to the Eagles’ song “I Can’t Tell You Why?” It was . . . memorable).
I’ve speculated that when people talk about a politician’s “charisma” they are in large part projecting onto that person qualities that they are looking for, and so they find those qualities. I still think that’s true, but that’s clearly nothing like the whole story. Again, why is Trump, specifically, such a successful object for such projections? What does it mean to say he has — or is granted — Max Weber’s famous charism by people like Tucker Carlson, as well as many tens of millions of much more ordinary Americans?
That seems, under our present circumstances, a pretty significant question.