For Trump, the Political Is the Personal

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/19/opinion/trump-narcissism.html

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President Trump was several minutes into an extemporaneous speech on Monday when an offhand locution clarified an important reason the government shutdown persists: “I said I’ll build the wall and I’m going to build the wall.”

The first-person singular is familiar to observers of both this president and his recent predecessors. Mr. Trump has escalated this phenomenon, as in his telling inquiry regarding Jim Mattis, the former secretary of defense: “What’s he done for me?” In this acceleration of the personal presidency, Mr. Trump is abetted by opponents who insist on interpreting all events through him. The result is that the space between the man and the office is vanishing. The shutdown dispute has sharply divided Democrats and Republicans, but all seem to agree on one crucial point: “L’état, c’est Trump.”

The motto of this presidency might best be expressed as the reverse of the old feminist slogan “The personal is political.” According to Trumpism, the political is determined by the personal. All issues are judged by their compatibility with Mr. Trump’s interests. This may be smart politics. It is not serious conservatism. It is a formula for an all-encompassing politics that intrudes into every realm of life.

Mr. Trump’s presidency has upended many conservative orthodoxies. Perhaps none is more disconcerting than the collapsing barrier between the political and the social. The key distinction is between state and society. The state wields coercive authority over certain realms of life, the extent of which liberals and conservatives reasonably dispute. Society, by contrast, consists of the rich layers of private associations — families, religious institutions, civic clubs, businesses and media — that provide a buffer between the individual and the state.

Mr. Trump’s lack of interest in a social space insulated from politics is evident in things like his attacks on Amazon because its chairman separately owns a newspaper Mr. Trump perceives as hostile and his opining on cultural topics — such as his former television show — unrelated to his authority.

Mr. Trump has bullied companies for where they allocate capital, often in response to his own policies, and sought to push private employers into arrangements like his failed deal with the Carrier Corporation to prevent the transfer of jobs to Mexico.

The problem is not that this is bad economic policy — though it is — or that the president’s cultural commentary is often, to say the least, uncivil. Nor is the problem the hypocrisy of Republicans applauding these pronouncements even though they would howl if Democrats sought similarly to intervene in the market. The real problem, rather, is the intrusion of politics into realms once removed from it. It is increasingly difficult to tell what is properly political and what is not.

A recent — or at the speed of Trumpism, ancient — tweet is illustrative. Mr. Trump proclaimed that news bias and satire targeting him “should be tested in courts, can’t be legal?” The first sentence of the first provision of the Bill of Rights, which Mr. Trump has sworn to protect, insulates such topics from government. But what is more disconcerting than Mr. Trump’s constitutional ignorance is his obliviousness to the idea that some things fall within state jurisdiction and others do not. That news coverage and satire are unpleasant for him is irrelevant to whether coercive power should be deployed to control them.

In their waning days in the majority, House Republicans hauled Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google, before that body’s Judiciary Committee to account for whether his search engine suppresses conservative content. Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican who headed the committee, said that “the American people deserve to know” how search engines work because “the market works best when information about products and services is readily available.” Has it become a conservative belief that anything the public deserves to know falls within the authority of Congress to expose, or only those things that involve Mr. Trump’s political interests?

Traditional conservatism would have recognized the danger in politics creeping further onto what was once the terrain of the social sector. One of Alexis de Tocqueville’s most famous insights was that civil associations, which he described as “in no way political,” enlivened American life and, crucially, preserved freedom from an all-embracing state. Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian political economist, predicted that one factor undermining capitalism would be “wars of conquest” on the private sphere “by the men of the public sphere.” The conservative sociologist Robert Nisbet saw the erosion of these buffers as conducive to tyrannical politics. He observed that the individual had a need for community and would seek it in the state if it was unavailable in the society.

Mr. Trump is both an accelerant and a reflection of this longstanding erosion of the civic spaces that mediate between individuals and the state. This is a central irony of Trumpism. It drew part of its force in 2016 from a sense of economic and social dislocation from these spaces. Yet Mr. Trump has been less interested in restoring them than in offering his personality as a substitute.

In this sense, not only is there no separation between the political and the private, but there is also no separation between Mr. Trump and the presidential office — something his copious use of the first-person singular indicates.

In this, Democrats are not innocent. They, too, have fueled presidential celebrity. It is difficult to conjure a modern occupant of the office who has not. Before he won the office in 1912, Woodrow Wilson theorized about the need for presidential celebrity and then attempted to embody it. He wasn’t the last.

But Mr. Trump occupies the office now, and the conservatism he professes places special importance on limiting the scope of the political. Instead, his personality-driven politics requires attacks on anything, whether public or private, that obstructs an unmediated path from his voice to his followers’ ears.

This is both the result of the erosion of social institutions that Mr. Trump rued in 2016 and the cause of its acceleration. Its end point, if Mr. Trump’s proponents and critics alike do not stop filtering every issue through him personally, will be a politics that reaches everywhere even as citizens feel increasingly alienated from it.

Greg Weiner (@GregWeiner1) is a political scientist at Assumption College and the author of “Madison’s Metronome” and “American Burke: The Uncommon Liberalism of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.”

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