Modernity and its Discontents

Jon D. Michaels, “Trump and the Deep State: The Government Fights Back,” Foreign Affairs, Sep/Oct 2017. Michaels begins his article with an observation.   “One of the strangest aspects of the current era,” he writes, “is that the president of the United States seems to have little interest in running the country’s government.”   It’s something of a truism that there are differences between the skills necessary to secure an office and those necessary to hold onto an office, and those necessary to both securing and holding differ from those necessary to actually doing the job implied by the office.     Likewise, initially, as is the case with all American politicians subject to election and re-election, the concerns of securing and holding office take on a sort of continuing precedence over “doing the job,” for the obvious reason that one cannot do the job if one is not in the job.     We all know, of course, there are many motivations for seeking office...

The Politics of Grievance David Roth, “Making Sense of Donald Trump’s Petulant Reign,” New Republic , June 12, 2019. There seem to be two aspects to Donald Trump’s personality.   The first, and the one that connects him to the Evangelical communities, is the messianic.   He believes himself to be, in effect, the chosen one sent to redeem and repair America. [1]    The secular version of the messiah is, of course, the superhero, and Roth begins his piece recounting a (blessedly) failed animated series called Trump Takeover: The Ultimate Power Trip , in which “Trump was taking over everything and making it better.”    One pitched episode has Trump and his team “’uncovering a global financial conspiracy’ and ends with them triumphantly taking control of the stock market ‘to save the world economy from total ruin.’”    Another, more pertinent example, “’Politically Corrected,’ begins with ‘America … in a state of virtual collapse,’ which is...