I have a friend who worked in the first Trump administration who really admired the ancient virtue magnanimity (which is different than the modern definition, generosity). I thought that was odd since she is a devout Catholic whereas through most of the past 2,400 years magnanimity has been seen as a pagan virtue that directly contradicts the Christian ones. But especially after Tuesday night’s presidential address I could understand her interest. I walked away thinking that ancient magnanimity is the organizing principle of Donald Trump’s life — or at least a third rate, schoolboy version of magnanimity.
What is classical magnanimity? The magnanimous man is a certain social type who down through the centuries has fascinated people like Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas and Nietzsche. The magnanimous man accurately believes he is great and seeks to win triumphs that will bring glory and greatness to his country. Noble versions of magnanimity include Pericles, who led Athens through some of the Peloponnesian War, and more recently Charles de Gaulle, who reclaimed France from the Nazis. Third-rate versions include Trump, who dreams of conquest over Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal.
The magnanimous man does not believe in equality. In his view, some people are great-souled; they lead, live in splendor and strive for eternal fame. Other people are small-souled; they follow and are grateful to be led. The great-souled man displays courage and seeks honor and power. He has contempt for the small-souled man, whose humility, charity and compassion seem to him forms of weakness.
The quintessential magnanimous man is aloof. He doesn’t really have friends. Historically, he has rivals from whom he extracts tribute (like trying to seize Ukraine’s mineral wealth), and he has acolytes on whom he bestows gifts. He gives gifts to others not out of generosity but to display his own superiority. On Tuesday night, Trump told a grieving mother he was naming a wildlife preserve after her murdered daughter. He gave a student the gift of admission to West Point. Trump glowed at the sight of his own noblesse oblige.
The magnanimous man is charismatic. Whatever you think of the man, Trump’s speech on Tuesday night was a political triumph. He made himself look dominating, energetic and in control, while the Democrats looked pathetic and weak. His followers loved it. Populations that feel betrayed and disrespected naturally go for leaders who radiate status, power and vitality.
Of course one problem for Trump is that he is not the admirable version of the magnanimous man; he is a made-for-TV simulacrum of one. A truly magnanimous man — whether Pericles, Alexander the Great, de Gaulle, George Washington, George Patton or Winston Churchill — has earned his self-estimation. He has made himself wise, courageous, prudent and virtuous through hard study and a life of service. Trump, by contrast, has merely swooped up his hair.
Unlike the truly magnanimous, Trump is a leader who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He believes that there are tens of thousands of 160-year-olds getting Social Security benefits, but that’s fictional. He says South Korea is protectionist toward the United States, but we signed free trade deals in 2007 and 2012. He said that he would lift tariffs on Canada when opioid death rates fell, but they were already falling sharply. A truly magnanimous leader would be embarrassed to be so ignorant, not proud of it.
Magnanimity tends to be prideful, and pride, especially in a puffed-up man, tends to be fragile. This kind of magnanimous man seeks godlike self-sufficiency. But he also needs to be admired, and that admiration can come only from the masses, whom he privately holds in contempt. His addiction to approval is voracious and he refuses criticism, even when it is meant to be helpful, from his own supporters. Such a man lives with the secret fear that he might in fact be ordinary or insignificant.
The magnanimous man is a poor fit for democracy. Democracy is built on the idea of human equality, precisely the notion that magnanimity rejects. Democracy is built on the compromise between ideas and factions, which the great man also rejects.
As Jonathan Rauch noted recently in The Atlantic, democracy is built upon institutions, agencies and Constitutions that transcend one person. But Trump practices “patrimonialism.” He acts as if he is the nation’s all-powerful father. The state is an extended household. He treats government as his own personal property, his own family business. Everything revolves around him.
All magnanimous men have large and healthy egos, but Trump’s narcissism is the elephantiasis of egotism. It takes the form of “I alone can fix it.” Before Trump came on the scene, I didn’t appreciate the fact that the flip side of narcissism is isolationism. Trump first campaigned with the promise to build a wall. On Tuesday night he promised wall after wall. A tariff wall against Canada. A wall against Europe. A wall against the starving recipients of foreign aid. A wall down the middle of the chamber between Democrats and Republicans. Over the next four years, I predict, Trump will build a wall between everybody else and himself.
Trump lives for perpetual conflict and endless domination games. In an essay collection titled “Magnanimity and Statesmanship” the political theorist Peter Augustine Lawler observed that the circumstances that make magnanimous people happy — war and revolution — make most people miserable.
How does a nation overcome the seductions of the magnanimous leader? Abraham Lincoln offers a model. When he was 28, he gave a speech in which he warned that if the American system toppled, it would be because of homegrown men of overweening ambition. Historians have surmised that Lincoln was conscious of his own unchecked ambition as a political threat.
Lincoln argued that we can counter this kind of ambitious tyrant by cultivating a “political religion” based on reverence for law. He also confronted and regulated his own personal ambition by cultivating the virtues that stand in contrast to it — humility, kindness, respect for the equal dignity of all human beings. Lincoln emerged, by his 50s, as a man who reconciled power and humility.
It’s worth noting that our civilization has mostly rejected the pagan virtues and embraced the Abrahamic virtues. These virtues enable diverse people to live in friendship with one another, not amid permanent dominance games.
Friendship stands as a powerful rebuke to the magnanimous man, a better way to live. Lincoln ended up practicing a different and superior form of politics to the one Trump aspires to. Lincoln believed that you succeed in a democracy when you treat others as friends and not as enemies: “If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great high road to his reason.”
There was very little of that spirit out of Trump’s mouth on Tuesday night.
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