Where We Stand 6 Months into Trump 2.0

 

“Yes, you. The rabbit at the back of the room. Stand up.”

There will be a lot of talk by the experts now that the first half year is in the bank. The Honeymoon is over, so to speak. The bride has returned from her lavish world tour and is now spilling the secrets to her girlfriends. Was it all perfect? No. She won’t be discussing the great sex in detail because they were sleeping together before the wedding anyway, and now she can’t help confiding to her intimates some of the real life annoyances that always crop up when you’re sharing close quarters in foreign surroundings. Her confidence that the things about him she thought she could change or improve has been shaken. In little ways, he is still living his own life, no matter how solicitous he seems. He is always busy but he is not always with her. He stares alone out the window in the middle of the night. Sometimes he seems to be looking past her, even when they’re touching. She had particularly wanted to see a,particular museum on the tour, told him so, and see it they did, from a horse-drawn carriage as they drove past, but they did not go inside. Promise kept but she is not quite in charge even here at the center of things. Yet together they have experienced wonders, and she has been part of an adventure she could never have dreamed possible before she met him. Why does this not seem enough?

The most extraordinary things about Donald Trump is the extent to which everyone seems to have a personal relationship with him. One sided as it has to be for people like him. What’s that? Who is ‘people like him’? I can think of several. Muhammed Ali. Elvis Presley. Mick Jagger. George Washington. JFK. (Yes, there are others, but simpler to leave them out here except in passing…) These men all share the attribute of being larger than life, enduringly famous in both success and failure, unashamedly self-involved, and flawed enough to be as hated as they were belovèd. They were men of their time, so much so that they became synonymous with their times in key respects.

The easiest comparison is the first man I named. Muhammed Ali. Like Trump, he became the most famous man in the world. People loved and hated him with equal passion. Unlike Trump he was not born rich, but he was nevertheless ‘of the blood’ in that his family was reputed to be a collateral branch of the line of Henry Clay, four time candidate for the presidency, whose name was taken by the ‘natural sons’ of his philandering. Cassius Clay loved his name and his aristocratic legacy, whether people chose to believe it or not. He graduated last in his high school class, a fact which haters used throughout his career to deride his intelligence. He was obviously no dummy, but haters will hate and that’s a fact. His rise to celebrity was like a work of fiction too unrealistic to write. When he took up boxing because his moth got him into so much trouble even as a kid, he showed dazzling talent. He was also handsome, unabashedly boastful about that and his talent, and quite unlike any great black athlete before him. He won Olympic gold as a light-heavyweight and at 6’ 3” had no trouble gaining the weight required to go after the most coveted individual title in sports, the Heavyweight Boxing Championship of the World. 

In the ring he was flashy, unconventional, a risk taker who relied on lightning speed and footwork to make his opponents look clumsy and outclassed. He made up little poems about himself and the boxers he fought. He even made predictions about how many rounds it would take him to win. Sportswriters called him the “Louisville Lip” and fed his fame in their columns because he was such good copy, and they all wanted to be the first to predict his inevitable comeuppance. They needed him as much they disliked his brash self-promoting posturing for the cameras, at weigh-ins, and even in the ring, where he wouldn’t stop talking as he actually danced around his targets, daring them to hit him. He was unique, he was a star, and he had an appointment with destiny even the sportswriters couldn’t have invented as perfectly as it all seemed to be inventing itself.

The comeuppance of the Louisville Lip was a glowering slugger named Sonny Liston, who took the heavyweight title from Floyd Patterson with a brutal knockout. Young Cassius Clay was an obvious choice for a sensational defense of Liston’s title. By traditional measures, he was too young and inexperienced for a title shot, but he was already famous and the world wanted to see the fight. Everyone predicted a humiliating early round knockout of the challenger. (Everyone but me. I was 10 and already a Clay fan.) They were looking forward to it. I listened to the fight on a transistor radio, under the covers after my bedtime. Clay won the early rounds with ease, but then he turned suddenly uncertain, apparently having difficulty with his eyes, and had to use his legs to run from Liston for a full round or two. Later, it was discovered that Liston’s worried corner man had rubbed liniment on Liston’s gloves, which finally connected with a rare successful jab and temporarily blinded Cassius Clay. Trainer Angelo Dundee talked (scolded in fact) his young fighter through the crisis and when his eyes cleared, the challenger’s counterattack made boxing history. When the blizzard of jabs and combinations was complete, Liston sat down in his corner, unwilling to come out for the seventh round. Cassius Clay was the youngest and greatest underdog victor in the annals of the heavyweight title.

I provided all the detail above because that fight made me a lifelong fan of the man who would become Muhammed Ali, the most famous man in the world and the greatest heavyweight fighter of all time. It became personal for me because I was the only one in sixth grade who wanted Clay to win and said so. No one put it in just these terms, but there was a sense that the kid with the fancy name from Louisville, KY, was “uppity” and overdue for a lesson in humility. No one else could have made Liston a crowd favorite. 

Then followed the spectacular life in the public eye no one could have foreseen. Clay immediately made more friends in the sports media by declaring himself ‘the Greatest,” buying himself a pink Cadillac convertible with a built-in record player(!) and parading through his hometown like the king of all he surveyed. He had about ten title defenses in quick succession and kept getting better as a boxer. He was so good that he dispensed with even the most basic of all rules. Keep your gloves up. Don’t tempt fate by being careless. Well, he wasn’t careless. What he was was fast. His gloves were perpetually low, on either side of his body, facilitating better balance for his deft legwork, and he had an innate sense of distance that was uncanny. He could pull his head back just the fraction of an inch required to make a punch miss, and his own punches were timed at speeds comparable to that of the legendary middleweight Sugar Ray Robinson. 

Sportswriters were unstinting in their admiration for his talent, which made up for his stupidity (those obnoxious little rhymes of his…!) but always left open the question of what would happen if Clay ever got nailed in the head by a competent slugger. They were still waiting for the comeuppance. They failed to realize that the doggerel provocations were a lot like Clay’s jabs, a tool uniquely effective as part of his arsenal, and only deceptively harmless. It was common for Clay to spend whole flurries of effortlessly landed jabs that were mere flicks, felt but harmless, building confidence in the recipient. Is this all he’s got? Then, pittypat, pittypat, ROPE. And, boy, did that one hurt. Followed by a hail of left-right combinations and trouble in River City. The boxer boy was scoring knockouts while remaining seemingly impossible to hit. 

Who could stop him? Only the federal government. A bunch of stuff happened all at once it seemed. Cassius Clay, sedulously courted by the Nation of Islam, declared that he was now and henceforward ‘Muhammed Ali’ and a member of the black Muslims led by the controversial Elijah Muhammed. When other fighters, still pissed by his poetry,  refused to call him by his new name, the champion tortured them in the ring with his signature jab. “What’s  my name? What’s my name? What’s my name?) It was ugly to watch. Ali could still be funny and playful when he wanted to be, but he was no longer a kid, He was giving notice that he was no comic sideshow, not some flashy freak but a man not to be trifled with. He upped the ante by declaring that he had no quarrel with the Viet Cong and would not accept conscription into the U.S. military based on his religious right to be a conscientious objector. Whereupon the sanctioning bodies of professional boxing stripped him of his title and suspended him from competition. Before there had been any legal adjudication of his draft status.

The ban from boxing last for more than three years, no doubt the years of his peak physical capabilities, when athletes commonly enjoy their greatest successes. Not to be in his case. I saw him in person during that time. He came to Harvard to give a speech at the Indoor Athletic Building, as part of a college tour aimed at raising money for his ongoing legal battle with the government. The Gothic auditorium was standing room only. He began with a smile and a joke. “I like your college and I like your style, but with what you pay, I probly won’t be back for a while.” Then he delivered his speech, to which we listened raptly. His gray suit was beautiful, He was handsome (“pretty” as he was fond of describing himself), and he spoke without notes. He had written the text himself in longhand (as I read later), memorized it, and his manner was earnest and straightforward. He wanted to return to the ring, but he couldn’t abandon his beliefs for the sake of money or popularity. He knew that the college environment as a whole was opposed to the war, but he didn’t recite the talking points of the anti-war movement. He was making his own personal statement and standing up for his faith and his rights as a citizen. He received a prolonged ovation. I knew that I had seen a star. He filled the room that day.

It was only a matter of months before the suspension was lifted, he raced through a couple of tune-up fights, and prematurely a lot of us fans thought, he signed to fight Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden to reclaim his title.

It was a great fight, close throughout, until Frazier scored a knockdown in the 15th and final round. Ali was instantly back on his feet, but the decision went to Frazier because of it. With becoming humility, Ali admitted the blow was so hard it knocked him out until he hit the floor and reawakened in the process of standing up again. My roommate and I sent him a letter of support and received an autographed photo in return. That was unexpected but welcome.

The rest is now the stuff of legend. I got to watch the Ali-Foreman fight live on HBO when I was in business school. That night a bunch of us had taken an important midterm and had an afterparty whose real purpose was to watch the dreaded showdown with the most ferocious knockout artist since Joe Louis in his prime. Norman Mailer was at ringside and wrote a book about the fight, called “The Fight,” and I read it. My favorite piece of writing by Mailer. He was there in person, but we all felt like we were too. It was painful to watch the rope-a-dope play out, round after round. Leaning against the ropes, taking thunderous shots to the body only partially deflected by elbows and arms, escaping into the ring for about 30 seconds at the end of each round to score a few jabs and then retreat to the corner for a minute’s rest. It seemed that it was only a matter of time before Ali had to hit the canvas, the impossible comeback dream finally terminated.

Except that a little more than halfway through the fight, the rope-a-dope ended just a bit earlier than in previous rounds, and Ali came off the ropes. What I mean to say is, Ali came off the ropes. Muhammed Ali in all-out attack mode. It only took a few seconds when all was said and done. Foreman had punched himself out. Mailer’s book had described the sound of the fight from early in the first round on. He wrote that they were so loud and resonant in the arena that he could feel them physically in his own body. He knew no one could stand up to that kind of body battering, not even the greatest boxer in history.

But he had survived it and fought through it to a knockout victory of his win. The business school gang watching the HBO broadcast cheered and high-fives one another for what seemed like minutes. Have you ever witnessed an impossible dream come true on such an enormous scale in a truly global context?

I think those of us who supported Donald Trump through his first presidential campaign, the political warfare of his first term, the crushing loss of the Presidency in 2020, and the pounding lawfare of the next four years have experienced something much bigger than Ali-Foreman. The first six months of Trump 2.0 have been very much like Ali coming off the ropes in Round 8 and scoring a knockout in a matter of moments.

The purpose of my comparison and the others I could make. No one would argue that Muhammed Ali was a saint or a messiah or someone to be admired slavishly and uncritically. Like Elvis, Jagger, JFK, and even George Washington, he was necessarily a narcissist when he came down that escalator in 2015, as well as an unlikely candidate for the deep cross-cultural (dare I say ‘populist’?) emotions he aroused and the impact he had on the time and culture in which he was both celebrated and reviled. Elvis came close to becoming a cartoon in his corsets and white jumpsuits, but he was always Elvis, always magnetic, and his music lives on. Jagger was an icon of the same breed but since he is a foreigner and still alive, I’ll leave it at that. JFK was uniquely belovèd before he was assassinated, even though it was no secret while he lived that he was a sexual satyr and heavily dependent on, uh, ‘medications’ for his daily functioning. He got a Pulitzer for a book he didn’t write, and he got caught off guard by the challenge of a nuclear confrontation his own political inexperience had probably brought upon him, but he brought us through it, and the grief people felt when he was murdered was as personal as it was political. George Washington was a rich, well-born plantation owner, a slaveholder, and a haughty Virginian (he thought the President should be referred to as ‘his high mightiness’), but he was also a wise, clever, and charismatic commander-in-chief who won the Revolution without winning many battles and set so many great precedents in his two terms as President that there is no denying the appropriateness of his status as ‘Father of Our Country.”

Are there lessons we can draw from such Larger Than Life (LTL) personages that we can use to navigate our experience with one of them who’s still on the scene? That is, one of the ones whose historical era we all happen to be living in? In whose life story we are all now supporting players for good and ill?  I think so.

I said at the outset that these are men for whom the bonds between them and the populace tend to be intensely personal, for good and ill. This is largely independent of the question of the impact they have on our lives, especially with respect to the negative emotions they inspire. The LTLs are by definition powerful personalities. Why they manage such dizzying feats in their chosen careers. Personal power attracts the hopeful and optimistic (not necessarily the same demographic), but it also inspires resentment, envy, and fear.

The reason I focused so much attention on Muhammed Ali is that more than the others, he inspired all three of the negative emotions listed, as does Donald Trump. Resentment arises from the sense that someone is enjoying a degree of success and admiration that is not earned. It ignores talents that are obvious to most observers based on a personal conviction that the person in question is not worthy in some fundamental way. The whole success narrative is a phony, which neatly drops talent out of the equation. Cassius Clay was a creation of the sporting press, the clickbait of his day, and all his opponents were probably handpicked to give him an easy route to a title fight. And btw, wasn’t Liston an aging, drug-addicted ex-con who was wholly unprepared for the role of heavyweight champion? Look at the rematch. The Phantom Punch heard round the world. After that he’s a coward draft-dodger, a celebrity muslim who keeps marrying and abandoning beautiful women, and a darling of the Jane Fonda anti-war, hate America traitors, all of which makes him somehow a traitor to his race. Even now, if I write something positive about Ali in a blog post, some commenter will invariably show up to denounce him as an over-rated, cowardly ingrate. (This about a fighter who after going for years without getting hit at all proved to be able to take punishment with the best fighters who ever lived. I saw him fight 12 rounds with a broken jaw and lose a split decision. I saw him take head shots late in his career that should have sent him to the canvas if not into retirement. He won anyway. But haters will hate…)

Resentment, of course, is a companion emotion to envy, which can flow from or feed into the resentment. Why can’t I have all that money, all those women, all those things, all those adoring fans…? Whatever he has or got was because it was given to him or he inherited it somehow or he had powerful friends who removed the obstacles from his path along the way, everything about his story is fixed, a lie, an evil fraud perpetrated by his evil friends and dumb followers.

And then there’s fear. Where all the symbols and ideological rationalizations come into play. So much power and influence in one person smacks of conspiracy, which means I could be targeted simply by objecting to the fraud and voting against it. For Ali, the conspiracy involved the antiwar movement, the excesses of the Civil Rights movement, Islamophobia, Malcolm X, blah blah blah… For Trump it’s white supremacism, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Zionism, Catholics and other censorious Christians, the Billionaires Club, and Russia Russia Russia.

These negative emotions don’t go away when their targets win a big victory. They won’t go away because the first six months conspicuously did not include the singling out and persecution of individual Trump enemies. Which no one has noticed but the most zealous of Trump/MAGA supporters, who are flirting with conspiracy theories of their own about why people like Liz Cheney, Adam Schiff, Valerie Jarrett, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Merrick Garland, Christopher Wray, Jack Smith, Jamie Raskin, General Milley, Jill Biden, Jake Tapper, Rachel Maddow, and the editorial boards of WAPO and the NY Times haven’t been rounded up and frog-marched into the same cells where the Jan 6 defendants were entombed for four years.

The lefties haven’t lost their fear of these arrests, but they haven’t bothered to consider why they haven’t occurred yet. If the MAGA faithful can’t figure it out, how could they be expected to?

The terrifying campaign of “Retribution” so desired by the MAGA hasn’t occurred because Trump is President of the United States, the whole United States, whose people he serves above all other constituencies. There were not enough resources in place to get his cabinet in place, fix the border, begin deportation of illegals, restart the American Energy Independence infrastructure, end the dangerous and potentially nuclear wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, herd the narrowest of Congressional majorities into passing core MAGA legislation on taxes and structural changes in governance, AND renegotiate trade agreements with every industrialized nation on earth. 

That was the six months objective. Substantially achieved. Phase 2 will be continuation and expansion of same, plus carefully organized investigations of crimes committed by and on behalf of the previous administration. I said “carefully.” Undoing the damage to the rule of law isn’t about ginning up Mar a Lago raids and kangaroo courts of our own to imprison our enemies. It’s about restoring credible legal processes within the federal law enforcement and intelligence organizations, who are presently still staffed by careerist Deep State parasites who will keep trying to sabotage every step toward fair nonpartisan justice.

In other words, the first six months tell us, if we’re paying attention, that Trump does not want to be a dictator, a Cromwell, an Oval Office vigilante seeking payback for what was done to him. He wants the crimes that can be proven to be prosecuted and the jury verdicts accepted. I’m willing to bet he is not interested in putting Orange jumpsuits on Joe Biden, Barack Obama, or Hillary Clinton. Their ignominy will be assured by the evidence presented in other prosecutions, and they will always represent a lesson in American history for those who might imagine themselves above the law in future. That is their verdict, their sentence for all time.

Even the more modest goals just described are not guaranteed to be attained, of course. The President of the United States is responsible for steering the course toward a better future, not dotting every ‘i’ and crossing every ‘t’ in the word justice as it relates to individual persons. There’s an old and wise saying: Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I have my suspicions that some of the most wronged of Trump’s supporters are suffering from PTSD because of their own outrageous treatment: General Flynn, Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, Rudy Giuliani, and others. I also suspect that Trump will make decisions they won’t approve of in terms of retribution. Why? Because he wants to bring a divided nation back together and establish a larger, more inclusive majority party around the core of MAGA. He wants to facilitate the lawful, fair elections of future Presidents who will put America First.

I was one of the first to write about the Trump attribute the left was most anxious not to give him. That he is a consummate politician, perhaps the most gifted of all our lifetimes. He is that. We have seen him over the last four years as fighter, defending himself against a pack of rabid wolves. But he is President now. And I have been watching his politician skills in action, remarkably subtle and skillful. You can tell when he is seeing over our heads when he does things that look weak in his dealings with Congress, for example. The faithful wanted him to throw out the Milquetoast Speaker of the House after he caved in some negotiations with the Democrats. He didn’t. He knew that the Speaker job must not become a revolving door of those who follow orders the best. Just as he tried hard to distance himself from the sacking of Speaker McCarthy, he has needed to keep even the UniParty Republicans in the fold, against the day when he would need them to push, wheedle, and deal the Big Beautiful Bill onto the Resolute desk in the White House.

We have seen the tough guy. Trump as Ali, taking the furious body blows of George Foreman and seizing the moment to grab victory from the jaws of a defeat that was only apparent to spectators. We have also seen the version of Ali who was so exhausted in the rubber match with Frazier that he said it felt like death after the fierce comeback of Frazier in the middle rounds. But back he came, and with incredible physical courage he battered Frazier to the point where that champion could no longer see well enough to answer the bell for the final round. After the ref raised his hand in victory, Ali collapsed on the canvas himself. Both men went to the hospital that night. 

Now we must be prepared for the politician and come to realize what the stone-brained mass media never can. That his success in negotiation, which is the basis of his billions and foreign policy successes that have garnered him four nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize (three from the first term, one going on two so far from 2.0), is because he is his own bad cop/good cop negotiating team. He is bluster and outrageous demands at the beginning, forcing reluctant participants to the table, where they encounter the charm, flexibility, and desire for mutual benefit in what is finally agreed upon. Wall Street keeps reporting that  Trump has retreated under pressure in his tariff demands, unwilling to see that those demands were the opening gambit, subject to reasonable compromises that are beneficial to the American national interest.

All the MAGA faithful have to do to keep from stroking out in Phase 2 of Trump 2.0 is recognize the same Bad Cop/Good Cop duality that the President is using in his determination to heal a seriously fractured nation.

I’ll turn one last time to a fight, now mostly forgotten, of an Ali comeback most of his fans never wanted him to try. He was older, depleted in large measure by his bouts with Foreman and Frazier, and he took what looked like an easy payday against Leon Spinks, a wild, unpredictable puncher whose chaotic antics made him difficult for much more skilled fighters to deal with. He outscored the aging Ali to win the World Heavyweight Championship. “Time to hang up the gloves, Champ,” the faithful told him. But he didn’t. He went into strict training, signed for his guaranteed rematch, and outpointed Spinks with pure boxing skills, minus the speed and power of his youth.

What I remember best about that fight was my college professor sister, who was never a boxing fan, never a fan of the Louisville Lip, telling me she had happened to watch the fight. She was full of praise and admiration for the old champion. For the first time, she said, she could see the art in boxing, how the brain could matter more than the brawn. At that very late date, she had become a fan. 

One way of saying that Trump is getting older, and he has been through some wicked fights in the last 10 years. I believe we will see more of the crafty old politician than the Tweet Monster of yore. And I expect him to get a lot of good things done. Even if he loses the majority in Congress, he will still be President Trump, not a UniParty figurehead plotting against his own country. He can be impeached but not convicted. He can bring out the Veto pen ‘W’ never wanted to use, he will still have an highly competent cabinet, and he will never forget who put him in office and why.

I hope this explains why I get so grumpy when the PTSD’ers start sketching their End of the World As We Know It scenarios because one of their pet peeves has not yet been addressed. I’m old but I can still fight. I’m pretty sure Trump is the same. But panic is an emotion that ceases to afflict people who no longer fear death. There’s more than one meaning to the exhortation “Fight, fight, fight.”

Time for the youngsters to catch up.