Radio Free New Hampshire: Through A Glass Darkly

By Michael Davidow, Radio Free New Hampshire:, InDepth NH

Jeffrey Epstein, Rob Reiner, crypto deals, the Kennedy Center; Venezuela, the White House, vaccinations and wind farms.

That is only the past few weeks. As 2025 limps to an end, it hardly seems possible that so much has transpired and the primary catalyst for so much sadness has been one man.

Ordinarily I look for the bright side of Donald Trump’s influence. He challenges our country’s status quo and flouts conventions that no longer work. In that regard, his ascension to our highest office is nothing less than the measure of his predecessors’ faults, their complacency, their lack of vision, their self-serving moralities. But sadly it’s often little more than that, and for every successful gambit he serves up ten more that fail.

As both an attorney and your columnist, I search for resonances. What other case does this case remind me of, what theme does this story illuminate, what historical events get recalled by current news. What strikes me most about Donald Trump’s presidency is how little of it resonates at all. His actions feel out of place in American politics. Nobody else has ridden any similar blend of bluster and rage this far, this fast; not Huey Long, not George Wallace, not Lyndon Larouche.

I saw him as a buffoon for a while, because he presents as one. He was Mark Twain’s duke and dolphin; he was the guy who’d won the lottery and spent his dough on trips to Vegas. Yet his administration is not unserious; to the contrary, it has proven deadly. Nor is it unprofessional. It manages the leaden lump of Washington’s alleged meritocracy with aplomb. Nor is it ineffective. It gets things done. Yet it’s uninformed, it’s self-indulgent, it’s short-sighted, and it’s dangerous because those qualities reinforce each other.

I used to think he embodied selfishness. He was the greedy kid reaching for more french fries; he was the guy with the fashion model wife, already looking for someone new to sleep with. But that is another glaring truth that hides a subtler reality, because while he reaches openly for every buck he can make, he also cares deeply about our country, and thinking otherwise is a trap that makes it harder to either work with him when it’s possible to, or oppose him with the sort of purpose that makes opposition worthwhile.

I also used to deem him a flash in the pan, a break from the airless elite that has dominated our government for decades. But that sense faded a long time ago. He has staying power, and his success not only serves as an indictment of the political inertia that existed before him, it also illuminates the moral poverty that marred that earlier time. Sadly, Trump accomplishes that particular task by living the B-list celebrity lifestyle even better than Obama did. Those pictures of our nation’s best who hung out with Jeffrey Epstein, from Bill Clinton in his hot tub to Michael Jackson with one of his kids: American wealth has never looked so grubby.

But having shed these various simplifications, I’m still at a loss. He has been compared to both Hitler and Mussolini, but such slurs don’t fit. He has been compared to Dick Nixon (weird for someone to be compared to both Hitler and Nixon). I don’t see that either. Nixon was a thoughtful, self-made, and finally tragic figure. His positions were moderate ones, his misdeeds were petty ones (we always cite him when we talk about the cover-up being worse than the crime), and he respected facts.

Leaving Mark Twain behind, the English writer Joseph Conrad presents a better match for Trump in his novel Nostromo. His character General Montero was the would-be leader of a fictional South American country. Conrad writes that Montero’s western visitors were always impressed by his sheer physical courage; the specter of violent death did not faze him. His creator argued that this quality was both real and over-valued. What would have been extraordinary in a European was commonplace for the people about whom he was writing, and what was ordinary for a European – a sense of fair play, a sense of justice – would not only have been unthinkably rare in turn; it also would have been thought foolish.

Trump resonates like that to me. Not as an American president worth being commemorated by the minting of coins, but as the strong-man generalissimo of an inconsequential state. And with that, he is both a reflection of the culture that produced him and a bitter dose of medicine to take. We can’t beat him when we remain his foundation. I hope the new year brings us all strength.

Davidow writes Radio Free New Hampshire for InDepthNH.org. He is also the author of Gate City, Split Thirty, and The Rocketdyne Commission, three novels about politics and advertising which, taken together, form The Henry Bell Project, The Book of Order, and The Hunter of Talyashevka, Chanukah Land can be found here. And his latest novel Interdiction can be found here.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.