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Last Sunday The Free Press published Douglas Murray's latest Things Worth Remembering column. It was about Vaclav Havel and a speech he made. However, in the concluding paragraphs, Murray compared Havel to Donald Trump. For me, that was a kind of window into an image of Trump that had long evaded my understanding. I wrote a comment under that column which several people suggested I should give a wider audience. With that being my goal, I will reproduce my comment here with a few corrections to the original text.
I have always been skeptical of men or women who sought leadership positions. My experience of such is that ambition and intelligence occurred in inverse proportions. As such, I was very skeptical of Donald Trump. I think, though, that I was wrong about him. He is not a man who seeks to lead. Rather, he is a fixer, a man who sees problems and develops solutions for them.
He and I grew up in the same part of New York at the same time, a period of great American patriotism following the Second World War. It was a time when we celebrated Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, not with sales, but with parades and pledges of loyalty to our flag and country.
The years that followed in the '60s were much less so. Viet Nam soured many and gave inroads for the left to infiltrate our schools and colleges with dissent and division.
I never grew to hate our country, just some of our politicians. I think that Trump, as well, believed as I did that this country was still the greatest in human history despite its failings. Perhaps it was his rise to fame that gave him the sense that he could make a meaningful change in what was happening, where for my part I just grew cynical and totally distrustful of anyone running for office. Trump, on the other hand, saw a way to bring things back into alignment with how they had been in our youth. Where for a long time I held him in suspicion, I am beginning to see him as a kind of naive warrior who still can hold the dream of changing things for the better. That he has surrounded himself with other such dreamers, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard, J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, and a host of others strikes me as a real return to Camelot, and, possibly, a rebirth of the American dream. It is certainly nice to think in those terms for the first time in many, many years. He is an imperfect man, as are we all, but his heart is good, and, unlike his successor/predecessor, he has no ulterior motives.
Discussion (13)
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I believe you are correct. He sees problems, and he wants to fix them. Isn't that what the Progressives call "Toxic Masculinity?" Far better to wallow in the muck for the Left and make things worse than to take a single step backwards to decency.
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The comparison with Havel is not spot on, but apt if you look at the last 60+ years as a degrading of liberty and ascension of the bureaucratic state. If I recall, the point was that Havel delivered on his promises of transparency and returning the government to its people, and Murray likens that to what we're currently seeing as Team Trump assault and dislodge entrenched interests and officials.
A playwright and a real estate developer, they might have nothing else in common but love of country, and a vision for the restoration of their countries.
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The problems Trump is working to solve have been building for more than a century and over the last sixty years have been incorporating measures making things worse by not solving problems but creating new ones. America's founding provided a structure within which every individual can pursue their on interests and desire within a limited framework of responsibility focused on not harming other humans in the process. The Left pursues power and control over the people that is unacceptable. Trump has done well in selecting his help.
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I think it was during the Tea Party period, early 2010s, that extensive work was done by a number of people developing thoughts about how our system for raising federal revenues should be revamped. But we never developed quite the impetus to actually do that in a significant way.
Maybe now is the time to restart efforts to get real tax reform.
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Well done, Eugene! You really captured well who he is and what he's trying to do!
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