Donald Trump, Man of Destiny
Every act of political violence yields instant reactions that can’t be supported by the available facts.
A single assassination attempt by a loner with a rifle doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about whether America is poised to plunge into a political abyss. Nor do the motives of would-be assassins necessarily map onto a given era’s partisan divisions. Nor can we say definitively that this assassination attempt has sealed up the 2024 election for Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance — surely the wild twists and turns of the Trump era should disabuse us of that kind of confidence.
Having lived through eight years of that era, though, I feel comfortable making one sweeping statement about the moments when Trump shifted his head fractionally and literally dodged a bullet, fell bleeding and then rose with his fist raised in an iconic image of defiance. The scene on Saturday night in Pennsylvania was the ultimate confirmation of his status as a man of destiny, a character out of Hegel or Thomas Carlyle or some other verbose 19th-century philosopher of history, a figure touched by the gods of fortune in a way that transcends the normal rules of politics.
In Hegel’s work, the great man of history is understood as a figure “whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World Spirit.” Hegel’s paradigm was Napoleon, the Corsican adventurer whose quest for personal power and military glory spread the ideas of the French Revolution, shattered the old regimes of Europe and ushered in the modern age.
For Hegel the great man’s role is a fundamentally progressive one. He is developing or revealing some heretofore hidden truth, pushing civilization toward its next stage of development, sometimes committing crimes or trampling sacred things but always in service to a higher aim, the unfolding intentions of a divine process.
In different ways in my own lifetime, American conservatism and liberalism placed Hegelian hopes in Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, both figures who seemed to embody a grand optimistic vision of how the global future would unfold.
