The recent moves of Donald Trump have brought to my mind the guns-blazing way many an old gangster movie comes to its climax. In those movies, the head gangster (played perhaps by James Cagney) is at last cornered, but rather than surrender he emerges with guns blazing at the cops, and dies in a hail of bullets.
Defiant to the end. After a life of crime – willful defiance of the laws of society – ending in one last finale of defiance.
Likewise, I’m thinking, with the criminal in the White House.
Donald Trump has been a norm-breaker throughout his career, and his measured ways of breaking the norms – stiffing contractors, cheating on his finances, presumably laundering money for the Russian mob, lying about the previous President of the United States – created a path for Trump to climb to the top of the American power system. Donald the Don.
But now, the impeachment process is closing in on Trump. (“We got you cornered. Come out with your hands up.”) He probably senses it.
But it is not in his character to yield (as Nixon ultimately did), or even to acknowledge his ongoing conquerors in any way. He denies their legitimacy. He refuses to cooperate. He continues to hurl words as hostile as he can come up with.
He remains always defiant.
And perhaps it is that same spirit of defiance – a political version of that “guns blazing” approach to the final confrontation – that explains what seems to be a couple of extraordinarily wrong, extraordinarily provocative, and extraordinarily self-destructive decisions President Trump has lately made:
his apparent colossal blunder in the recklessly rash retreat he ordered in Syria, and the new planned crime right before our eyes in declaring that the big G-7 Summit meeting next year will take place at Trump’s own Doral Resort in Florida.That he’s tried to back-track on both of those decisions – trying to close the barn door on the Turkish invasions after the horse was already out of the barn, and then backing down on the idea of directing the G-7 bonanza to his own troubled property in Florida – shows that Trump’s spirit of defiance is not the only part of Trump that’s operating.
But we’ve already seen the caution-to-the-winds defiant part express itself. Not “hands up,” but “guns blazing.”
We still have the fact that -- just as the stonewall he’s tried to build up is cracking, just as the glue that binds the Republicans in Congress to Trump is beginning to show cracks of its own -- Trump made two decisions in quick succession that dramatically give the finger to the world:
The Kurds are our allies, you say? Well f*** them. I’ll do what I please, in defiance of all my advisors. Sending the G-7 business to myself bothers you because of its brazen corruption? Well, I’m Donald Trump and I do what I please, in defiance of both the domestic and the foreign emoluments clauses against self-enrichment.That’s what reminded me of some Jimmy-Cagney gangster, at the end of the movie, doubling down on the path of defiance, going down fighting.
(Except that Donald Trump will likely never be able to accept that he’s going down at all, so after his acts of defiance, which he can see visibly cracking the wall of Republican support in Congress that has been his protection, he tries to undo his rash acts and shore up that support.)
Defiance is the most enduring of Trump’s impulses —defiance of the law, defiance of the Constitution, defiance of political norms, defiance of norms of decent conduct.
Trump has been grabbing the world by its vulnerable places his whole life. It’s testimony to the flaws in American society — as well as a certain kind of genius (though not a stable one) — that Trump that he could ride the spirit of norm-breaking defiance so far, for so long.
But in his recklessness, it seems, he has now gone too far. If it is some sort of cultural breakdown in America that allowed such a corrupt and criminal man to succeed as far as he could, it seems that it is the remaining power of the good structures in our culture — those that are supposed to make sure that life in America goes well — that will at last overtake the man who overreached.
That will be the subject of a forthcoming piece I’ll publish here: how gaining power brought out the monster in Trump, and led him to express his defiance so brazenly that he at last will not get away with it.