Not Impressed

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Everything gets carried before Donald Trump for a ruling, and the ruling never changes. The sob story goes up first: the baby, the family being torn apart, the camera wet with tears. Then the credentials: the degrees, the commissions, the decades of service. Then the sacred institution itself, then the anointed person, the one nobody is allowed to touch. A nation reined for fifty years by disapproval, by the raised eyebrow and the frozen smile and the withering look that ends careers without a vote, elected the man the look bounced off, and Donald Trump lives in a world: not impressed. He does not care about sob stories. He does not care about credentials. He does not care about the anointed or the institutions that anointed them. The procession has been filing through his office for ten years, each exhibit more heartbreaking and more credentialed than the last, and the verdict comes back identical and immediate, because the enforcement mechanism of the old order was never law. The enforcement mechanism was impressibility, and the man cannot be impressed.

The reins

Our Puritan upbringing taught us to treat the id as a necessarily evil thing, a devil in the basement of the soul. The id is primal. The id is the way your internal voice speaks when the fatigue gets heavy: culture fatigue, protest fatigue, drama fatigue, the fatigue of children getting their way, the fatigue of a room where nothing true can be said about a man because he is holding the worst word in the language hostage over it. The voice under all of that is not evil. The voice under all of that is the animal reporting its condition.

The ego and the superego are the management we built for the animal, and their mechanism is a horseman's mechanism: they are reins. Leather straps, bit and bridle, whose whole function is keeping the animal's head pointed where the rider has decided it goes. Norms and values are synonyms for ego and superego, the same straps with Sunday names, polished for church. A rider learns the horse by loosening the rein now and then. A country learns itself the same way. Norms and values, kept taut for fifty years, never let you see what you are actually made of, and a nation that never sees itself eventually believes the straps are the animal.

My own position belongs on the record here, because it governs everything after it. I don't respect the man at all. I respect his willingness to not be stopped by some flouncy person who pins you to the ground with a withering look while saying that just isn't cricket. The withering look was the old order's real police force: the raised eyebrow, the frozen smile, the governess's tone, social death administered by people who never had to win an argument or an election or a fight, because the look did the work and the room enforced the sentence on itself. Trump is the man the look bounced off. The bounce is the thing I respect. The man is incidental to the bounce.

Off with their heads

The id speaks in verdicts, and the verdict ends the proceeding. The petulant king says off with their heads, and the heads come off. The husband in the old trope says I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you, and the marriage ends in the saying of it, with no ministry convened and no committee seated. Trump's sentences run on the same current: the utterance is the act, and it lands before the priesthood of process has finished clearing its throat.

The procession keeps arriving anyway, bearing the standard offerings. They bring the baby, the family, the photograph of the family, and the offerings are bids for the old response: deference, tears, a stay, a merciful exception carved out for this one case. They bring the résumé, the degrees, the fellowships, the endowed chair. Every offering assumes the levers still connect to the machinery. The sob story assumes a heart that can be reached by staging. The credential assumes a guild that can be reached by rank. The discovery of the decade, made fresh by every delegation that files into that office, is that the man cannot be reached by the usual levers. He does not care about sob stories. He does not care about credentials. The levers move in his hand and nothing at the other end of them stirs.

Give the old world a credentialed fabulist and the old world admires the weaving for years. Jason Arday arrived at Cambridge in 2023 as its youngest Black professor, thirty-seven, carrying a biography nobody checked: nonverbal until eleven, unable to read or write until eighteen, thirty marathons in thirty-five days. When The Guardian finally asked the institutions named in his college biography, Ohio State and Glasgow denied the visiting chairs outright, and Arday answered for the whole arrangement himself: 'To be honest with you, I thought you'd just believe me.' Carry the same man in front of Trump and he is out on his butt almost immediately, because credentials are the one currency the man has never accepted. England took three years to ask its first question. He resigned the day Cambridge opened its investigation, and nine days later he was found dead at home, aged forty-one, the inquest still open. The speed is the tell. An afternoon in one world; in the other, the truth arrived slowly enough to kill.

The primal howl

In the eighties and nineties, the men's movement went looking for the animal in a safer venue. Robert Bly published Iron John, and grown men went into the woods with drums, to sweat and chant and find the primal howl in a safe little circle, with the cars parked at the edge of the clearing and dinner waiting back in the suburbs. The howl was rehearsed, permitted, contained: an id with a permit, on a schedule, home by Sunday night.

America in 2016 skipped the drum circle and elected the howl. Donald Trump was America's primal howl, and the howl took the oath of office, which is the part of the ceremony the drum circles never attempted. The men in the woods wanted to visit the animal and come back. The country moved the animal into the White House and handed it the seal.

When the targets fire back

Norms are range rules, and America is very good at bullseye shooting. The target hangs still. The light is good. The distance is marked on the ground, the score gets posted, and a man can build a whole reputation as a marksman without a single round ever coming back over the berm. Performance on the range measures everything except performance.

A friend of mine, a lieutenant colonel out of the JSOC and DIA world, compressed the whole dilemma into one question: shooting targets is one thing, but what happens when the targets fire back? The clutch is the only honest examination there is: bullets coming the other way, the plan dead in the first minute, the reins in your teeth. The apparatus of norms and values exists, in large part, to make sure that a man in public life never has to sit that examination, and that the country never gets to watch him sit it. Trump sat it daily for ten years, in public, brilliantly and badly by turns, and the country finally saw what it was made of. Some of what it saw, it liked. The rest is still being argued about at full volume, which is itself a kind of answer.

False churches

Churches are hallowed institutions, and the hallowing was paid for in the old currencies. Universities claim the same reverence on credit. They are false gods and false churches, an unholy priesthood in academic robes, and I have been writing about that priesthood for years: universities run on hierarchies, initiations, credentials, canonical literatures, and ceremonial robes, graduate school functions socially like formation, and the most powerful orthodoxy is the one whose priests are convinced that only other people have religions. The university's actual product is class. It is a diploma mill for the entitled elite, and the diploma's working part is the right to pull rank in civilian life for the next fifty years.

Claudine Gay is the perfect example of the response, the whole mechanism in one career. In any other climate she is enthroned for life: a modern Brahmin, a Nubian queen out of central casting, strong and Black and intellectual and academic, aesthetically and visually flawless, a president no administrator in America would volunteer to shit-can on camera. The protection around her was never her record. The protection was the taboo, and a taboo is a spell that binds only the men who are impressed by it. Trump was not impressed. The donors stopped being impressed. The price of swinging got shared around until no single swinger had to carry it, and Harvard performed the oldest rite in the institutional book. The sacrificial lamb must be without flaw, because a flawed lamb makes the appointment the scandal; a flawless one keeps every question pointed at the crisis she inherited. Her casting was flawless, so the sacrifice took. Harvard kept the fellows, the endowment, and the authorship of the story. She carried the scandal out the gate. I wrote when she was appointed that the institution had placed a wager with a human being's tenure as the stake. The wager came due, and the institution collected.

England keeps its fabulists

England runs the opposite system and runs it without embarrassment. Defy the intent and mission of the Crown, of the Home Secretary, of Downing Street, and England will put you in jail for the defiance itself, because deference there is law and not merely manners. The fabulist with the right schooling gets protected for years, since protecting him is what the deference is for, and the priesthood grades its own papers behind that wall. America has no wall and no deference worth the name. Our fabulist is out fast. Our priesthood gets defied on television at breakfast. Nobody in this country goes to jail for being unimpressed, and whatever else the American arrangement breaks, it breaks that arrangement first.

The whole of it, once more, plainly

Donald Trump is the American id with the reins cut, and he lives in a world: not impressed. Our Puritan inheritance named the id evil; the id is primal, the voice that speaks under the fatigue, and the ego and the superego are only its reins, and norms and values are the same straps with Sunday names. The old order enforced the straps with the withering look and the sentence that just isn't cricket, and the enforcement worked on everyone it was aimed at until it was aimed at him. In 2016 the country skipped the drum circle and elected its primal howl. The false churches conferred their credentials and watched the taboo bounce off; the fabulist who would have been out on his butt in an afternoon in America was guarded for years in England and ruined by the first real asking, in the country where defiance of the mission is a jailable offense. I do not respect the man. I respect the bounce, and the bounce is the whole story of the decade. What he did with the decade the bounce bought him is a separate accounting, kept in bones, and it stands in The Rebreaking.

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