The Disordered Soul and Presidency of Donald J. Trump: Platonic Reflections on 45
D. R. Koukal University of Detroit MercyThank you all for coming today. I want to also extend my thanks to Stuart Patterson and the Shimer Great Books School for accepting my offer to come and share some thoughts with you. I’m very happy to be among kindred spirits again, and also excited to experience the latest iteration of Shimer College—the most itinerant institution of higher learning I know of, and one that persists in existing in one form or another against ridiculously long odds. Whenever I have visited in the past, despite the different places, the younger students, the different faculty, etc., I have always found an atmosphere I have recognized. I also want to express my sincerest gratitude to North Central for recognizing the value of what Shimer College has been offering its students for so long, and allowing it the possibility of persisting. To flirt with a cliché, Shimer allowed me to discover the vast largeness of the world, and it means the world to me that North Central has stepped forward to keep this door of discovery open.
But before getting to the talk proper, I need to address the following question: what business do I have, holding forth on Plato? You should know from the outset that I am no Plato scholar, and that my area of philosophical research is actually phenomenology. Still, over the past 25 years of teaching lower division survey courses, I’d like to think I’ve developed a familiarity with Plato’s style of thought; I’ve even come to regard him as a kind of friend. So, you might think of what I am offering you today as the product of a friendly but philosophical dialogue that has occupied my mind for the past several months, as I have tried to grapple—both as a philosopher and a citizen—with the dangerous situation that has overtaken our polis since
January of last year, a danger which has been greatly amplified over the course of the past couple weeks. * * *
By chance the 2016 presidential season found me teaching a course I regularly offer called “Person and Society.” The animating idea behind the course is to examine the relationship between different philosophers’ views of human nature so as to see how these views inform their thinking about how society should be ideally structured. The course begins with the study of selections from Plato’s Republic where he famously—or infamously, if you like—argues that the perfect society would be ruled by philosopher-kings. Needless to say, the candidacy of Donald J. Trump made this an especially interesting read for the class.
Several political commentators have drawn on the Republic to shed light on our last presidential election. The most prominent among these is Andrew Sullivan’s article “Democracies end when they are too democratic,” which was published in the New York Magazine in May 2016. In this piece and others like it, the authors draw primarily on Books VIII and IX of the dialogue, where Plato lays out his “cycle of regimes” that begins in aristocracy but which devolves through timocracy, oligarchy, and democracy before ending in tyranny Sullivan et. al. emphasize the features of democracy that make it especially susceptible to demagoguery, which heralds the arrival of tyranny, and then go on to relate this to Trump’s political ascension (Sullivan 2016).
While these analyses are compelling, my students and I would like to report that other parts of the work, particularly Book IV, can also tell us much about Trump and his presidency. This part of the dialogue deals with Plato’s conception of the soul or psyche, and how it relates to his ideal political state. Since Trump makes no effort to hide his oversized personality, this
allows an opportunity to inspect it through Platonic eyes. What this inspection reveals is a very troubling state of affairs emanating from the man who is now seated in the most powerful and demanding political office in the land.
But in order to fully appreciate this point it’s first necessary to lay out, at least in outline, Plato’s conception of a well-ordered society. He begins by setting down the economic foundation of his utopia. The talents of farmers, craftsmen, merchants, sailors, and laborers are put to work in addressing the fundamental needs of society. But as society continues to grow in size and luxury a second social class is needed, a class comprised of those who have the necessary talents to fight and acquire new territory to accommodate society’s growing needs. Warriors must have keen senses to discover enemies, speed to overtake them, strength to fight them, and courage to fight well. Warriors must also have thumos, which is translated in various ways—as spiritedness, pugnacity, indignation, fierceness, or anger, all of which embody the appropriate attitude toward enemies (Republic, II 371a-375b)
But here Plato runs into a problem: how to keep the warriors from behaving fiercely towards one another, or the rest of society? It’s essential that they be friendly to their own kind and harsh only to their enemies. Plato’s answer is to educate warriors like guard dogs who can make a rudimentary distinction between friends and enemies. He calls the ability to make this distinction the seeds of a “philosophical disposition” that indicates a fondness for learning. This fondness of study indicates an aptitude for leadership that can be cultivated through a lifelong program of instruction that begins in a robust physical regimen, moral education through the literary arts, military training, mathematical studies, and the study of dialectic, topped with fifteen years of apprenticeship in public office and military command. Those who perform with excellence throughout every stage of this curriculum are marked by the moral virtues of courage
and moderation, and the intellectual virtues of persistence, distress at realizing one’s own ignorance, and indignation at hearing falsehoods. This creates a third class to complete Plato’s ideal state: the class of philosopher-kings, from which the leaders of society are exclusively drawn (Rep., II 376e-383c; III 386a-412b; VII 521d-540c).
This is a point where my students typically resist Plato’s line of thought. A central tenet of the American ethos is that “anyone can be president,” but here Plato is arguing that only those with a certain kind of aptitude for leadership may lead, and then only after completing a rigorous education that trains them to this end. “This is plainly undemocratic!” my students complain, and they’re right to do so. But I counter with the following questions: “Isn’t it appropriate that a doctor be prohibited from practicing medicine until they’ve passed their boards? Would you live in a house designed by an uncertified architect? Would you allow a lawyer to represent your interests if they had failed the bar?” Obviously, these questions give my students pause. Obviously, knowledge, skill, and experience are essential in all human endeavors, at least if excellence is our standard. The next question should be equally obvious: why would we exempt political leaders from having the requisite knowledge, skill, and experience, even in a democracy?
This is a burning and vitally important question because it flies in the face of the American electorate’s current passion for political “outsiders,” who pledge to come in and reform a corrupt political system. Plato would find this idea absurd, because such candidates would lack the knowledge and experience to effectively carry out any political agenda, much less an agenda of reform. Plato gives his reasons for this earlier in the dialogue. In Book II he observes that each member of society has many needs, but because we’re not self-sufficient we need the aid of others to meet these needs. Each, therefore, contributes their own work to sustain
society as a whole, based on a principle of mutual need. This in turn requires each individual to work at a single occupation in accordance with their talent, without meddling in the affairs of others (Rep., II 369b-370d).
Here Plato is basically saying that for the most part each of us is only good at doing one thing. Again, my students often push back, pointing to the fact that a person can be good at both practicing medicine and, say, making fine wooden cabinets. This is obviously true. But at the same time we don’t find that many polymaths among us. It’s the rare person who can excel in a multitude of arts or occupations. Most of us find our area of aptitude, and then work on refining it. In most cases an excellent doctor will make shabby cabinets, resulting in customer dissatisfaction; on the other hand, a talented cabinetmaker dabbling in medicine will most likely result in either harm to or the death of the patient.
For Plato, being unhappy with a politician or a political order and turning to a political outsider as a remedy would be akin to being unhappy with your doctor and turning to your cabinetmaker for relief rather than another doctor. Just as any doctor must have a fundamental knowledge of the human body in order to have any hope of curing what ails it, any politician must have the relevant wisdom and experience to care for the body politic. Whatever one might think of the challenges facing our political system, any reasonable person would have to concede that an effective politician needs to be well-versed in the workings of the system of government they seek to rule, especially a complex system such as our own, and especially given our country’s central and complicated interrelationship with the rest of the world. In my opinion, Donald Trump has abundantly shown that he simply doesn’t have the wisdom required to perform the duties required by the office to which he was elected.
This is not to say that Trump isn’t wise; it’s to say that he simply doesn’t have the right kind of wisdom for this particular job. At this point Plato would ask, so what is Trump’s natural aptitude? Where exactly do his talents lie? As we all know, Trump considers himself to be a world-class businessman of rare and unparalleled talents, with an unsurpassed record of success. This means that Trump hails from the producing class, which would be highly problematic in Plato’s eyes. On his view, a well-ordered society can only be assured by the rule of the philosopher-kings, who possess the right kind of wisdom for this task. Members of the producing class are guided by a kind of commercial wisdom, and members of the warrior class are animated by their fierceness aimed at enemies of the state, directed by a martial wisdom. What is required to unify society’s different parts is the more encompassing wisdom of the philosopher-kings—or at least leaders who are sufficiently philosophical—who, through an alliance with the warrior class, bring harmony to society by ensuring that each of its parts keep to their own proper social tasks.
By way of contrast, a society ruled by warriors will be overly pugnacious and too quick to embroil the state in needless and ruinous conflicts; a society led by the producing class will meet its ruin in greed and immoderation. It’s simply a mistake in reasoning to assume it’s necessarily the case that because a person is good at war or business they will also be good at politics. Trump has never served in the military, and his success in business, as it turns out, has been at best middling. Many journalists, particularly Kurt Eichenwald of Newsweek, have shown that Trump’s track record in real estate and the casino industry is marked far more by failure than success (Eichenwald 2016). So as it turns out, not only is our country currently being led by a member of the business class with no military experience; we’re being led by someone who isn’t even particularly good at business.
However, to be fair to Trump, there is one thing he is exceedingly good at. He is at heart a salesman, and what he most loves to sell is himself. Plato would likely be alarmed at this because an essential requirement of a leader is a fundamental love or care for society that requires no small sacrifice of self-interest. Plato makes it clear that the philosopher-kings prefer to spend most of their time in philosophical pursuits, but when their turn to serve comes they resign themselves to the hard duty of public life (Rep., VII 540a-c). This idea—that political leaders should be reluctant to assume office—insures that leaders are taking office out of a duty motivated by care rather than some other more nefarious motivation, like the pursuit of power or riches. In this connection Trump might seem like a philosopher king because he is, by our measure at least, no career politician; he has not spent his life running for one office after another, and his interest in politics is very recent. Nevertheless, he most definitely desired the office once he decided to pursue it. When viewed with this history in mind, his decision to run for president seems impulsive and whimsical. It is precisely this point, along with Trump’s proclivity for self-promotion, which will reveal the most alarming aspect of his presidency when viewed from a Platonic perspective. It’s not just that he lacks the knowledge, skills, and experience to perform his official duties; much more importantly, Trump lacks the temperament for the job, and this puts our body politic at grave risk.
This can be illustrated by Plato’s theory of the soul, which is analogous to the structure of his ideal society. On his account the largest part of the soul is appetitive in nature and seeks to satisfy the various kinds of desire we experience. The second largest part of the soul is the pugnacious part, which manifests indignation and anger. The smallest part of the soul is the rational part, which seeks and manifests wisdom. On Plato’s account a well-ordered soul is ruled by the rational part, which, with the assistance of the pugnacious part, keeps our appetites in
check, and this allows us to cultivate the classic virtues of courage, justice, moderation, and above all, wisdom. By way of contrast, a soul is disordered if it allows the desirous or pugnacious parts to rule, leading to the vices of cowardice, injustice, ill-temper, and ignorance (Rep., IV 434d-444d).
If there is anything that Donald Trump has conclusively proved throughout his campaign and short presidency is that he is entirely ruled by desire. And Trump’s strongest desire, the desire which all his other desires serve, is his desire to be admired and envied by all—as the richest, smartest, most successful man in any room. One doesn’t have to engage in deep psychoanalysis to discern this. Trump tells us this with his eponymous jets and towers, the excessive opulence of his residences, the fastidious intricacy of his comb over, and the beauty of the women he wears as accessories, as testaments to his virility even at the age of 71. Among the various goods that humans seek—the goods of the soul, the goods of the body, and the goods of the world, according to Plato—Trump is focused almost exclusively on the most fleeting of the worldly goods: that of honor or reputation. And he doesn’t wait for these honors to come to him—Trump himself constantly tells us how great he is, almost every day, in every other tweet and at almost every public appearance.
But as Plato’s student Aristotle noted, the problem with thinking that such accolades will validate you is that they depend on other people conveying them unto you (Nicomachean Ethics, 1095b24). In other words, it’s one thing if Trump’s supporters sing his praises, but when he awards himself such honors, he just appears ridiculous. Nevertheless, Trump seems to be unable to help himself in this regard and subjects himself to a near constant barrage of self-administered compliments, which would seem to point to a very fragile ego. Further evidence for this claim arises whenever anyone criticizes, contradicts, or even gently demurs from Trump in any way.
His responses in such instances are always indignant, measured out in various degrees of ferocity. From a Platonic point of view, this shows that his thumos, the pugnacious part of his soul, is allied not with his rational part but rather with his desires, making his soul deeply disordered. He has shown himself to be incapable of standing up to the rough and tumble criticisms that are typically directed towards a president, and he has bridled at any notion that he must behave in a way that accords with the decorum of the office. His urge to publicly dominate, mock, belittle, insult, and humiliate anyone who is even perceived as challenging the primacy of his desires appears to be insatiable and second nature to him. All of this has been thoroughly documented in the public record, and offering even a partial list of Trump’s transgressions in this regard would be superfluous and take me far beyond my allotted time.1
In the fifteen months since Trump’s inauguration no one has been able to even slow such intemperate outbursts, even as they tend to damage the president politically outside of his core base of supporters. In fact, if anything, these outbursts seem to be escalating. Trump seems to grudge and hold on to even the most insignificant slights, which should be of no consequence to a man of his power. In fact, Trump’s lack of moderation in his feelings leads him to deploy this power in unjust ways, which in Plato’s eyes is also a testimony to a kind of inner cowardice
1 But nevertheless, here is a short list. During the campaign Trump mocked a long-serving senator for being captured during the Vietnam war; a disabled New York Times reporter was subjected to a cruel pantomime from a public podium; a female debate moderator was accused of menstruating after she asked Trump pointed questions about his attitudes towards women; he belittled the parents of a slain Muslim soldier after their appearance on the stage of the Democratic convention. These are but a few examples of Trump’s intemperance during the campaign, and his presidency has so far been no less tumultuous. Since his election he has not only continued the public abuse of political rivals and private citizens; he has adopted a bellicose attitude towards longtime NATO allies and referred to some nations as “shithole” countries; he has spoken sympathetically of authoritarian leaders the world over, as well as the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia; he has picked unnecessary battles with his own party’s Congressional leadership, which he needs to accomplish his political goals; he has shown himself to be impatient with the rule of law and the limitations it places on his office; he has castigated judges who have ruled against his policies and publicly humiliated his own attorney general a former Congressman who was the first in the Senate to endorse his candidacy for properly recusing himself from the Justice Department’s investigation into possible Russian meddling in the 2016 election; and lately he has turned on and dismissed several senior advisors whom he had recruited to further his agenda, and the pace of White House turnover seems to be accelerating.
because his seething fulminations testify to the fact that he is afraid of things that a rational person in his position shouldn’t fear. Given the state of Trump’s soul, its rational part is reduced to cleaning up the messes created by his disordered psychic life, making post-hoc rationalizations for his outbursts which are usually incoherent because they have no foundation in reason. Absent this foundation, he is forced to govern primarily through a breathtaking display of lies and bluster. In other words, far from becoming indignant at hearing falsehoods, as is required of Plato’s philosopher-kings, Trump actually traffics in them in order to preserve his brittle selfimage.
On the matter of Trump’s lies two obvious objections could be raised, which should be addressed straightaway. The first of these is based on the fact that we have come to expect politicians to be less than truthful, especially in a democracy such as our own where political success hinges on the ability to appeal to diverse constituencies; if this is so, then why single out Trump for his falsehoods? And secondly, given that Plato himself sanctions the telling of falsehoods for political purposes when he endorses the Noble Lie, isn’t it hypocritical to criticize Trump on Platonic grounds for lying to the public?
I want to answer the second question first, which requires a summary of the lie in question. In the Republic, the Noble Lie is reluctantly introduced by Socrates as the “myth of the metals,” which is meant to dampen any simmering resentment or jealousies between the three classes of Plato’s utopia. All members of society, regardless of class, are to be taught that they are born of the earth, which is their mother. Despite being comprised of different metals (gold, silver, and bronze) that determines their respective places in society they are still “siblings of the soil” who are bonded together by this familial relationship, and so must love and care for one another (Rep., III 414b-417b). Plato’s “useful falsehood” is meant to unify and harmonize the
different parts of society into a coherent whole. Whatever we might think of Plato advocating for this falsehood, we should be able to recognize it in social myths more familiar to us. From childhood on we are taught to think of America as “the great melting pot,” as the land of “equality and opportunity for all,” even though our social reality is arguably at odds with these claims. Most if not all societies and cultures cultivate similar myths, meant to form and solidify the identity of a people. Such myths have a social utility, and Plato recognizes this, creating one to serve his own imaginary society.
This puts us in a better position to contrast Trump’s lies with more workaday dissembling on the part of more typical politicians. Though I don’t want to come off as endorsing the idea that politicians should lie to their constituents, there are more or less effective ways of doing it
At a functional level, the point of a lie is to deceive, and in order for this deception to work the lie must be believed. One problem with Trump’s lies is that he frequently denies easily verifiable facts or spontaneously makes claims that are easily disproved, which undermines the ability of the lie to accomplish its purpose. Another problem is that the frequency with which Trump tells lies has given him a reputation as a habitual liar, which further degrades their effectiveness because we’re wary of those with such reputations. Yet another problem is that Trump is apparently proud of his falsehoods, as is evidenced by his unforced admission of the lie he told the Canadian prime minister just last month about a nonexistent trade deficit (Levin 2018).
This last point, combined with the frequency and brazen nature of so many of Trump’s lies, puts them in an entirely different light. It seems as if many of these lies go beyond the more typical political purpose of gaining electoral advantage through deception; it seems as if the president is happy if such lies bring him attention. In fact, if we look at the press coverage of
Trump’s falsehoods, it seems that the more outrageous the lie the more attention he receives. This tracks with Trump’s obsession with his “ratings,” and brings us back to the idea that Trump most values the worldly good of reputation—except “reputation” and “attention” are not exactly the same thing. For Plato, one can have a reputation for something, e.g., for wisdom, justice, courage, ignorance, cowardice, etc. Having a reputation in this sense says something about how one’s character is viewed by others. It’s true that one’s reputation might attract the attention of others, but this is not a necessary condition. One can attract attention in a wide variety of superficial ways, all of which have the effect of saying nothing more than, “Hey, look at me!”
One only has to think of how young children misbehave in order to get the attention of their elders. If this line of thought has any merit, it would indicate that Trump’s more bald-faced lies serve an infantile desire to always be the center of attention, no matter how that attention is gained. Perhaps this attention for attention’s sake should not surprise us, given that the president comes from that part of celebrity culture where one is famous merely because one is famous. But I feel fairly certain that Plato would be confused by such a notion, and consider it as the palest possible imitation of “reputation.”
All of this would make many of the falsehoods Trump tells an expression of his disordered soul and to this extent, “ignoble lies.” Despite its own falsity, Plato’s Noble Lie at least has the virtue of attempting to unify and harmonize society. By way of contrast, recall the overwrought mythology that Trump promulgated during his campaign and continues to spread as president, which exploits and exacerbates almost every fear, phobia, and resentment that divides us as Americans. Whether or not the president actually believes in this apocalyptic vision of the country is almost beside the point. If he is cynically propagating it for political gain, then he is the kind of dangerous demagogue that Plato warns us about in Book VIII of the Republic (562b-
569c); if he truly believes in what he is saying, then his reason has been overwhelmed by his fears; but if he is selling this myth as a form of self-aggrandizement—and I think this is the most likely case—then this shows that Trump has no mastery over his desires; rather, they have complete and utter mastery over him. Think of the times when the president has seemed to be on both sides of an issue. Has his wildly fluctuating desires caused him to mix up his lies? Or, more disturbingly: could it be that in such instances he literally doesn’t know his own mind, because his constant desire for attention has never allowed him to develop and take a measured, introspective, rational position on the issue? What all this suggests is that Trump cannot bring harmony to society because, from a Platonic point of view, he can barely hold himself together. Now I want to stress that when I make claims like this, or call the president “disordered” more generally, I am not pronouncing him to be suffering from a psychological malady in any clinical sense. The way Plato is using this term is in reference to the way he thinks the psyche or soul ought to be ordered—with rationality mastering the desires with the assistance of the pugnacious. Plato’s theory of the soul is normative, not descriptive. At the same time, this doesn’t mean that Trump isn’t suffering from some kind of diagnosable psychological dysfunction, but this is an entirely different question and in any case I am unqualified to make such a determination. What I am doing is using Plato to highlight not a psychological disorder but rather a flawed character that is due to a failure of self-mastery. This might be illustrated by the typical emotional development of small children. Young children start out as little bundles of desires, and if these desires are not immediately satisfied they react by throwing a temper tantrum. But over time and in the normal course of development, children eventually learn to master their desires and anger through ego-control (or, to use Plato’s term, reason). Children that grow into adults who never learned this impulse control aren’t necessarily mentally ill, but we
consider them to be emotionally immature. On Plato’s view, their immoderation in emotion and action retards their ability to cultivate the virtues of courage, justice, but above all, wisdom. The characters of such adults, from a Platonic perspective, are irredeemably flawed.
This is why my students and I reacted with extreme alarm in November 2016 when the country elected a president with just such a flawed character and who stands in diametrical opposition to everything Plato claims is necessary for sound political leadership. Countless analysts and political commentators have struggled to understand how such a clearly unqualified candidate could have garnered almost 63 million votes and through the quirks of the U.S. electoral system ascend the political heights. What all of these election post mortems make clear is that there is no one, simple cause. A deeply polarized electorate; a widespread dissatisfaction with the political status quo; economic uncertainty; the distorting whining buzz of social media and propaganda; blunders in Democratic campaign strategy; low voter turnout; the lethargic performance of the corporate mainstream media; civic illiteracy; misogyny; racism; arguable electoral interference by the director of the FBI; and the apparent machinations of Russian hackers—all of these conspired to propel a dull, dishonest, bigoted, sexist, petulant, egoistic reality TV star into the Oval Office.
But none of these factors, even in combination, are sufficient to explain the election to high office a man of such low character. The late moral philosopher James Rachels once pointed out that Aristotle’s definition of a virtue (“a trait of character that is manifested in habitual actions”) is problematic, because the very same definition would hold for a vice. Rachels attempted to solve this problem by claiming that virtues are reasons for preferring a person’s company, while vices are reasons for avoiding a person. The idea here is that rational people would prefer the company of those who are moderate, just, courageous, and wise to the company
of those who are immoderate, unjust, cowardly, and ignorant. To extend Rachel’s line of thinking one step further: people with virtues are more likable than those with vices (Rachels 2006, 254).
What, then, to make of those who still support the president, who in my view clearly embodies a collection of unlikable qualities and vices? In his short but turbulent presidency, Trump has amply demonstrated that in terms of his character he is precisely the person he campaigned as; that was no persona we saw during the primaries and general election, but the man himself. It’s exceedingly hard for me to imagine anyone wanting to spend any amount of time with him, yet given that most of his supporters routinely dismiss in the president behavior they would never tolerate in Democrats or their friends (or even their own children!), it’s important to ask: why are they continuing to buy what Trump is selling?
I suppose there is a multitude of possible answers to this question, but I suspect that Plato would claim that those who continue to support Trump are suffering from the same deficiencies of character that beset the president. In Trump they see a figure who reflects their own chaotic collective psyche and who gives full voice to their desires, fears, and resentments. They identify with his antagonism towards Mexicans, Muslims, and other immigrants of color, his fulminations against “political correctness,” his broadsides against a corrupt and out of touch political and media elite, and his frightful vision of an America in decline. Yet at the same time his supporters cannot recognize the fact that their champion can never satisfy their desire to “put these things right,” given that many of these grievances are based on flawed perceptions of vague and ill-defined menaces, misplaced fears, or fevered fantasies with little to no grounding in social reality.
Moreover, these fears and anxieties have blinded them to the fact that Trump himself is incapable of addressing even the more plausible of their grievances because he lacks not only the necessary kind of knowledge but also the will to do so—and this for the most Platonic of reasons. Throughout this paper I have taken it as a given that the president is to an alarming degree ignorant of affairs of state, but his ignorance runs even deeper that this—he is ignorant of his own ignorance. It’s important to remember that for Plato, “ignorance” is not necessarily a pejorative term. His famous allegory of the cave (Rep., VII 514a-517a) clearly shows that it is part of the human condition to be born into ignorance, and for this we are not blameworthy. However, what is blameworthy is to remain willfully ignorant, or worse still, to be wholly ignorant of what you don’t know. Plato makes this point most clearly in the Apology, where he points out the foibles of thinking one knows what one doesn’t know (Apology, 21c-d), which gives one a false sense of wisdom. Over two thousand years later the field of psychology documented Plato’s insight with what has come to be called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which has been defined as a cognitive bias wherein people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, which causes them to assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is (Kruger and Dunning, 1999). Ironically, this false sense of wisdom makes it very hard for such people to recognize their own ignorance, which in effect makes it impossible for them to learn from others, or in the worst case, from experience itself. What this means in the case of Trump is that he cannot address the concerns of his supporters because he doesn’t know how to do so, but more to the point, he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know. The president’s astronomical self-regard keeps him chained in the darkest regions of a cave of ignorance (Rep., VII 514a-517a), along with his most fervent supporters.
If there is one single, relatively kind adjective to describe Trump it is self-serving; it’s the one constant among all of the various journalistic and biographical accounts of the man. Whatever doesn’t affect him doesn’t exist at all, in his mind. This means that empathy is not in his repertoire, which means he will advance the political interests of his supporters only if doing so also benefits him. Yet even as Trump’s string of broken campaign promises grows ever longer he retains the dogged loyalty of many who voted for him. I think Plato would attribute this loyalty to a tragic failure in character assessment. Because they have failed to put aside their passions and take an accurate, rational measure of the man—to, so to speak, “get wise” to Trump—he has put them at his mercy. And it is perhaps for this reason that Plato was so wary of democracy, or “rule by the many.” Since the largest parts of society and the soul are comprised of desire and anger, it is the form of government most susceptible to demagoguery, which can only lead to social instability, and then, ultimately, tyranny.
The sum of Trump’s actions since his inauguration bear witness to his disharmonious effect, both on the domestic and international stages as well as the chaos of his administration.
This chaos can be illustrated by a famous image from Book VI of the Republic. Here Plato describes a ship piloted by a captain who is ignorant of the art of navigation and surrounded by similarly unskilled but quarrelsome sailors vying for his favor, all while the vessel careens dangerously out of control (Rep., VI 488a-e). It is as if Plato witnessed the Trump administration first-hand—except many of the sailors have jumped ship or been pitched overboard, including some with relevant experience (Keith 2018; Samuels 2018; Wolff 2018).
Plato’s image is meant to show the foolishness of entrusting the “ship of state” to such a person. This image strikes some as comic, but in reality it describes a very dangerous situation, and one which we are presently living. Absent the internal constraints of a well-ordered soul and now the
external constraints of more seasoned advisors, the danger that the president poses to our governing norms grow every day. One of the few things left standing between us and political ruin are the constitutional constraints built into our system of government. Unfortunately, so far Congress has almost wholly abandoned its duty of checking the power of the executive, with the judiciary stepping up to hold the line. However, it’s important to stress that voters will have an opportunity to put things on a more even keel in the upcoming November midterms, which I think will be the most momentous election in my lifetime.
Until then, all of us—those who voted for Trump and those who did not—are all trapped aboard a ship steered by a captain of profound ignorance and unstable temperament. The vessel is being severely battered, and only time will tell whether or not citizens will seize the wheel and pilot our country back to port in one piece, where it will undoubtedly require some extensive repairs.
Works Cited
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Keith, Tamara. “White House Staff Turnover Was Already Record-Setting. Then More Advisers Left.” NPR, 7 March 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/03/07/591372397/white-housestaff-turnover-was-already-record-setting-then-more-advisers-left. Accessed 6 April 2018.
Kruger, Justin and Dunning, David. 1999. “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77/6.
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