I’ve detested at least three-quarters of what the Trump administration has done so far, but it possesses one quality I can’t help admiring: energy. I don’t know which cliché to throw at you, but it is flooding the zone, firing on all cylinders, moving rapidly on all fronts at once. It is operating at a tremendous tempo, taking the initiative in one sphere after another.
A vitality gap has opened up. The Trump administration is like a supercar with 1,000 horsepower, and its opponents have been coasting around on mopeds. You’d have to go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration in 1933 to find a presidency that has operated with such verve during its first 100 days.
Some of this is inherent in President Trump’s nature. He is not a learned man, but he is a spirited man, an assertive man. The ancient Greeks would say he possesses a torrential thumos, a burning core of anger, a lust for recognition. All his life, he has moved forward with new projects and attempted new conquests, despite repeated failures and bankruptcies that would have humbled a nonnarcissist.
Initiative depends on motivation. The Trump administration is driven by some of the most atavistic and powerful of all human desires: resentment, the desire for power, the desire for retribution.
The administration is also driven by its own form of righteous rage. Its members tend to have a clear consuming hatred for the nation’s establishment and a powerful conviction that for the nation to survive, it must be brought down. This clear purpose gives them the ability to see things simply, which is a tremendous advantage when you are trying to drive change. This clear purpose is combined with Trump’s reckless audacity, his willingness to, say, declare a trade war against the entire globe, without any clue about how it will turn out.
I have come to think of the Trump team less as a presidential administration or even as representative of a political party and more as a revolutionary vanguard. History is filled with examples of passionate minorities seizing power over disorganized and passive majorities: the Jacobins during the French Revolution, the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution, Mao’s Communist Party in China, Castro’s 26th of July Movement in Cuba. These movements did not always possess superior resources; they possessed superior boldness, decisiveness and clarity of purpose.
