An essay on Trump, his appeal, and his mythic paralell in Balder.
Donald Trump is like Teflon, nothing ever sticks. Most other politicians would have retired from politics after experiencing just one of his many scandals. Yet Trump is still as popular as ever fully nine years and dozens if not a hundred scandals later. His supporters see him as the best of America, a paragon of true national values who stands up to the phony establishment. His opponents see him as the worst of America, xenophobic, close minded, and arrogant. Yet like the Balder of myth he is impervious to all that they throw at him. Legal threats, fines, primary challenges, and impeachments have all bounced off him and two assassination attempts have failed to stop Trump’s campaign. Why has Trump been so hard to stop, and will it always be this way?
The main reason why Trump is so different from other politicians is that he has rejected the established rules for how a politician is expected to act. Unlike other politicians who style themselves ‘outsiders’ Trump genuinely does not care that his conduct is seen as aberrant or immoral. Trump has been so successful due to how he has lived up to his reputation; he says he is not like other politicians and he says things other politicians would resign over. They way he talks proves that he is not all talk, he demonstrates time and time again that he is different.
That difference is what many of his most loyal supporters crave. In a society where trust in institutions both political and civil is declining from a low base compared to say the Nordics the lack of faith in politicians has been used in every presidential campaign since the financial crisis. Obama campaigned on change from Bush and the wars in the Middle East, Trump campaigned on change from Obama and Obama’s signature healthcare reform, and Biden campaigned on change from Trump and the chaos he brought. The American people want someone different, someone who isn’t just another lawyer who will continue on the current path. Breaking the mold and established taboos was not a mistake, it was what made Trump a desirable candidate.
Actively cultivating that mistrust in the established order has long been Trump’s modus operandi. His opponents accuse him of destabilizing the status quo operation of government for the sake of furthering his political ambitions but it is worth noting how consistently Trump has been in favour of breaking the established order. Trump is often portrayed as erratic and fickle in the media – and for good reason, there is a hundred issues he has flip-flopped between being for and against like banning TikTok – but he is consistent in his core ideological beliefs, including his opposition to the way previous politicians have, and current non-Trumpist politicians do, run the country.
That core is comprised of three issues: immigration, trade, and national respect all intermingling. The reason why Trump seems so changeable in his views is his utter disinterest in details. The how of reducing immigration is not very important, but his drive to reduce immigration is core to his political ambition. It does not really matter if the wall gets built or the Muslim ban gets reversed, those policies are a means to an end, not the desired outcome in and of themselves. What animates Trump is his belief that America has lost its standing in the world and that foreigners are taking advantage of her, whether through lax immigration enforcement or trade policy.
Trump’s adoration for leaders like Hungarian prime minister Orbán, Russian president Putin, and North Korean leader Kim is often taken as him endorsing autocratic and authoritarian governmental structures, but that it once again missing the forest for the trees. Trump likes the respect that those leaders get from their citizens, press, and international leaders but he is not interested in how or why these leaders get that respect. He sees it as an inherent quality in people like Putin without considering how the system Putin sits at the top of makes sure that life becomes very uncomfortable for those who dare voice dissenting opinions. Again, Trump cares about outcomes rather than inputs, and the broad strokes rather than small details.
It is this focus on big picture broad themes which makes him such an effective communicator in spite of his rambling speeches and often changing policy prescriptions. By eschewing talking about specific laws and reforms and using everyday language instead of statistics and jargon he is able to communicate what is important to him: that America deserves more respect than it is given, and that foreign states and people take advantage of it. It does not matter what wacky policy he has come up with this week to solve America’s issues, what matters is that he knows that the lost respect is an issue and that he wants to solve it unlike mainstream politicians in the Establishment.
Another throughline in Trump’s political career has been his opposition to that Establishment, which has in retrospect been remarkably prescient given the trouble he would later face with the law. The seeds of mistrust he sowed in 2015 and 2016 when he was saying that the ‘Deep State’ was after him would blossom years down the line, and while the specific dastardly plots and groups he insinuated was after him were not, he has been saying from the start that they were out to get him. It is another example of how consistent Trump can be; thematically if not specifically.
This thematic consistency was summarized in the famous line that his supporters took him seriously but not literally and his critics took him literally but not seriously. And it is one of the main reasons why so many attacks against Trump bounce off harmlessly like the Aesirs’ spears off Balder. He told them fake legal challenges would arise, so when lawsuits began being filed against Trump his supporters saw it as a prediction coming true. The story then becomes that Trump was right, not that he was indicted. Building that shield has paid dividends for Trump, and will continue to do so in the future. It has given him some of the most loyal supporters due to the credibility it has bought him with the disillusioned.
In some important ways Trump is right about the state of America. It is less powerful and respected than it was during the so called ‘unipolar moment’ in the nineties and early 2000’s when it was by far the most powerful country in the world. Its elites have overlooked how difficult the years after the Great Recession were for many in the hinterlands far away from the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Immigration has surged in the last few years. But his appeal may be fading as the process of political triangulation proceeds. Trump was the only one railing against globalization in 2016, but now that is the Establishment’s position too. Outsourcing to China is out, trade barriers are in. Border enforcement is also a bigger priority now than it was nine years ago, as is confronting China.
This is not to say that Trump has been totally successful in his policies, failures abound during his term. But most of those failures speak to Trump’s weakness as an administrator rather than a failure of vision. It makes sense for Trump the ideas man, the big picture guy, not to be great with the detail heavy work of crafting policy. His greatest successes, overturning Roe vs Wade, and implementing project warp speed, were achieved essentially by letting others do the implementation. Roe vs Wade was about getting the right people in the right place (or rather wrong, but you know what I mean), and project warp speed was about getting out of peoples’ way. Or, to oversimplify, more personally involved Trump is in the details of a project, the worse it goes.
While perhaps unconventional, his thematic politics has given him an ironclad base of support among a subset of Americans which skew whiter, older, and more rural than the median. This hardened core of support is also more likely than average to vote in Republican primary elections which means that the prospect of Trump being sidelined due to the preferences in his party is quite remote. When Trump’s political career eventually does end it will not be due to a primary challenge.
The more likely end to his reign at the top of the Republican party is a volley of legal challenges which he has primed his base to disregard. Trump is consistent in the way that he is never much bothered by details like which papers he can bring home, and what he can say about whom. That a cavalier attitude to the law makes him a prime target for legal challenges he has few real defences against. “I’m sorry I didn’t think about that, it won’t happen again” just isn’t good enough for federal prosecutors, so the only real strategy open to Trump is to rely on the distrust he has encouraged his supporters to develop towards the legal system. Essentially just defaulting to calling any indictment a witch hunt. But the American legal system will pursue justice no matter what the defendant says, and there is a real risk that American politics breaks if there is a head-to-head collision between Trump and the law.
So far that strategy has worked through brinkmanship, but it cannot last. Courts have been reluctant to make decisive rulings against Trump because of the fraught politics of doing so, and now that the election is very close it would appear rather partisan for an ostensibly non-political institution to go after a presidential candidate weeks before election day. But should Trump lose the election a criminal conviction seems likely. In the myth it is the blind Höder who kills Balder, and Lady Justice too is blind.
Another threat to Trump is disillusionment with him from his party comrades. At the tail end of his administration there was a time when it looked like his grip on the Republican party was slipping, and perhaps even that he might be impeached. Now, four years and two assassination attempts later any indication that the Republicans are souring on Trump is a distant memory. Any primary challenge or attempted impeached would be doomed in today’s political climate in the party. In the myths the reason why Balder was impervious to harm was that his mother Frigg had made every thing swear an oath not to harm her son; while not an explicit requirement, it does not seem one can rise far in the Republicans without a similar dedication not to harm or oppose Trump.
The final and most disturbing threat to Trump’s political career is political violence. No matter how you feel about Trump it is disheartening to see that the ostensible city on a hill has so lost its faith in its political process that assassination attempts have entered the Overton window. At the time of writing there have been three attempted assassinations of Donald J. Trump in 2024. Trump was shot in the ear, literally centimetres away from death. Maybe I am a pessimist, but I doubt Trump would survive another term in office if he is elected.
Trump has had a much longer political career than one would have guessed when he descended on the escalator in 2015. He has survived both politically and literally through a combination of skill, luck, popularity, and infamy. While not the root cause of the declining trust in civil society he has undoubtedly cultivated it and benefitted from it. Balder is most famous for the story of his death, and Trump is not far from the end of his political journey as he would probably be too old to campaign again in 2028 if he does not win this year which would make him ineligible to run again. It remains to be seen what will turn out to be Trump’s mistletoe; let us hope it is not violence. If Trump leaves politics willingly after run in with the law or losing the election American politics will hopefully stabilise and the rifts between Democrats and Republicans can maybe start to heal. In the story of Balder’s funeral, Tor kicks a dwarf onto the funeral pyre in grief, Litr as the dwarf was called died in the flames. Similarly, if Trump is forced out of politics or killed his supporters may act out.
If you liked this post you can read a previous post about North Korean troops in Ukraine here or the rest of my writings here. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!
I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.
Written by Karl Johansson
Cover photo by Ethan Wood from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson
Comments