IN SEARCH OF TRUMP'S GOOD SIDE
An Essay on Contamination
This article was published as “Splitting the Unsplittable” on April 30, 2025.
FALSE EQUITY
“Hey, Jack! What about rounding up The Prince’s character?”
“What do you mean, Pere?”
“To be accepted as a novel’s character, he must have some good features, or his other features must have a good perspective.”
“You think so?”
“Yes, I do! Look at the movies in vogue! To be credible, a DEA detective, for example, must be a closet drug addict and must be in a toxic relationship with a vicious, dominant woman! When inspected closely, a lovely family must be a tarantula's nest. Symmetrically, I guess, monsters must have a good side, and sad personal histories explaining why they turned bad for good reason…Then, when you end seeing the film, you admire the producers and directors, recognizing they have been fair, they have pictured the bad side of good people and the good side of bad people..”
“You mean that we are all morally equal? Mean people are good and good people mean? Do you think reality is like that, Pere?”
Pere reflected for a while.
“Well, maybe not. I have to think. But, in any case, readers and viewers think that you, the author of the novel or the script, are fair, well-balanced, mature…”
“What do you think, Nicco?” asked Jack.
Nicco was watching Raven, the cat, who, pretending to sleep on Lauren’s lap, ignored him Olympically.
Nicco reacted and started talking.
GOOD, BAD, OR EVIL
“I was thinking of that, precisely. I think we have the same potential to be good, bad, or evil. That, however, doesn’t mean that we end life being equally good, bad, or evil on average, differentiated only by the particular ways in which we express each of these…can we say, substances?”
Many philosophers and scientists believe that we are driven by certain specific instincts, exclusively, like Freud (sex), money (Marx and some market theoreticians), and the will to power (Nietzsche). According to them, we are slaves to these drives and, ultimately, we are commanded by them. However, there are others who believe in free will, the ability to decide our path in life, given our instincts. As the famous psychiatrist Alfred Adler put it,
In real life we always find a confirmation of the melody of the total self, of the personality, with its thousandfold ramifications. If we believe that the foundation, the ultimate basis of everything has been found in character traits, drives or reflexes, the self is likely to be overlooked. Authors who emphasize a part of the whole are likely to attribute to this part all the aptitudes and observations pertaining to the self, the individual. They show “something” which is endowed with prudence, determination, volition, and creative power without knowing that they are actually describing the self, rather than drives, character traits, or reflexes.[i]
“We make these decisions every day, but there is one of them that may be taken gradually which defines our attitude to life. Adler (the father of the concept of the inferiority complex) started his rebellion against Freud, postulating that if there were to be a primary drive, this would be the will to power, not sex. Then he said that we are born feeling inferior because at that age we are inferior. We would die without the attention and help from the community around us. Not only that, this dependence remains throughout our entire lives. No man is an island. Therefore, in our infancy, and throughout life, we must find a way to integrate into society. There are two ways at the extremes: the way of seduction (you learn to be pleasant, to collaborate with your peers in the attainment of the collective side of life, through matrimony and civic virtues), or you become spoiled brats, who can relate to others only through harsh commands and tantrums aimed at attaining their personal aims. The extreme form of this path leads to psychopathy through narcissism.
“That fundamental decision dyes the entire personality. It normally becomes more marked with age. Adler said that the first kind of adjustment to communal life led to the positive side of life, and the second to the negative one. So, psychologically, it’s difficult to believe that good instincts coexist with bad ones in an evil personality. But also, we can find that the bad side taints any apparently good aspects of an authoritarian personality. In fact, it is impossible to split the good from the bad. Evil takes over ther entire personality.”
“We can inspect this aspect after reading a New York Times’ article written by David Brooks. To understand what Brook says it is necessary to quote him extensively.
“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.”[ii]
Brooks uses these reflections to compare the relative strength of The Prince and his opponents in three dimensions:
So I have three big questions. First, can the people who lead and defend America’s institutions work up élan vital? Can they summon the morale to fight back against the Trumpian onslaught? Second, do they have as much clarity of purpose as the Trump people possess? Third, do they have a strategy?[iii]
THE ÉLAN VITAL
Unsplittable Things
Brooks recognizes most, if not all, of The Prince’s dark sides in his article. Yet, even though he provides some details about them, he doesn’t seem to acknowledge that one cannot separate the aspects he considers good or evil from something that encompasses both. For example, The Prince inflames the multitudes (a plus in his accounts), but does so by injecting hatred (presumably a minus). Moreover, he doesn’t allow anything to prevent him from getting what he wants (another plus in his accounts), which parallels the fact that this means disregarding laws and the Constitution.
“In this vein, for example, we cannot admire Germany’s impressive ability to wage war against most of the developed world without recognizing that the Germans occupied the economies of numerous European countries and captured about 15 million workers to toil in their factories under horrific conditions that led to the deaths of a high percentage of workers.4 The communists transformed Russia in twenty years into an industrial power capable, with the support of its Western allies and winter storms, of confronting and defeating an invasion from Nazi Germany. Yet, this was obtained at the cost of more than 25 million deaths, without considering the Civil War between the Red and White Russians and the many famines, except for the one imposed in 1933 on the Ukrainian farmers by the communists.
“As we recorded in our last document, liberal democracy and morality are focused less on the ends (the objective of your actions) than on the means (the way you do them). The means, however, contaminate the ends, turning even a good end into an evil one.[iv]
“For this reason, hatred can be used to destroy but not to build. Even when it succeeds in gaining power over a country, it leads not to a good objective but to its own destruction. Just look at the experience of the countries that surrendered to communism and Nazism in the twentieth century. Nazism destroyed itself in a suicidal confrontation with almost all other countries, while communism sank in the bloody swamp of its own history. Thus, a process that starts by destroying democracy cannot be seen as motivated by an Élan vital but by an Élan suicidal.
Hatred is not an Élan Vital but an Élan of Death
“Because they are moved by hatred, these revolutions, of right and left, lead to exhaustion of any kind, sterility, and become a finale, not a new beginning, and lead to more deaths. This sinister process ends only if hatred is forgotten. Germany was able to rid itself of such hatred an this allowed it to create a flourishing liberal democracy, advancing the progress it had started to attain with the Weimar Republic. The Hitlerian period that lay between them, however, did not contribute to this progress. On the contrary, it detracted from it, even if Nazism overflowed all the “advantages” that The Prince seems to have in these years.
Nietzsche recognized that those individuals were destructive and called them “blond beasts, tropical monsters” and similar names, even if he liked them, and precisely because they were destroyers and no more. In his The Twilight of the Idols he described them like this:
"My conception of genius. Great men, like great ages, are explosives in which a tremendous force is stored up; their precondition is always, historically and psychologically, that for a long time much has been gathered, stored up, and conserved for them -- that there has been no explosion for a long time...
The danger that lies in the great men and ages is extraordinary; exhaustion of every kind, sterility, follow in their wake. The great human being is a finale; the great age -- the Renaissance, for example -- is a finale. The genius, in work and deed, is necessarily an squanderer; that he squanders himself, that is his greatness..."[v]
As Nietzsche wrote, Cesare Borgia squandered his country, and himself ended the Renaissance and left behind a trail of sterility, exhaustion, and weariness.[vi] Hitler vividly expressed the exhaustion of every kind that follows the geniuses of Nietzsche when, on March 19, 1945, he told Albert Speer amid the flames devouring Germany:
"If the war is to be lost, the nation will also perish. This fate is inevitable. There is no need to consider the basis of a most primitive existence any longer. On the contrary it is better to destroy even that, and to destroy it ourselves. The nation will have proved itself the weaker and the future will belong exclusively to the stronger Eastern nation [Russia]. Those who remain alive after the battles are over are in any case inferior persons, since the best have fallen." [vii]
This epitomized one of Nietzsche's envisioned supermen: a beast of prey, a creator of forms, an artist who had squandered both his nation and himself. The hatred mobilized by Hitler propelled Germany to first become a formidable economic and military power and then to suffer the worst defeat ever recorded in history.
Many people believe that Hitler fought for German nationalism, that he sacrificed his life for it. His words to Speer just before he killed himself and his lover prove that it was the other way around. As Nietzsche predicted, he squandered Germany to his hubris, his will to power and didn’t give a dime for the Germans. This was the man living on the negative side of life, a natural destructor, who, like so many others, have mobilized the élan of death. The Prince rides on a wave of hatred. He will lead the United States to at least an economic, political and social failure, and maybe to something worse.
Mao was another example of revolutionaries who portrayed themselves as builders of a new future while, in truth, marked the end of something good (like the Renaissance) or the opportunity to build something good (like a Russian democracy in 1917).
While Lenin was consolidating his revolution in the winter of 1917-1918, Mao was writing extensive comments on a book called A System of Ethics, authored by Friedrich Paulsen, a minor German philosopher. In those comments, he wrote:
““How do we change [China]? The country must be…destroyed and then re-formed. This applies to the country, to the nation and to mankind…The destruction of the universe is the same…People like me long for its destruction, because when the old universe is destroyed, a new universe will be formed. Isn’t that better!”.[viii]
“Mao wasted 65 million lives to destroy the China he didn’t like. Altogether, communists and Nazi fascists killed about 125 million people in their obsession to destroy democracy or the possibility of it.
“The Prince cannot even take his country out of a world crisis. On the contrary, he is sinking it in a global crisis and the future he is offering is not of more power but of a permanent weakening by forcing the economy and the country to revert to an already obsolete past.
THE QUESTIONS
“These considerations answer Brook’s first question. Let’s look at the other two.
A Revolutionary Without a Purpose
“Hitler offered to lift Germany out of the Great Depression and succeeded. The Prince promised to rescue the United States from a crisis that did not exist. In fact, the United States had grown much faster than its peers, the EU and Britain, and not by a small margin. In the first two decades of the new century, it grew 20% more than the EU in terms of productivity and production.
“Certainly, it had experienced a period of inflation, but this was coming to an end when The Prince was elected. There were macroeconomic problems, but nothing significant. The major economic problem of the United States was the potential weakening of its human capital resulting from a lack of investment in incorporating those left behind by the technological revolution into the knowledge economy—an issue that The Prince is not only failing to address but is, in fact, worsening by reducing social expenditures to extend a tax reduction to the super-rich. This adds to all his destructive actions in all other areas.
In fact, The Prince lacks the clarity of purpose that Brooks attributes to him, except in the very primitive conception of destroying the rule of law and installing a regime that would blindly obey his arbitrary wishes, including that of reducing the taxes he pays. Any consideration about the need to invest in human capital to keep and increase the country’s wealth doesn’t pass through his brain. Brooks is right in believing that the people need to define a purpose and also create a strategy to create the new society that will benefit from the knowledge society. By doing so, they will not replace any meaningful purpose or strategy that The Prince may have. He hasn’t.
The Problem was Never The Lack of Elan…
“By the time of the 2024 elections, the country had been deeply unhappy for many years. Yet, the problem was never a lack of élan. On the contrary, economically, the country has been an example of élan for the entire world in terms of creativity and efficiency. The extraordinary economic boom is the result of an equally extraordinary explosion of positive technological and economic energy.
“So, the Prince’s élan has not been a solution to anything, and by being based on hatred, it is worsening the subjacent problem in the United States: the lack of social cohesion, the resulting idea that money is everything in life, and the myopia in devising a strategy to deal with their deep unhappiness is putting the world, including the United States, on the path of harm.
“But this is a matter for other discussions. We can conclude this one by saying that The Prince’s élan, his clarity of purpose, and his strategy to destroy the institutional setting of liberal democracy will not contribute to the country’s progress and are, in fact, working in the opposite direction. What he is destroying will have to be rebuilt if the country finds the road to democracy again.”
Thus we shouldn’t compete with The Prince in terms of the amount of energy or the kind of élan he transmits. Instead, we should deactivate the means he uses to inject hatred, and then proceed to create social cohesion and reactivate the economy and democracy. That’s what we need to do. It is contrary to what he is doing.”
…..
Manuel Hinds is a Fellow at The Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise at Johns Hopkins University. He shared the Manhattan Institute's 2010 Hayek Prize. He has worked in 35 countries as a division chief and then as a consultant to the World Bank. He was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. His website is manuelhinds.com
[i] Alfred Adler in Der Sinn des Lebens, in Ansbacher, Heinz, and Ansbacher, Rowena, The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1964, pp. 175.
[ii] David Brooks, Trump’s Single Stroke of Brilliance, The New York Times, April 24, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/24/opinion/trump-administration-ener...h-weakness.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
[iii] Ibid, footnote 2.
[iv] Manuel Hinds, When Was the Road Open to the Enemy: Who is the Enemy?, Substack, April 25, 2025, https://manuelhinds.substack.com/p/when-was-the-road-open-to-the-enemy
[v]Nietzsche in The Twilight of the Idols, in Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche, pp. 547-548.
[vi]This idea, which was present in several Greek tragedies, was put into high philosophy by Hegel, who had said, "If we take another look at the final destiny of these world-historical individuals who had the calling to manage the affairs of the World Spirit, we find that their destinies were by no means happy. They attained no calm enjoyment, their entire life was toil and trouble; their entire nature was nothing but their master-passion. Once their goal is achieved, they fall away like empty shells." See Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, pp. 33.
[vii] Hitler, quoted by Shirer, William, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, A History of Nazi Germany, Electronic edition, New York: Rosetta Books, pp. 1969. Scribd.
[viii] Mao, quoted in Chang, Jung and Halliday, Hon, Mao, Anchor Books, New York, 2006, pp. 14-15.