His belief in himself never wavers.

Let me rise to praise one good thing about Donald Trump. Trump is a man of bad character, with many well-known vices and few virtues. I need not rehash here all of the ways in which this is so, and has been publicly so for decades. But his remarkable comeback, at the age of 78, overcoming a dizzying array of obstacles (self-inflicted and otherwise) owes a lot to one important virtue that Trump has always had in spades: resiliency.

Trump is no stoic. He wears his emotions on his sleeve; even when he’s spinning a line of BS, he’s never able to hide his feelings. He can be baited. He whines, and throws tantrums. His ego is easily bruised, and he has a gnawing inferiority complex about being disrespected by others. All of that is true. But it is also true that Trump, throughout his life, has had a remarkable knack for clawing himself back out of every hole. It’s not just luck, or a ruthless willingness to throw others under the bus. It’s also that Trump is amazingly resilient. His belief in himself never wavers. His belief in the power of positive thinking never flags. When his back is against the wall, he never accepts that he’s finished, or that anything was his fault. That’s how he survived bankruptcies and scandals, declining public fortunes and the real onset of middle age in the 1990s. And it’s how he got through all of this. The image of Trump bounding back up to thrust a defiant fist at the sky after being shot will go into the history books to explain a lot about his career and how he has managed to keep coming back. Trump could have met defeat in 2020 with a smile, without letting anyone see him sweat, and maybe that approach would have brought him back even stronger in 2024; that wasn’t the Trump way. But he talked himself into the defeat being a conspiracy of his enemies, and dug in to fight it. Four indictments, a conviction, two assassination attempts — another man might have given up. A more sensible man, in fact, might have read the political tea leaves in 2022 and decided, at the age of 76, that the public didn’t want him back and the party was ready to back another horse. Trump refused to believe it, and refused to go gently, and he was rewarded for it with a level of vindication few people truly expected two years ago.

Resiliency on its own has its limits as a virtue. Trump was flustered dealing with the pandemic precisely because it was a thing one could not easily fight. And, of course, we have all seen the toll that can be taken by Trump’s insistence on never conceding an inch to reality. But it is a virtue, and if you’re looking for any positive lesson to be drawn from Trump’s career, that’s the one. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “Virtues of any kind are rare enough that those who have them should not be harassed about their type and relative importance.” Given Trump’s character as a whole, I would not go that far in his case. But it’s a good virtue to have.