President Trump
Source: Bigstock
The image of Donald Trump in Butler, Pa., on July 13, 2024, lingers in the collective imagination with the force of myth. A bullet scored his head, and he rose bloodied, fist raised, shouting, “Fight, fight!” into the air. In that moment he embodied something primal and terrifying, the raw instinct to stand upright in defiance of fate. It was the oldest of gestures, the will to affirm life even as death prowled. Modern politics, with its manicured committees and sterile talking points, had not seen such a spectacle in decades. Whatever the ledger of his policies, in that instant he passed the test of character.
That memory framed his return to New York on Sept. 23, when he mounted the rostrum at the United Nations General Assembly. The U.N. was marking its eightieth year, a body born of war but swollen into bureaucracy. The occasion demanded piety and platitudes. Trump brought neither. The escalator seized, the teleprompter failed, yet he strode forward, a man refusing the indignities of malfunction. The delegates received him with that delicate blend of disdain and fear, the polite hostility great hotels extend to the nouveaux riches.
He returned their coolness with fire. “The U.N. is supposed to stop invasions, not finance them,” he barked, accusing it of underwriting the migrant flows that have upended Western societies. He denounced climate change as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated,” mocked Europe’s windmills, and warned that “you’re destroying your countries. They’re being destroyed.” It was not a speech designed to charm diplomats. It was a provocation; a gauntlet flung at the feet of a weary age that prefers managed decline to dangerous vitality.
“The occasion demanded piety and platitudes. Trump brought neither.”
Trump’s instinct is to name the realities others avoid. He declared migration the existential crisis of our time, and he is not wrong. The cartels fatten themselves on America’s porous frontier, while Europe’s inner cities struggle to preserve a memory of their former selves. His government has already expelled hundreds of thousands, expanded detention, and shut down frauds in asylum law. Yet fentanyl still devours whole towns, and the frontier remains a wound. To acknowledge openly that mass migration corrodes nations was to rip away the polite hypocrisies of the hall.
On climate, he struck with the same iconoclasm. He ridiculed the Paris Agreement as counterfeit, condemned Europe’s green masochism, and poured scorn on the pseudoscientific priesthood that chants apocalypse. The effect of their catechism has not been planetary salvation but the relocation of industry to coal-burning China. He plays Diogenes with a lantern, the solitary skeptic exposing frauds in the temple. But negation is not creation. The skeptic can clear the ground, but only rulers with the courage to will a future can build upon the rubble.
On Ukraine, his defiance faltered. Many entrusted him with their vote because he promised to end the slaughter, a slaughter that has already consumed more lives than Verdun, to force Europe into its own defense and tell Kiev the truth that compromise is inevitable. Instead, he rattled tariffs against Russia, demanded Europe cut its energy imports, and indulged the fantasy that Ukraine might reconquer all its lost ground. On Sept. 23, he sounded not like the insurgent but like the heir to NATO’s script. And yet he could end it tomorrow. Without American weapons, intelligence, and money, Ukraine would either negotiate or collapse into its own impotence. Until he forces that reckoning, his words are empty thunderclouds.
On Gaza, the contradiction is crueler still. He warns that recognizing Palestinian statehood rewards terror, a line that plays well in Washington and Tel Aviv but convinces few beyond it. By late September, Gaza no longer resembles a battlefield but an annihilated cityscape: Jericho, walls toppled and innocents put to the sword, as in Joshua 6. The siege itself is pitiless, the worst killing of women and children in a generation, neighborhoods reduced to rubble, survivors herded into camps, civilians starved, then killed when they scramble for relief. Europe edges toward recognition of Palestine. Trump, meanwhile, stands immovable. Yet here too he holds the decisive lever. American arms and American vetoes sustain the war. A single phone call could halt it. During Netanyahu’s July 24 address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, the Likud leader received a standing ovation, perhaps the longest ever recorded, the spectacle of legislators applauding until their hands burned. Trump, who delights in humiliating supranational bodies, bows in this case to a lobby more supranational than any. It is his Achilles’ heel, the place where a brave man seems in thrall.
The remainder of the speech veered between boast and bravado. He proclaimed that he had “ended seven wars,” a claim fit for hagiography rather than history, and bragged that America was “the hottest country” for business, that inflation was “defeated,” that markets were at peaks unseen. Some of this is true: Prices have steadied, markets have surged. Yet debt devours the state’s revenues, the middle class cannot afford homes, and energy prices swing with every crisis. Even his call for a ban on nuclear and biological weapons, monitored by artificial intelligence, was a hollow flourish. His administration had already gutted arms-control treaties and verification regimes; the call was less a policy than a line for applause.
And yet, to dwell only on his failings is to miss the deeper truth. Trump remains singular because he embodies vitality in an age of exhaustion. His fist in Butler was not merely a campaign image but an eruption of the will to stand when others would have ducked. In September, that same vitality carried him through a hostile chamber, refusing to bend his words to the etiquette of the herd. Among the timid caretakers who populate our politics, he alone speaks like a man unafraid of scorn.
But vitality without decision decays into theater. The question is whether Trump can translate his instinct into sovereign choice. To end the war in Ukraine, he must close the spigot. To end the bombardment of Gaza, he must tell Israel, “Enough.” To restore America’s identity, he must not only deport but cut the legal inflows that have transformed its demography and dismantle the cartels that profit from our misery. To move beyond jeering at climate pieties, he must forge an energy future that does not rely on fantasy but on nuclear power, drilling, and the rediscovery of self-sufficiency.
If he does not, he will remain what he is now: the bravest man never to make a peace. Courageous enough to take a bullet and rise, bold enough to mock the hypocrisies of the age, but unwilling, so far, to sever the chains that bind him to the very decadence he despises. History grants few men such moments. Trump has had his. Whether he can transmute instinct into action, and thus carve his name into the stone of fate, remains the unresolved question.