Trump can be viewed in a Hobbesian context

After a year in office, President Donald Trump has exhibited most of the personality traits that Thomas Hobbes has detailed in Leviathan (Part I, section V, paragraph 3), which was first published in 1651, but has great relevance to what is happening politically today:

“… When men that think themselves wiser than all others, clamor and demand right reason for judge; yet seek no more, but that things should be determined, by no other men’s reason but their own, it is as intolerable in the society of men, as it is in play after trump is turned, to use for trump on every occasion, that suite whereof they have most in their hand. For they do nothing else, that will have every of their passions, as it comes to bear sway in them, to be taken for right reason, and that in their own controversies, betraying [exposing] their want of right reason, by the claim they lay to it.”

The analogy with card games is piquantly appropriate. This is precisely what Trump is doing, playing with national and international affairs. He thinks he has all the trump cards and actually he has only a few. But he has used them to undermine the Bush and Obama legacies. Dangerous and reckless behavior indeed, which is leading us toward a new barbarism and a fascist nationalism.

S.K. Wertz is an emeritus professor of philosophy at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth and lives in Santa Fe.