THE DONALD EXULTS IN EMPTINESS
Trump’s winning and whining don’t have anything to do with principle
I can only say this: My whole life has been about winning. My whole life,” Donald Trump told The
Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in a freeranging interview over the weekend. “My life has been about victories. I’ve won a lot. I win a lot. I win — when I do something, I win. And even in sports, I always won. I was always a good athlete. And I always won. In golf, I’ve won many club championships. Many, many club championships. And I have people that can play golf great, but they can’t win under pressure. So I’ve always won.”
Let’s put aside Trump’s myriad failures in life: Trump steaks, Trump University, Trump casinos, a Trump magazine, Trump airlines, etc. It’s no surprise Trump talked a lot about winning because he has never stopped talking about winning.
On the stump, he says things such as, “We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning. Believe me.”
He even defends his constant whining as a kind of brilliant strategy for winning: “I keep whining and whining until I win.”
NEED FOR STRENGTH
That bit is funny, given that his other favorite concept is strength, which is not normally associated with whining. As far as I can tell, he talks about the need for strength a hundred times more than he ever talks about, say, liberty or the Constitution (in the roughly 18,000-word transcript of his Post interview, these phrases appear exactly zero times).
I certainly agree that the country has taken its eye off the ball when it comes to winning — depending on what you mean by winning. From the “everyone gets a trophy” philosophy in our grade schools to the grade inflation in our universities, to the absurdly constrictive rules of engagement for our troops, it does seem that Trump is alluding to something real when he says, “America doesn’t win anymore.”
In his interview, Trump argues that all his antics and attacks on the campaign trail are justified by the fact that he’s winning. “Winning solves a lot of problems,” he says in response to a question about how he will unify the party, should he get the nomination after his scorched earth campaign.
He says, “Respect is about winning.” Is it?
For starters, this isn’t what we teach our kids. Sure, it’s good to win. But the essence of sportsmanship is something more than getting the most points on the board. Getting good grades is important, too, but not if it requires cheating or sabotaging others. How many people do you respect that whine their way to victory?
Indeed, the notion that winning is the highest value runs counter to most usual definitions of heroism, decency and good character. Atticus Finch is the hero of To Kill a Mockingbird even though he loses. Martin Luther King Jr. is a hero, but not simply because he won. RICHER THAN TRUMP Even in business, the arena where Trump claims to be the greatest champion alive, winning isn’t everything. Integrity matters, too. Trump defends his anymeans-necessary approach to profits as if that’s what great businessmen do. But there are plenty of men far richer than Trump who’d never dream of, say, abusing eminent domain laws to evict an old lady from her home. That doesn’t make them losers.
Among conservatives, Barry Goldwater is a hero, despite the fact he lost in a landslide. Why? Because he stood for a principle.
Ideology, specifically Goldwa- terite ideology, has taken a beating in the 2016 GOP primaries, to the glee of many Trump supporters. Even many longtime conservative purists take a kind of bizarre delight in the fact that Trump is overturning long-held notions of ideological orthodoxy in the name of winning.
But what is ideology other than a collection of principles? Mainstream, conservative ideology holds that the government that governs least governs best. It holds that strength alone is not the metric by which we judge the merits of presidents and that liberty, free enterprise and the rule of law are their own rewards.
Winning might be a principle of a kind, but it is a morally and philosophically empty one. Trump’s personal definition of winning has nothing to do with any larger principle than his own glorification.
And, by his own testimony, that’s the only principle he’d carry with him to the Oval Office.