by Roger Kimball
Trump’s critics grow louder even as his resurgence cements him, for many, as a defining leader whose impact is reshaping the nation’s political era.
The pampered class is whining hysterically about Trump calling Ilhan Omar and her 80,000 Somalis in Minnesota “garbage.” Remember when Joe Biden called Trump and his supporters “garbage?” Well, that was different, of course, because … reasons. Hitler. Fascist. Russia collusion. January 6. Argh!
Given the extraordinary accomplishments of Trump in the first 10 months of his second term, I find it remarkable that the anti-Trump hysteria has not ended. If anything, the volume has been notched up to 11. But here’s a prediction for the time capsule. In the fullness of time, which I reckon will be sometime in J.D. Vance’s first term, Trump will—gradually at first—come to be seen as what he in fact is: one of the greatest presidents in America’s quarter millennium, a great man of history, in fact, right up there with number 1, number 16, Ronald Reagan, and (I grudgingly admit) FDR.
I wrote something about this elsewhere around the time Trump was sworn in for the second time this past January, and I thought I would dust off that column for you now.
The fact is that Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) would have been impressed by Donald Trump. The author of On Heroes and Hero-Worship (1841) thought that history organized itself around great men the way that iron filings form patterns in a magnetic field.
The eighteenth century, Carlyle thought, had lost its moral elasticity and spiritual tautness. He prophesied that his own time would be a crucible of renewal in which “the world will once more become … a heroic world.” Over the last couple of years, Donald Trump has emerged as a Carlylean figure, a historic man of action who, having triumphed over extraordinary adversity, has become a totem of the age, a man through whom the highest ambitions of the country find expression.
I know that sounds odd. Eighteen months ago, Trump was finished. The swank people who tell us what to think had written him off. There he was, staggering under scores of indictments in at least four separate jurisdictions. Would he not be bankrupted, incarcerated, and swept ignominiously into the dustbin of history?
Somehow, Trump not only survived but thrived. Did he merely ride the crest of the Zeitgeist, or also help define it? The same question might be asked of Caesar, Napoleon, FDR, or Ronald Reagan.
There are still some flaccid, hand-wringing mutterers who can’t absorb the reality of what Donald Trump represents. Here is a bulletin that they should absorb: Donald Trump represents beneficent change.
The anti-Trump whiners congregate in their faculty lounges, their moist perches on The View and CNN, their renamed DEI workshops, and their climate-change seminars in Aspen. Here and there, one finds pods of sad people like Kris Mayes, the Attorney General of Arizona, who has vowed to “resist” and block Trump’s immigration efforts. One might as well vow to resist a tornado.
Elsewhere, in the real world, what had been an anti-Trump consensus is disintegrating. Even Politico has absorbed an inkling of the truth. Trump is, a column last January admitted, “someone with an ability to perceive opportunities that most politicians do not and forge powerful, sustained connections with large swaths of people in ways that no contemporary can match. In other words, he is a force of history.”
The title of that column is revealing. “Time to Admit It: Trump Is a Great President. He’s Still Trying To Be a Good One.” The charge that has most often been leveled against Trump is that he is a man of “bad character.” Even the patently absurd claims that Trump is a “fascist” (General Mark Milley called him that) or “literally Hitler” follow from the judgment that Trump is just too naff for words, an aesthetic determination that quickly shades into moral obloquy.
I think there are two things to be said about this. Let me turn first to Horace Walpole. “No country was ever saved by good men,” Walpole once observed, “because good men will not go to the length that may be necessary.”
This is where a certain expedient moral ambiguity enters. Like many people (not people at The New York Times), I believe that Donald Trump is in the process of saving America. That is, I believe that his diagnosis of America’s problems is accurate. America really is, as he said in his Somalians-are-garbage comment, at a “tipping point.” High on the list of those problems are a paralyzing commitment to woke ideology, mass migration, stupefying debt, and cratering cultural self-confidence.
I also believe that Trump’s proposed solutions—articulated in his whirlwind of executive orders, presidential proclamations, and on-the-ground reforms—have the best chance of inaugurating that “new golden age” he touts.
Does that also mean that I believe that Trump is not a “good man”? Not necessarily. But I do not think that is the right question. To explain why, let me turn to Cardinal Newman. A man, said Newman, “may be great in one aspect of his character and little-minded in another. … A good man may make a bad king; profligates have been great statesmen or magnanimous political leaders.”
As far as I know, no one has proposed Donald Trump for sainthood. Nevertheless, in the ways that matter for a president, he has shown himself to be a man of good character. Any meaningful definition of good character has to involve an instrumental, pragmatic element. Otherwise, the character in question would be impotent. This is part of what Aristotle meant, I think, when he observed that “it is our choice of good or evil that determines our character, not our opinion about good or evil.”
On issue after issue—the economy, national security, energy policy, free speech, crime—Donald Trump’s “common sense” revolution promises to restore America’s preeminence. Along with other larger-than-life personalities like Elon Musk, Donald Trump signals the welcome return of the Great Man idea of historical evolution.
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/12/07/a-force-of-history-why-trumps-influence-keeps-growing/
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