The writer of this article, the author of War of Two and many other books, believes that if we are to understand Trump, we need to turn to Aristotle.

Witness Trump's recent decision not to follow the professionals' advice to "pivot," but to remain true to himself in all his rabid, hateful glory, no matter how disastrous the consequences:

Aristotle pointed out in his Poetics that in the terrible arc of the tragic hero (Oedipus, classically), rising from nobody to somebody, before descending to ignominy at the end, there is usually a revealing moment of what he calls peripeteia in the long fall of Act Three.

That's when the hero decides that, even though the seeds of his disaster—megalomania, ignorance, cruelty, and an inability to stop lying--were parts of his character he should have jettisoned long ago to save himself, he instead decides to embrace them all the more tightly, and so go down in the flames of what he alone considers glory. It is a revelation of his true self, his inner Trump, and it brings home the fact that it is his true self that has been his undoing.

I'm not sure Aristotle was admiring, but I have to admit that in the case of Mr. Trump I see something strangely grand in this sort of monstrous stupidity. Who doesn't want to be who he really is, to hell with the consequences?

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August 19, 2016