Watching a social media video yesterday, I noticed a well-set-up person walking into lens collection. The man seemed to have a close connection to Donald Trump, and the camera recently focused on his mouth. Donald Trump had obviously changed, but I soon realized it was him. His pace was slower, more intentional, and the expression on his face was more solemn, less mobile, immediately less exciting and malleable. He did not look very like himself, but far more serious, more like a chess master of a mystic in thought. Another Trump-spotters, I’m certain, have shared the same restlessness and at least a hint of perplexity.
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And why not? One recalls the popular phrase from Samuel Johnson:” Depend on it, sir, when a person knows he is to be hanged in a month, it concentrates his mind delightfully”. A man’s perspective on the world, his personal polarity, and his natural tone will be greatly affected by mutatis mutandis, a gun intended for a man’s mind and divinely slicing off part of an ear, even if he escaped death.
The bombast and sarcasm and odd vulgarities, which many of us found amusing and down to earth, the extravagant and loud self-presentation, the loud good humor as well as the burning comments, the pointing finger singling out friends in the audience, the up-tempo disco moves, the tics and mannerisms of a man accustomed to performing—all these are very well gone, replaced by an attitude of sobriety and somber thoughtfulness. ” The Donald J. Trump who took the stage in Milwaukee next day”, writes Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media, “was a introspective, determined elder statesman…Trump’s sotto voce, conversational tone was great, and a counter to the furious maniac that the commies in the mainstream media like to present him as”. The Spectator World, an unfriendly outfit, also alludes to a “new subdued Trump”.
William James elaborates on a distinction made by classical scholar Francis Newman between the once-born and the twice-born in” The Varieties of Religious Experience.” ” God has two families of children on this earth”, said Newman,” the once-born and the twice-born”. The once-born are simple, vigorous, physically assertive, and have faith in a perfectible universe. The twice-born have been somehow transformed, aware of the deeper mysteries of life, the refractory nature of mankind, and the incongruities and absurdities that rule over the political and social theaters. He or she has grown painfully aware of the perplexing realities of existence.
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James considers a personal crisis that transformed the life of Leo Tolstoy, author of” War and Peace“, as follows:” The process is one of redemption, not of mere reversion to natural health, and the sufferer, when saved, is saved by what seems to him a second birth, a deeper kind of conscious being than he could enjoy before”. It is something “haunting, abiding and oppressive”, wrote the Victorian savant and economist Walter Bagehot in” Literary Studies“,” that changes men’s inner lives and makes them receptive to the idea of God”. Trump’s family now includes the twice-born, it is obvious. As he confided,” That was an amazing, horrible thing. Amazing thing. And in many ways, it changes your attitude, your viewpoint on life. And I think, honestly, I think you appreciate God even more. I really do”.
The question for many of us is which Trump do we prefer: the once-born gladiator who battled in the octagon of bloody UFC-type politics, dynamic, utterly confident, feisty, unorthodox, often irritating, or the twice-born hero, the quieter, meditative, austere, introspective and dignified champion who no longer fires from the hip but seems rather to be brooding strategically for ultimate victory.
Longtime friend Dana White, president of Ultimate Fighting Championship ( UFC), describes Trump as” a fighter…the legitimate, ultimate, American badass of all time”. I confess I miss the “unfiltered” Donald Trump, once affectionately dubbed” the Donald” as if it were the familiar handle of a neighborhood favorite, but recognize that the stately and pensive survivor of a millimeter-wide attempt on his life is the contemplative and decisive warrior that America—enmeshed in the thickets of identity politics, sexual deviance, feminism, black power and institutional corruption springing from the ideological roots of the Left—now desperately needs.
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