Opinion | The Nihilist in Chief - The New York Times 6/8/19 13(56

The Nihilist in Chief

How our president and our mass shooters are connected to
the same dark psychic forces.

By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist

Aug. 6, 2019

What links Donald Trump to the men who massacred innocents in El Paso and
Dayton this past weekend? Note that I said both men: the one with the white-
nationalist manifesto and the one with some kind of atheist-socialist politics;
the one whose ranting about a “Hispanic invasion” echoed Trump’s own
rhetoric and the one who was anti-Trump and also apparently the lead singer
in a “pornogrind” band.

Bringing up their differing worldviews can be a way for Trump-supporting or

anti-anti-Trump conservatives to diminish or dismiss the president’s
connection to these shootings. That’s not what I’m doing. I think Trump is
deeply connected to what happened last weekend, deeply connected to both
massacres. Not because his immigration rhetoric drove the El Paso shooter to
mass murder in some direct and simple way; life and radicalism and violence
are all more complicated than that. But because Trump participates in the
general cultural miasma that generates mass shooters, and having a
participant as president makes the problem worse.

The president’s bigoted rhetoric is obviously part of this. Marianne

Williamson put it best, in the last Democratic debate: There really is a dark
psychic force generated by Trump’s political approach, which from its birther

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Opinion | The Nihilist in Chief - The New York Times 6/8/19 13(56

beginnings has consistently encouraged and fed on a fevered and paranoid

form of right-wing politics, and dissolved quarantines around toxic and
dehumanizing ideas. And the possibility that Trump’s zest for demonization
can feed a demonic element in the wider culture is something the many
religious people who voted for the president should be especially willing to
consider.

But the connection between the president and the young men with guns
extends beyond Trump’s race-baiting to encompass a more essential feature
of his public self — which is not the rhetoric or ideology that he deploys, but
the obvious moral vacuum, the profound spiritual black hole, that lies beneath
his persona and career.

Here I would dissent, mildly, from the desire to tell a mostly ideological story
in the aftermath of El Paso, and declare war on “white nationalism” — a war
the left wants because it has decided that all conservatism can be reduced to
white supremacy, and the right wants as a way of rebutting and rejecting that
reductionism.

By all means disable 8Chan and give the F.B.I. new marching orders; by all
means condemn racism more vigorously than this compromised president can
do. But recognize we’re dealing with a pattern of mass shootings,
encompassing both the weekend’s horrors, where the personal commonalities
between the shooters are clearly more important than the political ones.
Which suggests that the white nationalism of internet failsons is like the
allegiance to an imaginary caliphate that motivated the terrorists whose
depredations helped get Trump elected in the first place. It’s often just a
carapace, a flag of convenience, a performance for the vast TV-and-online
audience that now attends these grisly spectacles, with a malignant
narcissism and nihilism underneath.

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Opinion | The Nihilist in Chief - The New York Times 6/8/19 13(56

And this is what really links Trump to all these empty male killers, white
nationalists and pornogrind singers alike. Like them he is a creature of our
late-modern anti-culture, our internet-accelerated dissolution of normal
human bonds. Like them he plainly believes in nothing but his ego, his vanity,
his sense of spite and grievance, and the self he sees reflected in the mirror of
television, mass media, online.

Because he is rich and famous and powerful, he can get that attention with a
tweet about his enemies, and then experience the rush of a cable-news
segment about him. He doesn’t need to plot some great crime to lead the
news; he just has to run for president. But having him as president — having
him as a political exemplar for his party, and a cultural exemplar of manhood
for his supporters and opponents both — is a constant ratification of the idea
that we exist as celebrities or influencers or we don’t exist at all, and that our
common life is essentially a form of reality television where it doesn’t matter if
you’re the heel or hero so long as you’re the star.

One recurring question taken up in this column is whether something good

might come out of the Trump era. I keep returning to this issue because unlike
many conservatives who opposed him in 2016, I actually agree with, or am
sympathetic toward, versions of ideas that Trump has championed — the idea
of a more populist and worker-friendly conservative economics, the idea of a
foreign policy with a more realpolitik and anti-interventionist spirit, the idea
that decelerating low-skilled immigration would benefit the common good, the
idea that our meritocratic, faux-cosmopolitan elite has badly misgoverned the
republic.

But to take this view, and to reject the liberal claim that any adaptation to
populism only does the devil’s work, imposes a special obligation to recognize
the profound emptiness at the heart of Trump himself. It’s not as if you could
carve away his race-baiting and discover a healthier populism instead, or
analyze him the way you might analyze his more complex antecedents, a
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Richard Nixon or a Ross Perot. To analyze Trump is to discover only

bottomless appetite and need, and to carve at him is like carving at an online
troll: The only thing to discover is the void.

So in trying to construct a new conservatism on the ideological outline of

Trumpism, you have to be aware that you’re building around a sinkhole and
that your building might fall in.

The same goes for any conservative response to the specific riddle of mass
shootings. Cultural conservatives get a lot of grief when they respond to these
massacres by citing moral and spiritual issues, rather than leaping straight to
gun policy (or in this case, racist ideology). But to look at the trend in these
massacres, the spikes of narcissistic acting-out in a time of generally-declining
violence, the shared bravado and nihilism driving shooters of many different
ideological persuasions, is to necessarily encounter a moral and spiritual
problem, not just a technocratic one.

But the dilemma that conservatives have to confront is that you can chase this
cultural problem all the way down to its source in lonely egomania and
alienated narcissism, and you’ll still find Donald Trump’s face staring back to
you.

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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is the author
of several books, most recently, “To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of
Catholicism.”

You can follow him on Twitter: @DouthatNYT

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