Not What He Seems

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, December 19, 2025

 

One of my little boys believes in the magic of the word “anyway.” E.g.: He talks from time to time about the cat that lives in one of our closets. There is no cat that lives in the closet, and no cat that lives in our house at all, and, if I have my way, there isn’t going to be one. But my little guy talks about the cat in the closet, sometimes attributing various acts of household mischief to said feline. And, just to check, I’ll say: “You know there’s no cat in the closet, right? That the cat is make-believe?” And he answers: “I know. He’s not real.” 

 

And then a pause.

 

“But he’s real anyway.”

 

Donald Trump’s imbecilic superlatives—the greatest this, the biggest that—are of a piece with his more generally lamebrained and absolute manner of speech: the thing that succeeds “like no one has ever seen before” or “like we’ve never experienced,” his achievements in office amounting to “more than any president in history.” Occasionally, one of the minority of Americans who can both count and write will take the time to illustrate that none of this is true, e.g., that we’re in a period of modest GDP growth, persistent high inflation, and middling overall economic performance—not the Great Depression but certainly not a golden age, not the “greatest economy anyone has ever seen.” Unless he is suffering from some kind of profound psychiatric problem–and I do not write in jest that I fear it is at least possible that he may be–Trump knows none of that is real.

 

“But it’s real anyway.”

 

Cicero offered a useful piece of advice: Esse quam videri—”be rather than seem,” that the important thing is to be virtuous or good or successful or courageous rather than merely to appear to be. Trump has spent his life turning that on its head: He was a middling businessman who was in bankruptcy court a lot more often than he was at the top of the game, so he spent years playing a successful businessman on television. He cannot write an ordinary good English sentence, but he paid someone to write a book and put his name on it. His imaginary friend John Barron would call writers at the New York Post and other outlets to tell them silly lies about everything from Trump’s business successes to his dating life. And, of course, he emblazons his name on things—most recently, the Kennedy Center.

 

Trump has been disappointed in his quest for a Nobel Peace Prize, which is not often given to mass murderers, so he just stuck his name on the U.S. Institute of Peace, which is now the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace. Trump is of course sensitive—in the way only an outer-borough man who feels he never was really accepted into Manhattan society can be sensitive—to the charge that he is and always has been the “short-fingered vulgarian” of Graydon Carter’s description. So he’ll put his name on the Kennedy Center, too—that’ll show ’em he has class. And, of course, he’ll aggrandize himself and insult his predecessors in that silly “walk of fame” he has constructed in the White House. He is building the monuments that no one else is going to build for him.

 

George Washington was never much of a boaster—he did not have to be. Dwight Eisenhower could afford to be modest—he was probably the most admired man in the world in his time, and no one doubted his ability to get things done: It is true that Trump once helped to fix an ice skating rink, but Eisenhower organized D-Day and liberated Europe. Eisenhower did so after preparing a letter taking personal responsibility for the failure of the assault—which he knew was a real possibility—noting for history that those under his command “did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.” It is impossible to imagine Donald Trump writing such a thing, or growing into the kind of man who could write such a thing, or even growing into the sort of man who could think of the author of such a note as anything other than a chump who missed the chance to pass the blame on to his subordinates.

 

Trump is a stunted man who attracts stunted men and women to himself. Dan Bongino, who held a senior position at the FBI for about 16 minutes, will be returning to the private sector, where he will no doubt go back to insisting that “taxation is theft” in spite of his having enjoyed a long career on the public payroll. Susie Wiles, insisting in what must have been about her 22^nd hour of on-the-record interviews with Vanity Fair that, as she put it, “I don’t ever seek attention,” is out there curating her legacy for whoever runs the hall of fame for chiefs of staff. Pete Hegseth is out there being Pete Hegseth, and J.D. Vance is playing footsie with Nick Fuentes and the rest of the neo-Nazis. Discarded Don Jr. fiancée Kimberly Guilfoyle is making a fool of herself as the disfigured face of American diplomacy in Greece. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, a whole generation of commentators and podcasters and influencers—these are debased people.

 

And Trump is going around naming things after himself. What about the moon? It isn’t named for anyone. And it does kind of look like him: round and lifeless and, at certain times of year, orange.

 

A man like that has “got a great empty hole right to the middle of him. He can never kill enough, or steal enough, or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.”

 

There just aren’t enough Venezuelans or crypto schemes or disabled people to go around.