Reflections on Character as Destiny

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, June 25, 2026

 

In the opening scene of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, one of the title characters flips a coin that keeps coming up heads, dozens and dozens of times in a row. Guildenstern muses that the unlikely event might be considered “a spectacular vindication of the principle that each individual coin spun individually is as likely to come down heads as tails and therefore should cause no surprise that each individual time it does.”

 

By the 85^th time the coin came up heads, the Elizabethan gentlemen not only came to expect heads but would have been surprised at any other outcome. There is the question of mathematical probability, and then there is the separate question of experience.

 

My friends over at National Review, who sometimes hurl themselves headlong at an opportunity to find something good to say about President Donald Trump, went as far as to publish a staff editorial—premature, as it turns out—on the subject of the reflecting pool renovation, writing:

 

There are many, many things to criticize about our 45th and 47th president, but it cannot be the case that literally everything the man does is wrong. ... A monument needed fixing, and it was fixed, quickly and competently.

 

Whichever Yale sophomore runs the magazine’s Instagram account declared: “Love him or hate him, it’s undeniable Trump is making DC beautiful again.”

 

As we read in the immortal line from Homer:

 

 D’oh!

 

As it turns out, the Trump administration awarded the contract for the work—on a no-bid basis, of course—to a firm linked to a Trump crony. Trump’s circle is populated almost exclusively by incompetents and grifters, and, no surprise, the new “American flag blue” paint began coming off almost immediately once the pool was filled with water. Ducks swimming in the pool are keeling over dead. Algae growth is rampant. It is a fiasco.

 

Trump claims that the work was not at fault but that the problems are the result of what his moral antecedents in the Kremlin would have called “wreckers and saboteurs,” and so the president has the former Fox News grotesque currently serving as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia out arresting people, with the president promising 10-year prison terms.

 

At least one of those charged—three-time U.S. Olympian David Hearn—says he had merely reached down to examine a piece of paint that had come unattached. Others are telling similar stories. Which raises the question: Who you gonna believe? The president of these United States of America, the Justice Department, and all of the lawyers and investigators at their disposal, or some rando off the street who has just been charged with a crime?

 

Advantage: rando.

 

The president himself, and virtually every senior member of his administration, lies almost all the time about almost everything. J.D. Vance, out there flogging his book about becoming a Christian, uses the Eighth Commandment like it came out of a package that says “Charmin” on it. Federal judges no longer accept as given that DOJ lawyers will not simply lie to them. A federal court has just thrown out a nakedly political and legally laughable attempt to prosecute Trump’s political opponents in Minnesota. Given a choice between the word of the president, the vice president, the secretary of state, the attorney general, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, the Republican leader in the Senate, the speaker of the House, Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Lindsey Graham, et al., and the word of some utterly unknown party, the only rational assumption is that the unknown party starts from a higher degree of presumptive credibility, inasmuch as one does not know for a fact that he has already lied repeatedly about important public matters or served as an active collaborator with such lies.

 

Maybe there has been vandalism. But whose word can we take on that? Trump’s? Vance’s? Jeanine Pirro’s? Are you kidding me?

 

It cannot be the case that literally everything the man did is wrong. I suppose those words might have occurred to contented motorists speeding down Germany’s magnificent autobahn from time to time. But, at some point, one might legitimately ask why anybody would grasp at such a straw.

 

When matters in the Soviet Union went from bad to worse to genocidal under the misrule of Joseph Stalin, the position of the Communist Party—culpably reiterated by its American cheerleaders—was that things would be just fine if not for the saboteurs who had somehow forced Moscow to starve 5 million men, women, and children to death in Ukraine, at that time a Soviet possession. (And we wonder why the Ukrainians still fight.) The problem with the Five-Year Plan and the collectivization of agriculture was not sabotage or the plotting of wreckers or right-deviationists (pour one out for Nikolai Bukharin) or anything like that: As National Review’s founder used to say (quoting Willi Schlamm), the problem with capitalism is capitalists, but the problem with socialism is socialism.

 

Half the problem with Trumpism is Trumpism. And the other half of the problem with Trumpism is Trump.

 

Trump will always betray those who trust him. And he will always force his underlings to go out in public and defend indefensibly stupid things. Ask Larry Kudlow or Kevin Hassett. And, contra National Review’s social-media intern, Trump will reliably make everything he gets his hands on ugly: His Caligula-by-way-of-Liberace aesthetic is not only—or even mainly—the result of bad taste but the result of bad character. There is a reason vanity is numbered among the seven deadly sins.

 

To assume that the reflecting pool work would be done incompetently and corruptly is far from absurd. If you happen to be among those who believe that character is destiny, then it is, at the very least, a reasonable assumption even if it is something short of an existential certainty.

 

It cannot be the case that literally everything the man does is wrong.

 

“A weaker man might be moved to re-examine his faith,” Guildenstern observes as he tosses another coin, “if in nothing else at least in the law of probability.”

 

Heads.