There is no Body Politic in Trump’s America
Just the Body Natural
To be clear, this week the Department of Justice agreed to create a $1.7 billion fund for Donald Trump to use, at will, to pay people he claims were wrongly prosecuted by the Biden administration’s Department of Justice.
To be clear, there is nothing in U.S. law that permits the President of the United States to do this. And there is no precedent.
To be clear, this particular “settlement” was reached because Donald Trump the private citizen agreed to withdraw a lawsuit against Donald Trump the executive’s IRS which Donald Trump the private citizen brought because in 2019 Donald Trump the executive’s IRS leaked Donald Trump the private citizen’s tax returns. This week, however, Donald Trump the private citizen agreed to withdraw his lawsuit against Donald Trump the executive’s IRS on condition that Donald Trump’s the executive’s Department of Justice create a $1.7 billion fund for Donald Trump the executive to use at his discretion to pay those who were prosecuted by Joe Biden’s DOJ for breaking federal laws in an effort to help Donald Trump (the private citizen’s? the executive’s?) pull off a coup and stay in office in and around January 6, 2021.
In light of all of this, there are those who are saying that Donald Trump is stealing from taxpayers to reward those who attempted to help him steal the presidency in 2021. Fair enough.
There are those who are crying “corruption!” Indeed.
There are those who can’t believe such a thing is possible, let alone legal.
But this, really, is as profound as the commentary gets: theft! corruption! how could he?
Which leads me to say: The biggest thing Donald Trump has stolen from America is the capacity to say anything profound in our political discourse about ourselves.
The most destructive thing Donald Trump is doing to the United States is stripping its citizens, representatives, officers, pundits, and philosophers alike of the conditions to do, say, and think things of any depth, any subtle meaning, about the nation, its past, its present, and its future.
Donald Trump has turned the American story flat. It cannot elevate, descend, crescendo, or crash. It can only infuriate, and this only fleetingly.
Fools and heroes alike require foils.
Donald Trump won’t even allow us to be fools, let alone heroes—so thin has he made character sketch of America. Reality TV does it better. We are not even cartoons. We are pebbles of sand at an inland beach resort.
The structure of Donald Trump’s “settlement” this week with himself is in fact very old. Political thought in the west has long made a distinction between a person in their private capacity and their public capacity. In the Middle Ages the doctrine was called “the king’s two bodies.” According to Ernst Kantorowicz in his 1957 masterwork The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, the basic idea that was that the king had two bodies, not one:
The Body Natural—the king’s physical, mortal, human body. This body was subject to the infirmities of nature: it could be sick, it aged, it died. It was the feeble body of the living, breathing king.
The Body Politic—an invisible, mystical, and immortal body. This body represented the king’s role as the embodiment of the realm, the crown, and sovereign power itself. It was immune from corruption and error alike, and it never died.
The medievals drew on Christian theology, poetic imaginations, and ancient law to transform the king, and with him the kingdom, into a sempiternal entity, a kind of heavenly body on earth. And so people had to speak in paradoxes: “The King is dead, long live the King.”
So too all those anti-monarchists that came later: democrats, republicans, anarchists, socialists, communists, communitarians, liberals, conservatives. They all sought to say something profound about the body politic. Every one of them.
But there is no profundity in Donald Trump’s America, no paradoxes. There not even true conspiracies, secret plots, or arcana imperii (“secrets of power”). There is just the blatant and banal manipulation of the levers of governance for one’s own and one’s family’s and friend’s profit, self-aggrandizement, and petty power.
That is, there is no Body Politic in Trump’s America, just the Body Natural—insatiable, irritable, aggressive, rapacious, flabby, aging, orange.
It too will die. But it’s already done the damage, already stole the story.
Donald Trump’s greatest crime is not what’s in the headlines this week. It’s his stealing from the nation its sense of dignity, its story and saga, its push for profundity.
He’s turned “the king’s two bodies” into the premise for a Ponzi scheme.