There he stood on the stage, blood streaming down his face, with a raised fist shouting “Fight!”
When had Americans last been witness to such a scene? In the wilderness, during George Washington’s first foray against the perfidious French. He later wrote to his brother about the bracing experience of feeling the bullets whiz past him. Washington wrote up his experience for the Royal Governor, who touted his protégé’s courage and pluck and had it all published abroad, providing Washington with his first taste of renown.
The differences between George Washington and Donald Trump are, of course, manifold, yet for millions he has become, like Washington, a providential president. No matter what comes at him, Donald Trump has not only survived but triumphed, again and again—like Washington who escaped the disaster of General Braddock’s campaign against the French. Even as Braddock lay dying, Washington was there at his side to promote American invincibility and exceptionalism.
Each generation of presidential biographers, beginning with Parson Weems and John Marshall, has cast the president and the presidency in a providential light. Not until the early twentieth century did a Washington biographer, Owen Wister, make fun of the idea of a providential president. A wave of debunking biographies of Washington followed in the 1920s, inspired by Lytton Strachey’s satirical portraits in Eminent Victorians (1918). But that trend did not last, and even to this day the idea of the providential president persists, however attenuated—that is, until the advent of Donald Trump.
“The hand of God is on you,” the Washington Post reported Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) as saying to Trump when he was selected as the Republican nominee for third time in his career. Voicing what many of his devoted base believe, Trump campaign spokeswoman Caroline Sunshine declared, according to the same reporting, that her candidate had survived the assassination attempts by “divine intervention.” Such declarations only affirm what openly partisan pastors, podcasters, and members of the Trump family have claimed for their blessed leader.
I learned about Trump’s power during his first term when a neighbor of mine described Trump as a man of God—or more precisely God’s messenger. I looked at him incredulously—just as he looked at me, wondering why I did not share his faith in Trump. Neither of us could breach the other’s position, advancing as though we had each taken the higher ground.
Even Americans who despise Trump want to believe that their president has somehow been anointed, blessed, and in the care of a higher power. For those of religious belief, it is providence, for others it might seem more like destiny, or the fulfillment of a higher purpose, as was the case, I believe, with Barack Obama. As president, Obama seemed to many the fulfillment of an American promise of equality and freedom for all that had been renewed in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments passed after the Civil War.
With Trump, the providential is rooted in the pre-amendment period, when Washington, addressed as “your excellency” seemed a fitting replacement for King George III—one George exchanged for another George, as Washington Irving slyly implied when Rip Van Winkle woke up to see the portrait of the king replaced with that of the first president. Irving, also a biographer of George Washington, was wondering how much had changed in the twenty years Rip had been asleep. Had one king been replaced with another sort of king?
All this is to say that although nowadays, protests call on the American spirit that decries kings, yearning for a king, a kind of superman who can withstand the bullets shot at him, has always been in the nature of the American experience. We don’t want kings, we say, but then some of us are fascinated with the royals. Biographies of monarchs still sell well. King George may have been mad, but kingship remains appealing to a vast segment of the American people.
Washington willingly gave up power—it is what made him great. Even George III agreed. Yet by giving up power, Washington ironically implied “I alone can fix it,” which is to say Washington was needed to tell us we did not need him.
It seems improbable, to say the least, that Donald Trump simply walks away from power, but his swollen veins may yet provide him with a sort of natural providence that he can invoke on his way out.