I am only a lukewarm, perhaps less than a half-hearted supporter of President Donald Trump.
I was not enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton either, except that I thought, if elected, she might exert her influence and do something to see Bangladesh back on track, as far as free and fair, as opposed to the currently nefarious and nihilistic elections were concerned.
However, I would like to call Trump’s visit to Riyadh a great “circus,” but not as “nasty, farcical, and dangerous,” as some critics would like to characterise it.
While there is a funny and farcical side to it indeed, certainly the trip was not nasty and dangerous.
The great performer
I would read his “circus” trip the way English writer William Hazlitt read the stunning tricks of an Indian juggler, English rope-dancer, hand fives player, chess player, and fencer in the 1820s -- tricks of precision, facility, self-possession, perfect execution, and deception through mechanical excellence with ease, grace, and elegance.
A juggler acquires his astonishing skill as a result of hard industry and perpetual practice with the aim of achieving only a particular feat at a time that would require “bending the faculties of body and mind to it.”
It is the result of utmost concentration on the movements of hands, eyes, and limbs “an infinite number of times,” to be “cemented into closer and closer union.”
The sword-dancing, Sunni nations addressing, and treaty-signing Trump’s performance at Riyadh neared a juggler’s feat, in his own (funny and farcical) way, the way he used to perform at the Miss Universe pageants and on his entertaining The Apprentice “reality show” about the mock business and job interview skills of the rich and famous.
His 1990 book, Trump: Surviving at the Top, about his real-life business success, may soon see its sequel about his political success too.
The main purpose of Hazlitt’s essay is to distinguish between the incredible talents of a juggler and the power of his human skill, cleverness, and ingenuity that did not fail to “stir” and “shake” the author on the one hand, and on the other, the genius, beauty, intellect, imagination, sublimity, and the power of reaching out of a work of art -- fine art -- to the higher and nobler, which Hazlitt considers to be far superior.
Despite the fact that it may have its own faults, digressions, and slow progress, a work of painting or writing is considered greater and more respectable than the show of mechanical tricks, however perfect and fantastic that may be.
“Where fine art begins, mechanical skill ends.” There are, in the height of art, “the soft suffusion of the soul, the speechless breathing eloquence, the looks ‘commercing with the skies,’ [and] the ever-shifting forms of an eternal principle,” to be seized by “strong and secret sympathy.”
A true artist is the interpreter of the language of nature, which “he can only do by knowing its application to a thousand other objects in a thousand other situations.” He has “a harder task master to obey.”
Hazlitt defines the idea of a great man, saying “it is in the nature of greatness to propagate an idea of itself, as wave impels wave, circle without circle.”
While Trump is approximately there in the proximity of a juggler’s mechanical art in the day-to-day actions and statements in his business and political career, both at home and abroad, he falls far short of the greatly refined and intellectually expansive art of his predecessors Barack Obama, John F Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Abe Lincoln, and many others.
Like an exciting ‘circus,’ Trump’s successes are of course mixed with entertaining light and loose elements
Life in the big top
It is true the whole Trump story has all along been a “circus,” more celebratory than ceremonial, be it his personal life, business life, or political life.
Like an exciting “circus,” Trump’s successes are of course mixed with entertaining light and loose elements, as if they were alloys to make his successes more successful with a tinge of the otherwise grave and wise reflections of Shakespeare’s fools and clowns.
Trump’s was a “circus” that the Americans, starved of action-oriented political entertainment in the Washington status quo, wanted to watch. Majority of the Americans did not care and they gave him an A+ victory last November. They wanted a change and there it was for them.
Similarly, Trump’s visit to Riyadh was a huge success -- politically, economically, and showbiz-wise.
He was able to change the whole scenario and steal the entire spotlight in his favour. He has virtually changed on everything he said during the election campaign, starting to seize upon the opportunity of marshaling all the foreign support available and meeting with the foreign leaders from day one. He goes on exploiting and tapping into his “America first” slogan.
What is amazing to see is how he is pulling through, like a phoenix or a circus trainee, from the noisy turmoil and turbulence he creates one after another, yet doubling down on what he says and hitting back hard at the opponents, and, at the same time, maybe hiding something as well.
Despite his comically stuffed controversial comments all along, he remains unscathed and undented. Flickering talks of impeachment often flare, but only to die down, like a burning candle blown out.
Starting from the “women grab” thing to the Mexican wall thing to the joint Russian-Trump team hacking thing to the Flynn thing to the Comey thing to the London Mayor Sadiq Khan thing to the classified intelligence sharing thing, nothing seems to have really shaken his position as much as he has shaken everybody else’s.
Well, he is proving that he has the stamina, of which he thought Hillary Clinton was seriously lacking.
Trump is totally different, developing and dynamic in his somewhat tricky and tendentious style; he is growing and learning, in his peculiarly individualistic way -- part of which looks funny, frivolous, circuitously “circus.”
The rest remains to be seen.
Good or bad, he is doing something, jolting in an apparently jarring way, draining out the swamp, repealing and replacing the Obamacare as he promised, and asking NATO members to pay their share of the military protection bill.
When you do something, you define what you do as much as what you do defines you.
With his family -- wife, daughter, and daughter’s husband -- by his side wherever he goes -- Bangladesh style -- Trump is the ultimate grand-stander in today’s world politics, although he thought his fired FBI chief, Comey, was.
Trump is the ultimate showboat, similar to the “ultimate Job Interview” on his show The Apprentice.
That is why he took part in the Saudi sword dance and did not mind gently elbowing the Montenegro prime minister to push his way through to the front at the NATO summit in Brussels. That’s what he thinks putting America first means!
Inexperienced in the ceremonies and symmetries of the highest and most watched elected office in the world (for which niceties and felicities he hardly cares), he is still the president of the United States.
Saudis and Saudi-led Sunni coalition has his full support, and he has theirs, as opposed to their condemnation of the bloody Iranian-led Shiites.
Saudis have a special responsibility to the Muslim world as far as the two holy sites are concerned. True, they are a monarchy, not a democracy. All systems have their positive and negative sides, their abuses and misuses.
For example, democracy in Bangladesh or Egypt is actually “demo-crazy,” “dummy-cracy” and “demo-crisis.” Elections in Iran, though free and fair, mean nothing much when everything finally rests with the supreme leader of the country, the Ayatollah, who is a killer of Sunnis (look at Syria and Iraq), harking back to Karbala, and who is probably worse than India’s Modi.
It is great to see that American leadership under Trump is with the Saudis and the Sunnis, although the latter group is hardly politically united. Qatar, for example, has its own narrative of the regional politics and Egypt has its own authoritarian government.
To reiterate, Trump’s visit to Riyadh was a great success, far from being nasty and dangerous. It was a much-needed “circus” for a show of unity and strength by the Sunni allies brought together on one common platform.
Trump is trying to shake things up, perhaps all for the better in the long run.
Besides giving great speeches, Obama did virtually nothing and does not have much to show for. It was his passive non-action -- like a pedestrian onlooker at a crime scene -- that brought the political situation of the Middle East to this bloody extent.
What Putin is doing in Syria, Obama should have done long ago: Stopping the butcher Bashar from killing his people. Obama’s idea of liberal democracy needs to be reformulated to include taking some action, especially in terms of moral and political imperatives, which is what Trump, who is actually neither Republican nor Democrat, is perhaps up to.
It is however too early to say which category of the following two Trump belongs to: “Ingenuity is genius in trifles, greatness is genius in undertakings of much pith and moment. A clever or ingenious man is one who can do anything well, whether it is worth doing or not: a great man is one,” Hazlitt continues, “who can do that which when done is of the highest importance.”
Trump has often been an embarrassment to America. But do Americans care?
All they care about is having him do something to change the status quo, no matter how clownish he looks doing it.
With their submerged or subconscious racism, Americans were tired of business as usual in Washington DC. Despite his antics, Trump stands as tall and erect as his Trump tower. If he leans, he does not lean more than the Tower of Pisa -- he stays steady.
Trump is trying to shake things up, perhaps all for the better in the long run
No wonder, Trump, a virtual king, mostly rules by presidential edicts and executive orders. He is however within his presidential prerogatives and proprieties to do so and he enjoys doing so and so does his electoral base.
Personal conviction
While the other presidents lacked the courage to rule by decrees, if and when necessary, Trump has the personal conviction to do so, no matter how comically, like Professor Higgins in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, with whom I drew a detailed analogy of Trump in another article called A Portrait of Donald Trump, which came out on weeklyholiday.net.
To conclude: “A man at the top of his profession is not [necessarily] a great man. He is great in his way, but that is all,” Hazlitt goes on, “unless he shows the marks of a great moving intellect so that we trace the master-mind, and can sympathise with the springs that urge him on. The rest is but a craft or mystery.”
While Trump at “the top of his profession” may yet be far from being “a mastermind” or “a great moving intellect” and may in fact never be so, he is not without his “craft or mystery.” In the words of Hazlitt, all along a liberal reformer and a supporter of Napoleon (unlike many of his contemporaries):
“Greatness is great power, producing great effects. It is not enough that a man has great power in himself, he must show it to all the world in a way that cannot be hidden or gainsaid. He must fill up a certain idea in the public mind. I have no other notion of greatness than this two-fold definition, great results springing from great inherent energy. The great in visible objects has relation to that which extends over space: The great in mental ones has to do with space and time. No man is truly great, who is great only in his life-time. The test of greatness is the page of history […] Besides, what is short-lived and pampered into mere notoriety, is of a gross and vulgar quality in itself.”
Since in the history of the US, Trump is an anomaly -- isn’t it too early to tell what he really is? Is he a short-lived notoriety, gross and vulgar, or a man of great inherent energy producing great results and great effects? In his inner attributes, does he relate to both time and space, or he is like a visible object relating to space only? Would he stand the test of time and history? When William Wordsworth could not figure out what the solitary reaper was singing about, he asked the similar questions:
Will no one tell me what she sings?
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?
The difference is that Wordsworth was at least sure and had the motivating mental satisfaction that the young village girl was singing a great overflowing song of haunting, inspiring music from the other side of the mountain. Does one have the luxury of being sure about anything about Trump -- familiar or unfamiliar, humble or great, high or low, domestic or international?
Jalal Uddin Khan teaches English in the Middle East and has a PhD from NYU New York.