Rupture Without Reformation

A year of living with Trump in the infinite present.

With the Old Year coming to a close, I’m finding it difficult to draw conclusions. What just happened? What did we all just go through?

It’s hard to say. I’m not wired for memories, I struggle with time. The upside of being present-oriented is I have few regrets. But looking back, it’s always through filthy glass.

Though I’ve tried doing it several times, keeping a journal never sticks for me. The whole idea behind a “Tuesday Note” was partly self-serving: to create a public obligation for me to regularly scribble down some passing observations. And lo, I guess I have a set of scribbles from the past year to look back on. So… what did we all just go through?

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Trump was clearly top of my mind this year. Two things about him and his reign stand out.

One has to do with time. In January of last year, I was glorying in what his ascent signaled. I didn’t vote for him, I wouldn’t vote for him, and I won’t in the future. But his victory represented a real break.

All of us writing in these pages have long felt in our guts how hollow and self-serving everything was getting. In 2016, Trump and Bernie felt it too, and both lunged for the throne. The Dem leadership outright aborted Bernie’s candidacy, while the Republicans tried to strangle newborn Trump in the crib, surrounding him with all sorts of nannies —“adults in the room”. The adults largely thwarted Trump’s program, but they failed to stop Trump himself. After four years in the wilderness, he came roaring back, and this time he flattened whatever political piety was still standing.

It felt like a true passing of an epoch. I wrote at the time that there was some perverse relief in that. I still feel it.

And the excitement. I went to an early Doge party and you could smell it in the air. For them, it wasn’t so much a perverse relief as a sense of triumph. Not in the normal sense — that their side had defeated the opponents, the enemies. More like that transgression had triumphed over manners. I get that too, if I’m honest: perversion is electric. But the charge didn’t energize me in the same way it clearly energized the young Trumpists. That jolt bred in them the second thing I kept coming back to in my writing this past year, something I could only describe as a barbaric frenzy.

The frenzy was everywhere. On policy, there was the “move fast and break things” Doge effort — except unlike in Silicon Valley, there was little pretense that the breaking was a regrettably necessary consequence of building something better. It felt more like transgression for its own sake. Nihilism.

It was all being done very quickly — partly as a tactic, because the system simply can’t keep up. But also because that nihilistic energy, unopposed, was feeding into itself. All across government, the very limits of existing law were being pushed — on firing federal workers, on deporting people, on tariff authority. There’s a positive ideological agenda you can pick out if you squint: the unitary executive, immigration restrictionism, industrial policy. But there was clearly gleeful energy to be gained from just transgressing.

“I’ll break it, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me,” I imagine Stephen Miller taunting. “I dare you to try.”

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Over a week ago, I went on what may have been the only vacation I took this year. (Is that true? I don’t remember.) I traveled (to Sils Maria in Switzerland, where Nietzsche summered and eventually went mad) and spent some time with my folks. I think I mostly unplugged. More important, I started reading again. The Reformation, by Diarmaid MacCulloch and Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism, by Philip Benedict have long been tempting me. I’m about knee-deep in both right now.

My parched, addled brain is soaking it up. The sixteenth century also contained a profound inflection point. The Church (like “the Cathedral”) had gotten flabby and cynical. Its pieties were hollow and self-serving. Many people had felt it in their gut ahead of time. As MacCulloch reminds us, proto-Protestant critiques had been bubbling up for at least a century before it all properly boiled over. Luther and Zwingli and Bullinger and Calvin also clearly felt it — and similarly lunged, if not for the throne then for the throat of the existing order.

It was violent, even frenzied at times. After a municipal vote in Bern banned the mass and ordered all images removed from churches, things got frothy, as Benedict tells us:

Two days of iconoclasm followed during which children sang triumphantly, “We have been freed from a baked God”—a mocking reference to the host—while Zwingli exhorted the iconoclasts from the pulpit of the ransacked Minster, “Let us clear out this filth and rubbish! Henceforth, let us devote to other men, the living images of God, all the unimaginable wealth which was once spent on these foolish idols.”

But Zwingli is no Stephen Miller. Luther, Bullinger, Calvin, and even the iconoclasts in Bern were not intoxicated by transgression itself. Even when they destroyed, they were destroying toward something true and binding, something with a horizon beyond the present moment. Salvation, after all, transcends time itself.

Trumpism is not iconoclastic in the Reformation sense. It is ultimately powered by the pleasure of violation and the tactical advantages of speed. Its truth claims about the monarchical executive, immigration, and nationalist economic policy are just simple inversions of parliamentary deliberation, open borders, and globalization — all pieties of the previous order. That is why it feels so electric but at the same time so very thin. And its horizon is only getting thinner. As its frenzy builds in speed, it shrinks the experience of time itself into an increasingly suffocating present. Even with my own temperamental presentism I’m finding it hard to cope.

I was talking to a friend today about the Trumpies. She was complaining that not only are they bigoted, but they are also ignorant and self-satisfied. I said that for all the education and erudition of our previous elites, they were no less self-satisfied than this bunch — and that I still can’t bring myself to really mourn their exit. The perverse relief I felt in January was real. But rupture is not the same thing as reformation, and relief is not the same thing as renewal. After a year, it’s clear that Trumpism is a white-hot fire that can’t go on forever. It already feels like it might be in the process of consuming itself.

The real danger, I think, is not that it will have destroyed too much of what came before. All that had to go because it was legitimately hollow. What I worry about is that we have lost our ability to even know what truth is. That’s not Trump’s fault either; liberalism tends to discourage all ultimate truth claims. But without ultimate truth, Trumpism might be just the first of many violent pendulum swings.

The Reformation endured precisely because it yoked reform to an account of eternity. That’s something we’ll have to eventually aspire to ourselves. But maybe as a first step, let’s pull ourselves out of the shrinking present and pray for a better year ahead — if only because nothing else we have tried can supply the kind of truth reform actually requires.

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