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Some 23 years ago, at the start of the Iraq War, I was senior cultural writer for Gannett Inc., writing a story about the nature of leadership and interviewing, among others, New York City developer Donald J. Trump, who had agreed to answer some questions by email. At the time, Trump owned the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, New Jersey, which featured the $10,000-a-night Alexander the Great suite.
Alexandrian that I am, I was intrigued and began by asking him why Alexander? “Because he was the best, and it’s the best,” Trump wrote back.
I was reminded of that the evening of Friday, May 1, as I watched Ashley Parker, a staff writer with The Atlantic, discuss “The Yolo Presidency,” an article she co-authored, on PBS’ “Washington Week with The Atlantic,’’ about how President Trump aspires to be a great man affecting history in the spirit of Alexander, Julius Caesar and Napoleon and, especially in19th-century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel’s interpretation of the “Great Man Theory.”
The world has been shocked, but I would venture hardly surprised, by the contretemps between the blustery American president and the steadfast American-born pope over Iran that absorbed much of last week. President Donald J. Trump, incensed over Pope Leo XIV’s antiwar stance, accused him of being weak on crime, terrible at foreign policy and ungrateful for his in effect making him pope. (Apparently, even Trump subscribes to the belief that an American pope serving as a counterweight to an American president was what the College of Cardinals had in mind when they elected Cardinal Robert Prevost pope.) For his part, Leo doubled down on his message of peace, grounded in the Gospels.
But this isn’t the whole story or the only one….
Sometimes you can say the right thing – the “true” thing – and still be wrong.
So we have Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the limits of Jesus Christ and actor Timothée Chalamet on the limits of ballet and opera. Both offered a realistic assessment of the world as it is. But both failed to see the world beyond its limitations.
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Lost in the fog of war or any geopolitical crisis is its cultural-historical aspect. This is especially true of the Iran War, which reveals a clash of cultures that in some ways are surprisingly similar.
It was President George W. Bush who said that Americans are not good at looking in the rearview mirror. And so lost on the United States is the irony of a country that fought a revolution against an empire that never understand it only to become an empire that never understood the countries it kept invading.
