The following is an abridged transcript of a segment from System Update’s most recent episode, lightly edited for clarity and readability. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.
System Update is an independent show that is free to all viewers and listeners, but that wouldn’t be possible without our loyal supporters. To keep the show free for everyone, please consider joining our Locals, where we host our members-only aftershow, publish exclusive articles, release these transcripts, and so much more!
I don't think there's any question that Trump is one of the most, if not the most consequential presidents of our lifetime. That's neither praise nor critique. That's just an observation that I think is undeniably true. The impact that he has had on media, the impact that he's had on political coalitions, the impact that he's had on policy, on political culture throughout the West and beyond, I think is far beyond any other specific president. Maybe Richard Nixon is the president who competes with him in terms of how consequential he was – and his presidency was – for better or for worse. But I would say Trump is probably the most consequential and the main reason for that, in my view, is how much he deviates from prior presidential patterns. Whatever you say about Donald Trump, you cannot say he's an ordinary political figure or an ordinary president.
One of the things I think is most worth noting about Trump, the thing that for me has always been a vessel of potential, a reason why I think that there's something not only interesting but positive in Trump's emergence on the political scene is precisely the fact that, unlike virtually every president from either political party in my lifetime who is sort of a person you just wind up and they reflexively embrace the most sacred authorities of DC's power centers, in part because they are byproducts of them, they're sort of strivers, people who have been training their whole life to become president, they're trained above all else in how to say and believe the things that advance their careerism, their self-interest and their political agenda, they just are reflexively unrevolutionary, eager not to alienate powerful people, and therefore they're very reliable vessels for establishment dogma. Trump has spent his entire life doing exactly the opposite. The fact that he wasn't even in politics at all, in any elected capacity or as a candidate, basically until 2016, when he was 71 years old, I think is what enabled him to be so willing to reject ideas, positions, and pieties that presidents previous to him, major presidential candidates previous to him, would never even dream of rejecting because the cost is too high, the anger on the part of powerful and influential people is too intense. And yet, for whatever reasons, Trump has constituted in such a way as to not really care about that, I think he does crave at a certain level, gaining approval and being liked, but there's a bigger part of him that is willing to incur the wrath of the people who are most powerful.
As a result, this unpredictability, I think is central to understanding Trump.
