20 newyork| october12–25, 2020
intelligencer
keeping this whole thing going.
Gingrich grasps better than most how to
stick to a message, and he keeps a straight
face on Trump’s behalf even as he argues
things he knows cannot be true. That voter
surveys are skewed by the left-wing media.
“I think the election is not quite like the
public-opinion polls,” he says. That the
president’s illness is a political asset. “It
gives him a better understanding of what
people are going through,” he says. Or that
the president doesn’t mean to imply those
killed by the virus were weak when he says
he’ll beat it because he’s strong. “I think he’s
talking about a national attitude. Should it
be ‘Hunker down in the basement’ or
‘Reopen the schools’?” he says. Still, he can-
not help but break character to admit the
obvious: “If the president had his way,
there’d be no virus. There’d be historically
high employment among Blacks and Lati-
nos. But you don’t get to pick the circum-
stances in which you run.”
And the circumstances have grown less
pickable each day. “I think some of this is
sad to watch,” Nunberg said. “It’s getting to
the point where he’s almost turning into
a laughingstock. What I’m worried about
is whether he wants to completely self-
destruct and take everything down with
him vis-à-vis the election and the Republi-
can Party.” He added, “This is a guy who’s
not gonna lose joyfully.”
It does appear at times as though self-
destruction may be the point. How else
could you explain the Plague Parade cir-
cling Walter Reed, in which a very sick
Trump boarded a tightly sealed SUV with
his Secret Service agents so he could wave
at the supporters who had come to fly
their flags on the street? Or the Evita-
inspired return to the White House, in
which a still very sick Trump ascended the
staircase to the balcony, ripped off his face
mask, and saluted to no one as his photog-
rapher snapped away? Or calling in to the
Fox Business Channel to suggest his infec-
tion may be the fault of the Gold Star mili-
tary families, since they were always ask-
ing to hug him? This is what it looks like
when the president knows he’s losing, but
it’s also close to what it looked like when
he won—after all, he thought he was los-
ing in 2016, too. We all did. “You’re never
as smart as you look when you win, and
never as dumb as you look when you lose,”
according to David Axelrod. In Trump’s
case, it may be more like this: What seems
like genius when he manages to survive is
the very madness that threatens his sur-
L
ast month, appearing at a rally in Minnesota, President
Trump praised the superior genetic stock of his supporters in
the state. “You have good genes, you know that, right?” Trump
observed. “You have good genes. A lot of it’s about the genes,
isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think
we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”
The comment received some attention as fresh evidence of a decades-
long streak of racism, which it certainly is. (There is obviously a reason
the lineage of the heavily Nordic state drew his attention.) But Trump’s
observations on genetics are not only an expression of racism. It is also
one of his deepest obsessions and the explanation for the bizarre passivity
that has characterized his response to the coronavirus pandemic from the
outset and that has led him to his likely political, if not corporeal, demise.
The classic American millionaire myth, from Carnegie to Warren
Buffett, has an origin story, employing at least elements of truth, built on
hard work. The hero rose at dawn and sweated and strove on his rise to
greatness. And yet, despite having spent decades carefully polishing his
place in the lineage of aspirational wealth, Trump has few well-known
stories of pounding the pavement or poring over real-estate listings. “It’s
instincts, not marketing studies,” he wrote in The Art of the Deal, the origi-
nal manifesto of his personality cult.
Instinct is something you are born with or not. In 1988, Oprah Win-
frey asked Trump if “all of the people reading Art of the Deal hoping to
find some answer that will satisfy their own desire for success” could
take away inspiration and lessons. The American prosperity gospel has
a hackneyed response to this question: Yes, with relentless effort and
perhaps some luck, anybody can get rich in America. Even though he
was peddling a book marketed to advance precisely such a fantasy,
Trump could not bring himself to supply the familiar answer. “You have
to be born lucky in the sense that you have to have the right genes,” he
explained. “You have to have a certain gene.”
Trump brings up his belief in genes over and over. “I have a certain
gene,” he told CNN in 2010. “I’m a gene believer. Hey, when you con-THE NATIONAL INTEREST:
Good GenesThe president’slifelong obsessionwith his superiorDNA is put tothe test.by jonathan chaitContinued on p. 22 ☛☛ Continued from p. 18