Maybe Donald Trump is just a rich guy who is impatient and wants to get richer. He figured out that to get really rich, Musk-rich, you need to have political power, the more the better.
Specifically, he must have reasoned, the CEO of the executive branch of the U.S. government could, if he wanted to, turn that virtual holding company of bureaucracies (Treasury, Justice, Homeland Security, etc.) into a money-making machine.
Richard Conville
Thus, he descended on the golden escalator in 2015 to declare his candidacy for president of the United States of America. That may be the simplest explanation of the Trump phenomenon: The rise of a New York real estate developer and reality TV star to the most powerful political position in the world.
Of all the keywords in that introduction, the most important is the word “impatient.” Trump wants his wishes carried out immediately. Hence, his disinterest in legislation. That takes time and negotiation and compromise. Rather, he prefers executive orders. He can sign them on live television backed up by adoring supporters in the Oval Office, and they echo across the social media landscape — then it’s done!
For some context, Trump signed 220 executive orders in his first term, and Joe Biden signed 162 in his one term. But in the first 10 months of his second term, Trump has already signed 213 executive orders, while during those same 10 months, Congress has passed only 38 bills.
Trump is leaving Congress, our elected representatives, out of the process of governing. If I were one of them, I would resent that. But it’s not just personal, it’s also political. The Constitution calls for three branches of government, and right now, the executive branch and the judicial branch are governing the country.
I wonder why Trump is so impatient. Maybe, in part, it is because he grew up in the city. Writing in Quartz, Lois Farfel Stark notes what has happened to many who have grown up in urban environments: “We are increasingly disconnected from nature. … The very skylines we construct … block us from seeing the horizon. Our man-made cities can be blinders to the lessons of larger natural landscapes, one that can teach connectivity, consequences and complexity.”
Maybe the young Trump could not see the rhythms and cycles of nature for the glare of the built environment around him — the paved streets and sidewalks and the carefully manicured grounds of the homes there in Jamaica Estates, Queens. Then, looming high above, there were the steel and glass towers of Lower Manhattan to the west.
“Nature will teach us patience if we let her.”
If he had noticed those rhythms and cycles of nature, maybe he would have also noticed that nature does not turn on a dime, nor does it obey us. Rather, much as we might want summer to follow immediately upon summer, summer will come round again only after the earth circles the sun once more. Much as the young Trump might have wanted the winter break at New York Military Academy to last until, say, Valentine’s Day, winter break is calendar driven. So winter, like summer, must wait another year.
Nature will teach us patience if we let her (also connectivity, consequences and complexity, if we let her). The young Trump might also have noticed (but did not) that we humans are also part of nature, not separate from it. We, like nature, do not turn on a dime. We, like nature, have minds of our own. We have agency.
Only with great collateral damage is that agency taken from us. Some comply with Trump’s impatience. Some resist and go their own way, as does nature. Many lose their livelihood and their inherent human dignity, if not their lives. All because of his impatience to acquire all the power he can to make all the money he can.
At the New York Military Academy (or at Fordham or Penn), the young Trump might well have encountered the work of the major 20th-century poet E. E. Cummings. Would that he had taken note of how he ends a notable poem:
spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there) and
without breaking anything.
Richard L. Conville is professor emeritus of communication studies at the University of Southern Mississippi and a long-time resident of Hattiesburg, Miss., where he is a member of University Baptist Church.