Donald Trump is one of the world’s most recognisable symbols of wealth. Making himself synonymous with prosperity has been one of the secrets to his success. To many Americans, Trump has come to represent something like money itself. But, as his critics often remind us, he also represents the other side of the balance sheet: rampant debt, financial trickery, insolvency and bankruptcy.
Trump represents capitalism not just in its growth phase, but also in chaos and crisis. And, on some level, he knows that. In 2016, he declared himself the “king of debt” and, in 1992, after his brush with ruin, he told New York magazine: “I was the cover boy, I was the leader of the depression,” making his own reversal of fortune emblematic of that era’s downturn. He was on to something. That mini “depression” of the early 1990s was one of the first signs of a wider crisis of liberal democracy and free-market capitalism that gave birth to what I’ve called a politics of national despair.
Understanding Trump’s political success and possible trajectory is the great preoccupation of our times. Endless hours of debate have been given over to parsing what Trump “really believes” or what “Trumpism” really consists of. But the best way to understand Trump is to look at his brush with failure during this earlier moment of American crisis — and the way in which he would later take up the politics of national despair for his own ends.