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Mr. Trump’s Governing Style: Feral Instinct

Mr. Trump’s Governing Style: Feral Instinct

Last updated on: August 2, 2024 at 10:42 am by Christy Thomas

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Mr. Trump’s Governing Style: Feral Instinct 2024-08-02T10:42:30-05:00 Christy Thomas

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Donald Trump governs on “feral instinct.” Believe it. The “I’ve never met a Republican I didn’t like” Wall Street Journal thinks so.

Donald Trump governs from feral instinct

Photo credit: free Adobe stock photo, official portrait of DJT (Shaleah Craighead, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons), modified by Christy Thomas.

This quote is from an opinion piece in the Wednesday, July 31 edition of the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Roberts explains in a letter to the editor nearby that Project 2025 was an attempt to offer ideas to debate and govern. But his mistake was thinking that Mr. Trump cares about anyone’s ideas other than his own. He governs on feral instinct, tactical opportunism, and what seems popular at a given moment [boldface mine**].**

Full disclosure: For most of my adult life, I have voted Republican. I grew up in a solidly Republican family, respected the party as a centering, stabilizing hand on the country, and felt better off with that kind of governance.

I had the most profound respect for Jimmy Carter as a person, but he was not a great President. Things began to change for me when Bill Clinton was President. He was, and likely still is, an utterly immoral man, yet his ability to govern with a broad outlook impressed me. George Bush, an intellectual lightweight operating off his father’s legacy, stumbled a lot but grew into the job.

I admired Barrack Obama, but I did not vote for him. My Republican roots kept saying, “He’ll take the country in a socialist direction.” But neither did I vote Republican: I was already seeing the party move in a meaner, narrower, whites-only, “survival-of-the-fittest,” or could we say, “feral” direction.

Had the GOP nominated a decent centrist like John Kasich in 2016, they would have had my vote. But they didn’t. And then, when I saw the despicable way Mr. Trump treated women and people of color and how his followers happily mimicked him, something in me completely broke. There was little honorable, moral, or centrist remaining in the GOP.

Did I agree with all of the 2016 Democratic priorities? Absolutely not. But the alternative seemed much worse–and it was much worse. The four years of chaos and instability, the lowering status of the US in world opinion, growing racism, the profound erosion of adequate medical care availability for women of childbearing age, not to mention the genuinely crazy “Trump as Messiah” movement among the far right wing of the Christian world, cemented my move into the Democratic party.

However, for the last nine years, I have been married to a lifelong Republican. We are now in our third Presidential race as a married couple. The Trump/Clinton campaign was difficult for us as relative newlyweds, but we got through it. The Trump/Biden campaign was a bit better mainly because we realized we could not discuss politics and maintain the deep harmony and joy that characterizes the rest of our conversations and activities.

After Mr. Biden won decisively in 2020 (despite Mr. Trump’s untrue insistence on an “alternate truth”), I told my husband that the GOP needed to get their act together and nominate someone else for 2024, or they’d deeply regret it.

He, along with his large group of friends, all male, white, financially secure older men who also carry deep memories of a responsible, centrist, compassionate Republican party, intensely dislike Mr. Trump. And they are now stuck. Emotionally, they can’t vote for a Democratic candidate. But they know . . .

Last week, after Mr. Biden pulled out and Ms. Harris became the likely Democratic candidate, they got together for what I call their “gossip” time, i.e., drinks and conversation at a local restaurant. To a man, they said, “We’ve just lost the election.”

They are highly aware of Mr. Trump’s many weaknesses as a candidate and the visceral dislike he has generated among many, including some of them. I suspect if they saw this phrase, “ruling by feral instinct,” they’d agree: this is his leadership pattern. He’ll swing with whoever or whatever makes him feel more powerful, more in charge, more invulnerable. To a person, they say, “If he’d only keep his mouth shut.”

But Donald Trump is a feral man; there is nothing civilized about him, including mature self-restraint. He cares zero for those around him–it is all about his survival and amassing as much power and riches as possible. Anyone hurt by his insatiable need to satisfy his internal emptiness causes him not even a second of remorse.

Frankly, I ache for these long-committed Republicans for the crumbling of their dreams of what a prosperous and just US looks like. In some ways, it is not all that different from mine: An adequately armed and prepared military, a recognition of the need for a solid and workable immigration policy, a business-friendly place that also has ways for the less advantaged to move up, and enough compassion to create a reasonable safety net for those caught in very bad spots and devastating circumstances way beyond their control, full civil rights for everyone, bodily autonomy for women as well as men.

It is now the Democratic party that offers the best hope for those things, not a party that has put its fealty into a man for whom possibly the nicest thing one can say is that he governs by feral instinct. Donald J. Trump has shown us who he is. Take him seriously. Nothing will stop him from devouring all around him if it makes him feel good. Nothing.

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