The Appeal of Donald Trump: a Surrogate Father

An entirely unacknowledged reason why Trump beat Clinton in the recent election is: he is a father figure. A terrible father figure...but a father figure! Hillary is superior to Donald in so many ways: experience, self-control, sobriety of judgment, intelligence, character and (some) values. But she cannot be a father figure. The defining crisis of our age and society is the crisis in masculinity and fatherhood. So many of our young are coming of age without the presence of a caring, wise, reassuring father: families are broken, young men are weak or violent, women are holding their own in the marketplace and raising the children largely on their own, and the sense of God as Father has declined. Into this spiritual, emotional wasteland comes Donald Trump: he is confident and reassuring! He will make America great! He will bring back jobs! He is a winner! He will protect us from immigrants and terrorists! He feels like he could be another FDR or Ronald Reagan. And so, he won the election. He is actually a bogus father figure...a terrible father figure! But he is a father figure. As described in the previous blog: a father-figure needs to represent, not his own ego, but Another, God our heavenly Father. Therefore, a genuine father will be humble, strong in a gentle and tender way, chaste and truthful. On all four counts Trump is blatantly, ridiculously, nauseatingly bad! Far from being humble, he is full of himself and clearly a narcissistic personality in the clinical sense. He is strong but hardly gentle as he bullies women and anyone who opposes him. He is boastfully unchaste. And his disregard for fact and truth is simply breath-taking. But he has a crude, confident masculinity about him. And so he is a father figure. And a culture in retreat from the fatherhood of God and largely depleted of genuine fathers is clinging desperately to a bogus father.