Chauncey Gardiner, President

("Secret Admirers")
 

Is it Trump's ideas or the idea of Trump that is the appeal? As Trump's thoughts are but enigma, borne not of intellectual pursuit but sleepless nights, it is hard for any diligent observer to weave a cohesive and coherent pattern from his mental peregrinations.
 

Maybe, owing to the lack of core, those who find merit in Trump create their own logic to his words. We have been advised that voters took him seriously but not literally, and recently we were informed by a member of his transition committee that Trump should not be taken literally but symbolically. In the huge space that exists between what he says and what we say that means seems to lie the very essence of a non-ideology ideology.
 

Trump is Chauncey Gardiner, full of statements without meaning that others infuse with a seriousness that does not exist, or at least did not exist without straining every muscle in one's brain to the point of exhaustion. And so some Republican intellectuals try to fit Trump's round peg into a square hole, convincing themselves that there is something of substance brewing behind the incoherent  tweets and the teleprompter speeches.
 

But in the final analysis, as in the final words to your article uttered by Mark Bauerlein, I fear that all of us, supporters and foes alike, will have to "suck it up" and deal with the uncertainties and inconsistencies of a President making it up on the fly.