On Donald Trump’s Virtues

A lexis de Tocqueville wrote, “Virtues of any kind are rare enough that those who have them should not be harassed about their type and relative importance.” With leaders who carry vast responsibility, that’s not enough. But in order to understand and critique political figures, it is important to grasp both their strengths and their weaknesses, their virtues and their vices. A decade into Donald Trump’s political career and nearly half a century into his career as a front-page newsmaker, his vices are well-documented, and I’ve written on the topic many times myself. Yet, he is not without virtues. In order to grasp Trump’s appeal and his successes, one needs to consider them.

Resilience: This one, I’ve written about before, including the crucial role it played in his 2024 revival from the political grave: “Trump, throughout his life, has had a remarkable knack for clawing himself back out of every hole. It’s not just luck, or a ruthless willingness to throw others under the bus. It’s also that Trump is amazingly resilient. His belief in himself never wavers. His belief in the power of positive thinking never flags. When his back is against the wall, he never accepts that he’s finished, or that anything was his fault. That’s how he survived bankruptcies and scandals, declining public fortunes and the real onset of middle age in the 1990s.”

The Donald’s resiliency served him exceptionally well amidst an unprecedented lawfare campaign, a bullet that nearly killed him, and a host of self-inflicted political wounds: “Trump could have met defeat in 2020 with a smile, without letting anyone see him sweat, and maybe that approach would have brought him back even stronger in 2024; that wasn’t the Trump way. But he talked himself into the defeat being a conspiracy of his enemies, and dug in to fight it. Four indictments, a conviction, two assassination attempts — another man might have given up. A more sensible man, in fact, might have read the political tea leaves in 2022 and decided, at the age of 76, that the public didn’t want him back and the party was ready to back another horse. Trump refused to believe it, and refused to go gently, and he was rewarded for it with a level of vindication few people truly expected two years [before].”

Humor: Humor is not just a talent; it’s a virtue. The ability and willingness to lighten a moment, and to make everyone in the room take themselves a little less seriously, is a positive gift that makes life better and easier to bear.

Trump is nothing if not funny. He has great comic timing. Few situations are grave enough for him to pass up a chance to get a laugh. Sometimes, he mocks others — aptly at times, in terribly bad or mean-spirited taste at times, and sometimes both. Sometimes, he riffs on the absurdity of situations. Peggy Noonan once described the difference between wit and humor by observing that the latter can really only exist in people who can take a joke themselves; Trump has more wit than humor, but he’s not entirely bereft of the latter. On occasion, in spite of his sensitive ego, he even makes himself the butt of jokes, allowing just a sliver of public acknowledgment of self-awareness. In a 2004 sketch on Saturday Night Live, playing a janitor alongside Darrell Hammond (who played Trump), he played gamely along with the japes, saying of his office, “This place looks like the Liberace museum,” and telling Hammond (as Trump): “Looks like you killed a squirrel to me and put it right on top of your head.”

Trump is also sometimes very funny in spite of himself — which can be a talent so long as the people who laugh at you still respect your power. Trump’s capacity for entertainment and generating laughter has been a major asset throughout his careers in business, television, and politics. Take it from someone who has often been horrified by Trump’s rise in our politics: The Trump Era is easier to bear when you can laugh at him and laugh with him in turn.

Unpretentiousness: People sometimes talk about Trump’s authenticity. What they typically mean is that he lacks and disdains the polish we typically associate with successful politicians. Authenticity, or candor, seems a bizarre virtue to associate with a man legendary for his bald-faced whoppers and fish tales. But in a way, that’s part of how he makes it work: He’s a liar and a BS artist, and he does not hide that from you. He winks and lets you in on the joke. This can make Trump dangerous in his capacity to weave falsehood, truth, and humor in a seamless web. But the virtue at the bottom of it is that the man lacks pretense. He doesn’t pretend to the things he knows he’ll never have: erudition, high-cultural respect, a mastery of Washington policy. He’s blunt about what he’s up to, saying the quiet part out loud, when others would conceal the same motives behind lawyerly caution. The virtue involved is that Trump is unpretentious.

Flexibility: Trump is famous for his lack of principle and for how little he is constrained by personal loyalties or previous promises. He doesn’t care much for the law or the republican or constitutional limits on his power. But the virtue on the flip side of those vices is that he is tremendously flexible in how he accomplishes goals. Arriving as he did at a moment when the biggest grievance of Republican voters was the gulf between what their party’s leaders professed to want and what they actually delivered, that goal-oriented focus has made him a powerful force even when some of his goals are really only of interest to himself.

Inspiring loyalty: Great men give loyalty and inspire it in return. Loyalty, except perhaps to his children, has never been a Trump virtue. And he has often been burned by subordinates who turned on him — either because they were loyal to Trump and received no loyalty in return, or because they were loyal to principles and causes that they saw him betray.

And yet, Trump has had a remarkable capacity to inspire loyalty in a certain subset of the people close to him, notably his children and grandchildren and his close business associates (other than Michael Cohen). That speaks well of the man — not well enough to cover the rest, but well enough that it pays to ask why.

Temperance: There is probably no area of traditional virtue in which Trump displays more public self-awareness of his human frailty than with regard to temperance (chastity is another matter entirely). Having seen how drink ruined his brother, Trump doesn’t touch the stuff — and he’s known to remark on what a bad drunk he would be. We don’t often associate Trump with that kind of self-discipline and self-knowledge, but we should acknowledge it when we see it.

History will have much to say about Donald Trump, and if his first term taught us anything, it’s that we will not be able to give a complete grade to his presidency until we have seen him walk out the White House door for the last time. In the long run, what will matter is what good and ill he accomplishes, rather than the extent to which he meant well or ill. But in predicting where he goes in the future, and in understanding what he has accomplished for good and ill in the past, we will fail at the task if we haven’t properly counted on his virtues.