Assholes: A Theory of Donald Trump

By Matthew Meyer

Almost everyone now knows that Donald Trump is an asshole. Much to his credit, Aaron James pointed this out in Assholes: A Theory (Anchor Books 2012) well before Trump took center stage in American politics. In his new book, James sets out to develop this idea in greater detail. According to the back cover, the book does not ask whether Trump is an asshole. This much is assumed. Instead, it raises the further question: What sort of asshole is Trump? As such, the book is presented as a contribution to what the author calls “assholeology”.

Readers will quickly learn that the book covers much more than this. Only the introduction and the first chapter are, properly speaking, exercises in assholeology. Even the first chapter, “The Ass-Clown and Asshole”, is more about offering a general theory of Trump’s person than a strict examination of his assholery, and the final three chapters not only ask whether having an asshole like Trump for president is a “sound proposition”, they also point to the larger problem of what James calls “asshole political capitalism”. 

James begins the work by recapping the definition of the asshole he developed in his first book. On this view, the asshole has three essential features: First, he – James notes that assholes are mostly men – “allows himself special advantages in social relationships in a systematic way”; second, he is “motivated by an entrenched (and mistaken) sense of entitlement”; and third, he is “immunized against the complaints of other people”. Although James presents these as three separate yet equal features of the asshole, the entrenched sense of entitlement seems to be the causal mechanism behind the asshole’s systematic privileging of himself as well as his immunity to the criticisms of others. So understood, an asshole might simply be someone with an entrenched sense of entitlement.

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Source: The Philosophers’ Magazine

Image source: Public Domain