Robert Tracinski:
So Donald Trump says he’s an Ayn Rand fan. That has about as much credibility as every other claim Trump makes about himself.
This comes by way of an interview with Kirsten Powers for USA Today. Here’s how it’s described:
Trump described himself as an Ayn Rand fan. He said of her novel The Fountainhead, “It relates to business (and) beauty (and) life and inner emotions. That book relates to … everything.” He identified with Howard Roark, the novel’s idealistic protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.
So The Fountainhead “relates to business, beauty, life, and inner emotions”? Wow, that’s really specific, because no other novels in history have ever related to “inner emotions.” (By the way, why “inner emotions”? What would “outer emotions” be? Don’t bother answering. I’ve seen Trump speak. That’s what outer emotions are.)
This kind of vague answer is par for course when Trump is pretending to talk about something he knows nothing about. It reminds me of Trump describing why he admires Abraham Lincoln.
He was a man who was of great intelligence,… but he was also a man who did something that was a very vital thing to do at that time. Ten years before or 20 years before, what he was doing would never have even been thought possible. So he did something that was a very important thing to do, and especially at that time.
A history professor who was asked about this said that Trump’s answer sounds like an inattentive student trying to bluff his way through a test question.
Trump talking about The Fountainhead sounds like a poor student trying to bluff his way through a book report, without even bothering to skim the Cliff’s Notes.
But here’s what makes it really funny.
When I pointed out that The Fountainhead is in a way about the tyranny of groupthink, Trump sat up and said, ‘That’s what is happening here.’ He then recounted a call he received from a liberal journalist: ‘How does it feel to have done what you have done? I said what have I done. He said nobody ever in the history of this country has done what you have done. And I said, well, if I lose, then no big deal. And he said no, no, if you lose, it doesn’t matter because this will be talked about forever. And I said it will be talked about more if I win.’
So Trump pivots from how he supposedly identifies with Howard Roark to a discussion of his favorite topic: how much people are talking about him. It’s one of Trump’s distinctive verbal tics to boast about how well he’s doing in the polls, or about what “everybody says” about how great he is.
To people who have not read The Fountainhead, let me explain why people who have read The Fountainhead are smiling right now. The whole point of the character of Howard Roark is that he doesn’t care whether other people are talking about him. Ayn Rand created Roark as the ultimate individualist, all the way down. Conformity has no pull on his soul, and what other people think of him has no fundamental impact on his “inner emotions.”
There is a character in The Fountainhead who cares deeply about what other people think of him, who is obsessed with the opinions of others. That character is not Howard Roark. It’s Peter Keating, the ultimate conformist, or what Ayn Rand called a “second-hander”—someone who borrows his ideas and goals “second-hand” from others.
In the first half of the novel, while Roark’s independent vision keeps meeting with rejection, Keating rockets to early success by being whatever other people want him to be. His motivation, as Roark eventually realizes, is “not to be great but to be thought great.” He’s not focused on actually achieving something good. He’s focused on wanting everybody to say good things about him.
Here’s Peter Keating’s inner monologue on his first day as draftsman at New York’s leading architectural firm. At first he is overwhelmed, but then:
