Phantasms of the Will

To be American these days is to feel like you’re living in a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, authoritarianism sliding into phantasmagoria under the leadership of an aging and deluded patriarch. A case in point is Trump’s decision to impose 50% tariffs on Brazil unless they call off their prosecution of former president Jair Bolsonaro. The threat came in the form of a letter written in the declamatory outrage and eccentric capitalization of his social media posts: “The way that Brazil has treated former President Bolsonaro, a Highly Respected Leader throughout the World during his Term, including by the United States, is an international disgrace.” According to a report in the Times, Trump came up with the idea all by himself, which only adds to the sense of a mad king chasing phantasms.

With Bolsonaro, the phantasm is also a mirror. Like Trump, Bolsonaro tried to sow doubt about an election he was afraid he might lose. Like Trump, he tried to undermine the results. Like Trump, he encouraged his supporters to invade his nation’s capital.

Bolsonaro and Trump are part of a cohort of world leaders — leaders of countries; leaders of tech empires — for whom democracy poses an intolerable challenge to their wills. They are creatures of will, and democracy tries to contain the unfettered exercise of will.

I sometimes think that the best way of understanding Trump is that he’s all will. The objects of his will are less important than the will itself. It’s not clear why Trump wanted to be president; he seems to have just followed his relentless will into office. The aims of his will can be scattershot, which is why the tariff stuff never makes any sense. In fact, the tariffs seem like a good example of will divorced from any desirable or even articulable goal.

In his first administration, his staff learned to work with the disconnect between his will and his goals by telling him “next week” instead of “no,” as Reince Priebus used to advise, hoping he’d forget what he wanted. This time around people seem to have figured out that they can use the force of his will to promote their own agendas. All they have to do is present their bêtes noires — DEI, campus protests, immigrants, trans surgery, woke universities — as opportunities for him to impose his will. Or, even more effective, as challenges to it.

I assume that anyone possessed of a human consciousness knows the experience of having their will thwarted. The self rises up in fear and outrage. How you respond to Trump may depend on what you make of that experience. Looked at one way, Trump is a bawling child, terrorized by the specter of a thwarted will. Looked at another, his will is what gives him power. His absolute refusal to be thwarted makes him bulldoze everything in his path. Such a will is mesmerizing. People fall in behind it. Suddenly, without quite realizing how you got there, you’re marching on Moscow. Or Paris.

The same day the Times reported on the Brazil tariffs, I went to see Wes Anderson’s new movie, The Phoenician Scheme. Maybe because I’d been thinking about all this, the main character, Zsa Zsa Korda, struck me as a more charming version of Trump. Like Trump he’s a schemer and an improviser, rising repeatedly from disaster to prop up his rickety financial empire. At one point, he persuades a business associate to fall in line by threatening to blow them both up with a hand grenade, not unlike what Trump did to the Republican party.

One way of looking at The Phoenician Scheme is that it’s about the fascination and the dangers of the will. Will is creative. It’s not clear how much Korda’s projects will add to the sum of human happiness in Phoenicia, but since this is a Wes Anderson movie, they all have the insane beauty of the Anderson aesthetic. Their batty grandeur mesmerizes. Will is also destructive. “If something gets in your way, flatten it,” Korda says, sounding like bulldozer Trump; and his plans for Phoenicia require slavery and an artificially induced famine. Maybe above all, will is relentless. It doesn’t know when to stop. If it’s not going to collapse into madness, some other human element needs to keep it in check.

You could almost suspect Anderson of crafting an allegory: the premise is that Korda has summoned his novitiate daughter Liesl from a convent to make her heir of his empire. As Liesl follows him from outpost to outpost, clutching a rosary in one hand and a pipe in the other, she has to remind him that slavery and induced famine are bad. He’s the will, she’s the conscience — though a very Wes Anderson deadpan one. She reconnects him with something. Call it the soul.

I’m reminded of something Mark Singer wrote in his 1997 New Yorker profile of Trump. He “had aspired to and achieved the ultimate luxury, an existence unmolested by the rumbling of a soul.”

I assume everyone, even Trump, has a soul. At times, you can catch something quirkily soulful in him, like that time he danced to a playlist for forty minutes at one of his rallies.

But if a soul is going to be useful, it’s got to be active. The day I saw The Phoenician Scheme, I’d been wrestling with an essay by Iris Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection.” Will is about our public acts, what we can impose on the world. Murdoch is making a case for private acts, the ones we perform internally in our struggle towards goodness. Central to this activity is the idea of attention, which she defines as “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.” It is, she argues, “the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent.”

Without that inward life, the will leads us into illusion. Murdoch writes of the void the will experiences when it “is dismayed by the feeling that it ought to be everything and in fact is not.” She describes the “fright which the conscious will feels when it apprehends the strength and direction of the personality which is not under its immediate control.” And that, really, is the problem of will. It requires other people to become objects. Albert Camus wrote of “the rule that specifies the relation between the will to power and man as an object.” You can hear the rule in the contempt for democracy expressed by the tech bros and the authoritarian apologists. We’re seeing now how quickly human beings can be turned into objects when will runs rampant.

The anonymous diary A Woman in Berlin was written in the aftermath of Germany’s collapse into madness. It recounts the author’s struggle to survive amid the sexual violence and starvation that followed the fall of Berlin. What saves it from mere horror is the diarist’s humane and clear-eyed gaze. She pays attention. A haunting element of her account is the sense of people waking up from a dream. What had they seen in his man who led their nation into disaster? How had he mesmerized them? His will was supposed to triumph, and instead it led them to destruction.

There are all kinds of reasons why Trump isn’t Hitler, but one is that different times require different illusions. Hitler offered his followers what Susan Sontag calls “unlimited aspiration toward the high mystic goal, both beautiful and terrifying.” He embodied the will of a nation. If I had to guess, I’d say that Trump embodies millions of wills like his own, enraged at being thwarted. I don’t want to discount the way economic and social disruptions have contributed to that rage, but it’s also true that Americans as never before find everything available at their fingertips. Like most people in that condition, they rage at the impossibility of ever being satisfied.

Murdoch writes, “Psychic energy flows, and more readily flows, into building up convincingly coherent but false pictures of the world […] Attention is the effort to counteract such states of illusion.” As the title of her essay suggests, she’s thinking about perfection, “that endless aspiration to perfection which is characteristic of moral activity.” Nations, too, as the opening words of the Constitution suggest, can aspire towards perfection. Or they can collapse into illusion. If we’re to rescue ourselves from this phantasmagoria, we’d better start paying attention.

— July 2025