Those who wax poetic about American greatness often make reference to our political customs and institutions — our founding principles, our Constitution, our tradition of republican self-rule. But those institutions themselves grew out of a deeper kind of exceptionalism, a boldness that has distinguished America from the very beginning. It is a character that could have only ever arisen here, in this nation of settlers — the same heroic spirit that drove the pilgrims to the New World; explorers to the untamed wilderness of the Western frontier; and American astronauts to the moon. It is an innate restlessness, creativity, and dynamism that is unique to who we are — a country built by irrepressible men, whose dreams were too great for the low horizons of the Old World.
America was the nation that connected the world — first through the great steam engine, spanning the continent from end to end; then through the power of flight and air travel. Our nation gave birth to the whole panoply of the gifts of our era — the telephone, the internet, modern electricity, skyscrapers, and the industrial assembly lines that built modern civilization. Even that which we did not invent we perfected. It was here, in this country, that humanity found the force of will and conviction to answer “the important question,” as Hamilton wrote in The Federalist No. 1, of “whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”
This distinctly American virtue was — and, to an extent, still is — a kind of insanity. To dream bigger, gaze higher, and venture further than any other people or nation in human history, America needed to be crazier than any other people or nation in human history, too. And that need was met, in great abundance. A bold and unremitting insanity is written into our national character, visible not just in our famous names and deeds but in the long-forgotten stories of nameless everyday Americans. The same nation that gave us the Alamo and Custer’s Last Stand also gave us men like Thomas Fitzpatrick, a pilot whose drunken 1956 bet lives on in the pantheon of American madness. Per the New York Times:
The pilot, Thomas Fitzpatrick, turned a barroom bet into a feat of aeronautic wonder by stealing a plane from a New Jersey airport and landing it on St. Nicholas Avenue in northern Manhattan, in front of the bar where he had been drinking.
As if that were not stupefying enough, the man did nearly the exact same thing two years later. Both landings were pulled off in incredibly narrow landing areas, in the dark – and after a night of drinking in Washington Heights taverns and with a well-lubricated pilot at the controls. Both times ended with Mr. Fitzpatrick charged with wrongdoing.…
The New York Times called [his first flight] a “fine landing” and reported that it had been widely called “a feat of aeronautics.”
The specifically American genre of insanity is a larger-than-life boldness — a swaggering self-confidence. It’s a disposition that often strikes our more patrician, refined European counterparts as uncouth or déclassé; at times, it verges on outright absurdity. (A 2021 YouGov poll found that Americans were three times as likely as Brits to say that they could beat a grizzly bear in a fight — and four times as likely to believe they could take on an elephant, lion, or gorilla). But it leads us to do things that others had previously deemed impossible.
Donald Trump is a quintessentially American figure, in this sense and in many others. My favorite story, in this regard, comes from a now-out-of-print 1993 book about Trump, Lost Tycoon. One anecdote from the book, recorded during a trip to Japan that Trump took in 1990, details how the future president refused to eat Japanese food — “‘I’m not going to eat any f***ing raw fish,’ he rails” — and chose, for his first meal in Tokyo, “a hamburger for lunch the next day at a Japanese McDonald’s.” The book continues:
Feeling better, he decides to take a walk through the Imperial Gardens. The walk inspires a new idea. “Call the emperor,” Donald orders his entourage. “Tell him I want to see him.” But like the Japanese media at the airport, the emperor’s spokesman does not seem to know who Donald is. He informs Donald’s intermediary that an appointment might be arranged one year from the following Thursday, provided that the emperor is supplied with a written request stating the purpose of the visit.
Call the emperor. Tell him I want to see him. If that isn’t America, I don’t know what is. Never mind that the emperor is heir to a 2,000-year dynasty and revered in Japan as a god-king. Never mind that he appears to have no idea who you are. Never mind the bureaucracy, the cumbersome procedures and waiting periods, the forms to fill out, the customs to observe. We Americans have no time for such things. Point us to the nearest McDonald’s.
This anecdote comes to mind again in light of today’s solar eclipse. As America prepared for the event, many recalled this famous moment from the last eclipse, in 2017:
The Left, of course, resurfaced the clip in the spirit of ridicule. “This is Trump during a solar eclipse,” Republican Voters Against Trump sneered. “He looked straight into the sun. Don’t be like Trump.” Rep. Eric Swalwell posted a forced, 12-months-too-late “Dark Brandon” meme edit of the Trump eclipse-watching video, captioned, “Trump + Eclipse = not the brightest moment.” Hillary Clinton took the opportunity to share an old post of hers from 2020: “Please do not take medical advice from a man who looked directly at a solar eclipse.” (RELATED: Eclipse Mania)
This is to be expected from the professional neurotics who spent the first few years of this decade terrified by the idea that somewhere, somebody’s kindergartener was attending school without a mask. To people like Swalwell and Clinton, the fact that the president would dare disobey the diktats of our priestly expert class is nothing short of a scandal. In reality, all it really demonstrates is that they still don’t understand what makes Trump — or America — exceptional.
