The Trump phenomenon illustrates the conjunction of the Great Man and impersonal historical processes.
Almost forty years ago, Gary Engle (1988) asked what makes Superman “so darned American.” Engle’s suggestion was that Superman’s story is the quintessential American story — an immigrant in “ethnic” garb who thoroughly embraces the American way and succeeds in the modern metropolis. Although appealing, that does not explain his popularity in the present moment of anti-immigrant sentiments (a new Superman movie appearing in summer 2025 while actual immigrants disappear), nor the popularity of homegrown all-American superheroes like Batman, Captain America, and many more.
Having watched numerous recent police and detective shows on American television, I have noticed that one recurring, if not universal, trope in the genre is the cop who ignores or breaks the law in pursuit of truth and justice. In short, these characters are vigilantes, even if they hold official roles in law enforcement. This may be what superheroes — wherever they originate from — and ordinary TV vigilante-police have in common. This is also why both are often (mis)taken for criminals themselves (especially Spider-Man, but even Superman at times), because they really are operating in the gray zone at the edge (or well across the line) of legality.
Thomas Andrae, in a thoughtful essay older than Engle’s, opined that, for all the good they do, such heroic figures — not just Superman but the whole lineage of super men (and women), what he called Homo superior — are potential threats to social order and often to human life. They combine great power (whether observational and detective power, like Sherlock Holmes, or physical strength, intelligence, or unnatural and almost immortal abilities like flight or imperviousness to bullets) with a willingness, if not a propensity, to act extra-legally, to be a law unto themselves. At times, we appreciate their power and their intervention; they are the cavalry charging over the hill to save us when we cannot save ourselves and when law-abiding agents can’t or won’t. But we should also fear them; such power can be destructive to us and seductive to the (super)hero.
What prevents Homo superior from using his/her power against us? What prevents them from ruling us, or transcending and replacing us? Why should they care about us at all? Andrae concluded that “all the stories of mentally and physically superior human beings end tragically and futilely. Whether he becomes an outcast, a pathetically lonely creature who is ostracized, or a tyrannical monster so dangerous that he threatens to enslave the world, convention dictates that he either die or be robbed of his power” (1980: 88). And when he circumvents and negates our institutions — and ultimately our freedoms — that is, “when he plans to right the wrongs of politics by forcing the selfish and cynical from office and securing the idealistic and incorruptible in their place, he realizes that he is becoming a tyrant” (91).
Indeed, Nietzsche warned us over a century earlier that the higher man, the Übermensch, is a menace to us mere normals. Cruel and indifferent in his superiority, evil by the conventional standards of polite society, he would have us lower types — the human, all-too-human if not subhuman — go under so that he might inherit the earth. No praising meekness for him; we mere humans are, as Nietzsche described in Thus Spake Zarathustra, but a tightrope connecting the primate past and superhuman future.
Some historians have promoted a theory of history that emphasizes the Great Men, the individuals—the likes of Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon—who seem to seize society and bend it to their will. Their lives are not always happy: Alexander died young, Napoleon was defeated and exiled, and Caesar was assassinated. However, there is no doubt that they leave an outsized mark on history, building cities, creating civilizations, inventing calendars (so that time begins with their era), and writing laws. Though mortals like us, they are turning points in human history.
There is reasonable debate about whether Great Men make history or whether history makes Great Men, that is, whether at the same juncture, things would have happened more or less the way they did because the time and society were ripe for it. We cannot settle that debate, and undoubtedly, both positions have merit. But that is not the point I want to make here.
My point is that American popular culture (which essentially means American culture) is particularly amenable to the vigilante figure. We celebrate and applaud the person who throws off the shackles of conventionality and gets things done. (Recall that both Rousseau and Marx judged society as chains robbing us of freedom.) In America, freedom is a fetish; its everyday hero is the self-made person, the rugged individualist, whose slogan is “Don’t Tread on Me.” (We even cheer the true outlaw — the Billy the Kid, the Bonnie and Clyde — who actually breaks the law and outsmarts the system in ways that we ourselves secretly wish we could.)
In the twenty-first century, when it is harder than ever to be self-made and ruggedly individualistic, when we feel trod upon continuously, when our technologies threaten to overwhelm us and deprive us of humanity, the lure of the (super)hero, the Great Man, the person who will not let rules and norms and traditions or even laws and basic decency and empathy restrain him, is profound. Surely, playing by the rules has not served us at all; it is the rule-followers, the Party men, the “normies,” the diminished and deformed Last Men in Nietzsche’s assessment, who got us here and keep us here.
I think it is not going too far to speculate that this entire discussion sheds some light on the contemporary Trump phenomenon. Never would I accept that Trump is a Great Man or even a good man. But probably neither were Alexander, Caesar, or Napoleon particularly pleasant. Trump shares with them, nonetheless, the desire, and apparently the ability, to disregard rules, norms, and laws and to recreate society in his image. He is leaving marks that any normal politician, respectful of precedent and law, would not and could not.
His supporters cheer him; he is their savior who tears down rotting institutions, vanquishes restrictive (if benign) regulations, and creates a world. It is no accident, we now realize, that he is often imagined by them as a superior human, possibly divinely chosen if not a deity, often a superhero. MAGA-land wallows in literal images of him as a superhero, as Superman (see image 1), a far cry from his real, corpulent physique. But reality is irrelevant; it is one of the limitations that the superhero/Great Man overcomes.
I expect that many a Trump fan experiences more than a bit of frisson from thinking of their leader as an Übermensch, destroying the old world and birthing the new world that (they think) they want to live in and that they, in their collective tyranny, want to impose on us. Like Andrae’s menacing heroes, he displays neither patience with constraints nor minimal sympathy for the suffering of those in his way. “I don’t care,” he has said in regard to illegally-imprisoned immigrants or his own deluded followers when they (rarely) demand accountability, as with the potentially damning “Epstein files.” (Recall Melania’s infamous jacket with “I don’t care” literally scrawled across the back.)
He is the closest thing American politics has seen to Andrae’s hubristic hero, who understands that he does not have to serve the little guy; he can serve the big guy or no one but himself. He is, on a human and tragi-comic scale, the tyrannical monster who menaces and seeks to reshape the world — or at the very least, to make it dance at the end of his string.
The Trump phenomenon perhaps illustrates the conjunction of the Great Man and impersonal historical processes. We forget at our peril that he is very much a product of decades of conservative/Republican policy and effort and still more profoundly of decades or centuries of American fascination with the outlaw-hero; he is also the individual who stands at the crux or apex of that tide, embodying and personifying the forces that made him and placed him there.
If he is Superman, he is not the Superman that Engle envisioned — the sympathetic immigrant who humbly protects the oppressed, if by routinely flaunting the law and by doing the job that law enforcement should have done — but is more the Superman that Andrae, Nietzsche and others feared and dreaded — the selfish champion who has discovered his own power and with it the freedom to do as he pleases, since neither the ants nor those with official power who play by the rules can stop him.
He is, ironically, closer to the original vision of the inventors of Superman, Jerry Seigel and Joe Shuster, who published a short story in 1933 titled “The Reign of the Super-Man” depicting the character as more similar to the later villain Lex Luther, a bald evil scientist who callously experimented on a homeless person to learn how to give himself superpowers so that he could “rule the universe.” Ultimately, Trump joins the ranks of the Great Men(aces) of American culture with no interest in or commitment to truth and justice but only in/to power, which is, too often, we concede with grief, the American way.
References:
Andrae, Thomas. 1980. “From Menace to Messiah: The Prehistory of the Super-man in Science Fiction Literature.” Discourse 2 (summer): 84-112.
Engle, Gary. 1988. “What Makes Superman So Darned American?” In Dennis Dooley and Gary Engle, eds. Superman at Fifty: The Persistence of a Legend. New York: Collier Books, 79-87.
