Victor Davis Hanson has given a fascinating interview to Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker.

The interview is well worth reading if only for the thesis that Hanson, a classics professor, offers about Trump:

Do you feel that in some ways he is a hero out of Greek myth? Yeah, as long as we understand the word “hero.” Americans don’t know what that word means. They think it means you live happily ever after or you are selfless. Whether it is Achilles or Sophocles’s Ajax or Antigone, they can act out of insecurity, they can act out of impatience—they can act out of all sorts of motives that are less than what we say in America are heroic. But the point that they are making is, I see a skill that I have. I see a problem. I want to solve that problem, and I want to solve that problem so much that the ensuing reaction to that solution may not necessarily be good for me. And they accept that. It reminds me of Trump saying that people will get sick of winning. It seems like you are saying we have gotten sick of it, and that is the tragedy of Trump. I think so. I tried to use as many examples as I could of the classic Western, whether it was “Shane” or “High Noon” or “The Magnificent Seven.” They all are the same—the community doesn’t have the skills or doesn’t have the willpower or doesn’t want to stoop to the corrective method to solve the existential problem, whether it is cattle barons or banditos. So they bring in an outsider, and immediately they start to be uneasy because he is uncouth—his skills, his attitude—and then he solves the problem, and they declare to him, whether it is Gary Cooper in “High Noon” or Alan Ladd in “Shane,” “I think it’s better you leave. We don’t need you anymore. We feel dirty that we ever had to call you in.” I think that is what is awaiting Trump… How does this fit, in a Greek sense, with the man we are often confronted with—constantly tweeting, spending much of his day watching cable news, obsessed with small slights. Do these things, allowing for the modern context, also remind you of great heroes of myth? Have you read Sophocles’s “Ajax” ever? It’s one of his best plays. No, I haven’t. You have a neurotic hero who cannot get over the fact that he was by all standards the successor to Achilles and deserves Achilles’s armor, and yet he was outsmarted by this wily, lesser Odysseus, who rigged the contest and got the armor. All he does is say, “This wasn’t fair. I’m better. Doesn’t anybody know this?” It’s true, but you want to say to Ajax, “Shut up and just take it.” Achilles has elements of a tragic hero. He says, at the beginning of the Iliad, “I do all the work. I kill all the Trojans. But when it comes to assigning booty, you always give it to mediocrities—deep-state, administrative nothings.” So he stalks off. And the gods tell him, “If you come back in, you will win fame, but you are going to end up dead.” So he makes a tragic, heroic decision that he is going to do that. I think Trump really did think that there were certain problems and he had particular skills that he could solve. Maybe in a naïve fashion. But I think he understood, for all the emoluments-clause hysteria, that he wasn’t going to make a lot of money from it or be liked for it.

The article is interesting for what it presents of Hanson’s thoughts on the matter. But it’s also interesting because of the subtext, which is a cat-and-mouse game the interviewer believes he’s playing with Hanson. In the latter game, I’m not sure who wins, but I am pretty sure it depends on the bias of who is reading.

When I read the article, Chotiner’s lead-in descriptions of Hanson leapt out at me as being a debunking of the opinions of the man he is set to interview (supposedly respectfully). He can’t do away with Hanson’s obvious academic achievements and honors, but he distorts Hanson’s record outside of academia in a way that is meant to discredit Hanson in the reader’s mind before even reading any of Hanson’s words in the interview. One small example:

…[Hanson] has a history of hostility to undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrants, who he claims are undermining American culture, and to African-Americans who speak about the persistence of racism…

Speaking of “hostility,” that’s a hostile summary description of Hanson’s work that’s patently unfair to Hanson, and yet meant to label him as a bigot at the outset. That Hanson’s responses to the interview are so thoughtful and interesting merely makes it even more important that Chotiner set it up in the readers’ minds in a way that the reader knows that he or she is not supposed to seriously pay attention to the actual thoughts of this bigoted person.

Chotiner also frames his questions in a way that makes his own bias known, although rather subtly. Hanson is much smarter than Chotiner (not to mention far more well-versed in the classics), but Chotiner is better at the spin and the propaganda.