Trumps Empire of Disorientation: Philosopher Hans Sluga on Donald Trump
Who is Donald Trump, and what does he stand for? Do we know? Does he himself know? Or is he caught in that precarious state of disorientation that characterizes our current political predicament.\n\nThe public discourse is heated, the language inflammatory. Philosopher Hans Sluga of the University of California, Berkeley, brings a cool head and rational thinking to his interview about our 45th president, Donald Trump, with Entitled Opinions host Robert Harrison.\n\nTrump has been a real estate developer, a reality TV star, a prolific tweeter, a politician, and has changed his party affiliation seven or eight times. Is he a fascist? Sluga, author of Wittgenstein and Heidegger\u2019s Crisis, warns against easy tags: \u201cWe\u2019ve drained this word of much of its specific meaning.\u201d Fascism, he says, \u201cis a form of statism quite different from what we have in America today.\u201d\nIs he a populist? That\u2019s not clear, either. \n\n\u201cPlutocrat,\u201d the term Aristotle used to describe the rule of the rich, might be a more precise characterization. Sluga says we might turn to the world of real estate to understand Trump\u2019s worldview.