Image by Arden (ChatGPT)
As Directed by JEL
Donald Trump in the Seventh Chair
Power, Belonging, Truth, and the Meaning of “America First”
by
James E. Lassiter and Arden (ChatGPT)
September 10, 2026
This is an imagined dialogue, not a historical transcript. Trump’s public positions and the controversies discussed are grounded in documentary sources consulted by Arden.
Following the appearance of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the Seventh Chair at the last Seminar, I asked Arden to suggest female replacements among the six permanent members. We merged our respective lists and came up with sixteen candidates, from which I chose three. Below is the revised list of permanents, now to be known as The Six. The Seventh Chair will from here on have a new occupant every Thursday. – JEL
The Six: Socrates, Marvin Harris, Clifford Geertz, Hannah Arendt, Mary Midgley, and Toni Morrison (in the order they were chosen for the Seminar)
Guest in the Seventh Chair: Donald J. Trump
Seminar Chair: Mary Midgley
Topic: Power, Belonging, Truth, and the Meaning of “America First”
The Chair Calls the Meeting to Order
MIDGLEY: President Trump, you will begin by asking the question that brought you here. Each member will answer without interruption. You may then respond. After that, each member may question you, followed by an open discussion.
Everyone will receive sufficient
time, but no one will monopolize the room. Repetition will not count as
additional argument. Claims may be challenged; persons may not be abused.
Civility governs our manner, not our conclusions.
Mr. Trump, the Seventh Chair is
yours.
Trump’s Question
TRUMP: What is wrong with putting your own country and its people first—and using every lawful power available to make them strong, prosperous, secure, and respected? Other leaders put their countries first. When America does it, suddenly everyone objects. Why?
The Six Respond
SOCRATES: Nothing is wrong with serving one’s country. But who are “its people,” what makes power “lawful,” and what constitutes national “strength”? If only your followers count, institutions are legitimate only when they agree with you, and strength means defeating opponents, then your question becomes: Why should America permit Donald Trump to do whatever he believes will benefit it? That is a different and more dangerous question.
HARRIS: You recognized the anger produced by closed factories, weakened unions, stagnant wages, declining communities, and globalization’s unequal rewards. But recognition is not remedy. Your tariffs break with global neoliberalism, while tax reductions, deregulation, weakened labor power, and concentrated ownership preserve much of its domestic structure. Have you overturned the system that abandoned working people—or merely changed its language and alliances?
GEERTZ: “America First” compresses an entire moral drama into two words: a once-great nation was betrayed by elites, exploited by foreigners, and weakened by outsiders until a strong leader arose to restore it. That story gives genuine grievances cultural meaning, but it also selects memories and assigns enemies. When you say “America,” do you mean everyone in the country—or an imagined people whose religion, culture, and grievances define authentic belonging?
ARENDT: Democratic power belongs neither to a president nor to any individual; it arises through laws and institutions that outlast them. Institutions can become corrupt or unresponsive, but reforming them differs from demanding their submission. The decisive question is whether you recognize any independent authority capable of limiting your power or declaring that you are wrong.
MIDGLEY: Love of country is no more inherently wrong than love of family, but neither excuses harming neighbors or disfavored members of the household. Human beings owe loyalties to family, community, nation, humanity, and the living world. “America First” becomes morally objectionable when outsiders are denied legitimate claims or selected Americans are degraded to reassure others.
MORRISON: Before restoring a nation, someone must choose the past being restored. American history contains courage, invention, prosperity, and expanding freedom, but also slavery, dispossession, segregation, and exclusion. When you say “our country,” who inhabits the word our? A promise of restoration must tell us both what it hopes to recover and what it is willing to remember.
Trump Responds
I have support from workers, businesspeople, Christians, Jews, Black voters, Hispanic voters, and people from every part of the country. Yet my opponents call everything racist, authoritarian, corrupt, or dangerous.
The institutions you defend were not
neutral. They investigated me, attacked me, protected failed policies, and
ignored ordinary Americans. As for business, everyone knew I was a businessman
before I was elected. The voters knew exactly whom they were choosing.
And on the election—
MIDGLEY: Your allotted response has ended.
TRUMP: Six people spoke. I need more time.
MIDGLEY: You have six further opportunities to answer them. Socrates begins.
Questions from The Six
What Could Prove You Wrong?
SOCRATES: What evidence could persuade you that you were mistaken about an election, a policy, or an opponent?
TRUMP: Honest evidence from fair people—not partisan investigations, dishonest officials, or biased media.
SOCRATES: You have identified those you distrust. I asked what evidence you would trust.
TRUMP: Complete evidence, honestly presented.
SOCRATES: Suppose courts, state officials, members of your administration, and your own advisers examined the evidence and rejected your conclusion. Could they all be correct and you mistaken?
TRUMP: They could also be wrong or afraid to act.
SOCRATES: Certainly. But if agreement confirms that you are right and disagreement confirms that others are corrupt or cowardly, your belief cannot be corrected by any possible evidence.
TRUMP: That is not what I said.
SOCRATES: Then name the authority whose adverse judgment you would accept.
TRUMP: Ultimately, the facts decide.
SOCRATES: Facts do not speak without interpreters. You have not named an interpreter you would accept when the conclusion is unfavorable to you.
Who Materially Benefits?
HARRIS: Your economic program combines tariffs and industrial nationalism with tax reductions, deregulation, and strong protections for private capital. Who receives the largest material benefit?
TRUMP: Workers benefit when companies invest here, factories return, energy costs fall, and foreign countries stop taking advantage of us. Tariffs give us leverage. Tax cuts create growth.
HARRIS: That is the proposed chain of benefits. But ownership determines where gains accumulate. If owners receive tax advantages and greater control while workers receive insecure employment and diminished bargaining power, the program remains neoliberal beneath its nationalist language.
TRUMP: Neoliberalism is an academic word. I opposed globalists and their terrible trade agreements.
HARRIS: You opposed international economic arrangements that weakened national control. You did not oppose the domestic concentration of private wealth. That is why I call your system a nationalist mutation of neoliberalism, not its abolition.
Who is the Authentic American?
GEERTZ: Who is the authentic American in your political story?
TRUMP: A citizen who loves the country, obeys the law, works hard, and wants America to succeed. Race has nothing to do with it.
GEERTZ: Legally, that answer is inclusive. Symbolically, your language often distinguishes the real nation from immigrants, cosmopolitan cities, universities, journalists, disloyal officials, and internal enemies. Political language can communicate exclusion without naming a race.
TRUMP: We have criminals crossing the border. Saying so is not racism.
GEERTZ: Border enforcement and racial symbolism are not identical. Nor are they mutually exclusive. Why does immigration so often appear in your rhetoric through images of invasion, contamination, and national dispossession?
TRUMP: Because uncontrolled immigration can become an invasion.
GEERTZ: Then your choice of metaphor tells citizens how to interpret the people arriving: not first as human beings, workers, families, or refugees, but as an invading force.
Can Trump Legitimately Lose?
ARENDT: Is an election legitimate only when you win?
TRUMP: Of course not. But it must be honest.
ARENDT: After the 2020 election, courts, state officials, members of your administration, and your attorney general found no fraud sufficient to reverse the result. Yet you continued seeking reversal. What institution possessed the authority to tell you that you had lost?
TRUMP: Many people believed there were serious problems. The investigations were political.
ARENDT: That does not answer the question. If every institution contradicting the leader becomes corrupt because it contradicts him, institutional government disappears. Only the leader remains as judge.
TRUMP: Unless the institutions really are corrupt.
ARENDT: They may be. But institutional
reform proceeds through evidence, law, and rules applicable to everyone.
Personal rule begins when loyalty to the leader becomes the test of
institutional legitimacy.
What does Christianity Require?
MIDGLEY: What do you understand Christianity to require of a political leader?
TRUMP: I protected Christians. They were treated unfairly. I appointed judges they supported and defended religious liberty.
MIDGLEY: You have described what you provide Christians politically. I asked what Christianity requires of you morally.
TRUMP: I do not claim to be a theologian.
MIDGLEY: Then Christianity risks becoming transactional: religious constituencies provide votes and moral legitimacy; the leader provides judges, access, and cultural power.
TRUMP: Christians can judge that for themselves.
MIDGLEY: They must. But you cannot invoke their moral authority while declaring their moral demands irrelevant to your conduct.
Which American Past?
MORRISON: When was America sufficiently great that you would choose to restore it?
TRUMP: When we manufactured things, controlled our borders, won wars, built great cities, and had pride. People could support families. The country was respected.
MORRISON: Those accomplishments were real. So were segregation, exclusionary immigration laws, dispossession, and women’s restricted citizenship. Can the strength be recovered without recovering the hierarchy?
TRUMP: Nobody is proposing segregation. That is unfair.
MORRISON: I did not say you proposed it. I asked whether nostalgia remembers benefits while forgetting who paid for them. A hierarchy can reappear without restoring its former statutes.
TRUMP: People understand the difference between loving their history and wanting every part of it back.
MORRISON: Then responsible leadership should clarify that difference rather than profit from its ambiguity.
Open Discussion
Corruption and Private Interest
ARENDT: Should presidents and their families profit from industries whose regulation their administrations influence?
TRUMP: My family has businesses. Successful people do not become corrupt merely because they enter public life. Everyone knew about my businesses.
SOCRATES: Does public knowledge of a conflict eliminate the conflict?
TRUMP: There must be an actual favor. An accusation is not evidence.
ARENDT: Criminal bribery is not the only democratic standard. Public trust also requires confidence that government decisions have not been shaped by private benefit.
TRUMP: My opponents receive money from wealthy donors and industries. Why is my family always the issue?
MIDGLEY: Inconsistent scrutiny is a legitimate concern. It does not answer the question about you. “Others do it” cannot establish that an action is right.
TRUMP: The standard should be equal.
MIDGLEY: On that point, everyone here should
agree.
Democratic Institutions
ARENDT: Your actions following the 2020 election present a more fundamental problem. Democratic institutions survive only when incumbents relinquish power after lawful defeat.
TRUMP: I challenged an election. Candidates have challenged elections before. Lawyers use legal procedures.
ARENDT: Legal challenges are legitimate. Pressuring officials to substitute unsupported claims for certified votes would be different. The distinction is between contesting an election under law and subordinating its result to the incumbent’s will.
TRUMP: That is the prosecution’s account.
MIDGLEY: Correct. The federal indictment alleged wrongdoing; it did not establish guilt. The January 6 Committee made findings that you dispute. Neither accusation nor denial ends the inquiry here.
SOCRATES: Let us remove your name temporarily. If a leader knowingly disseminates false claims in order to remain in office after losing, has he attacked democratic government?
TRUMP: If he knowingly lies, yes. But you are assuming what I knew.
SOCRATES: Then we have isolated the decisive
factual question: not merely whether the claims were false, but whether the
leader knew—or deliberately refused to know—that they were false.
Racism and Political Mobilization
MORRISON: Racism need not declare one race biologically inferior. It may operate by repeatedly associating certain populations with crime, contamination, fraud, invasion, and national decline.
TRUMP: My concern is illegal immigration, not race. Many legal immigrants agree with me.
MORRISON: Their agreement matters, but it does not settle the meaning or effects of the language. No racial or ethnic population possesses a single political mind.
TRUMP: What language should a president use when a border is not controlled?
MORRISON: Accurate language. Distinguish violent offenders from millions of human beings. Describe failures of enforcement without turning entire populations into pollutants.
GEERTZ: The deeper question is whether heightened rhetoric reports public fear or manufactures and directs it. Political leaders interpret anxiety, but they also teach people what their anxiety means and whom to blame.
TRUMP: Sometimes a leader is simply willing to say what people already see.
GEERTZ: Yes. But the leader also selects
what becomes visible. Factories close, wages stagnate, towns decline, and
families become insecure. Those conditions might be attributed to capital
mobility, automation, weakened unions, government policy, immigration, cultural
change—or some combination. Political language does not merely describe the
explanation. It helps choose it.
Christian Nationalism
MIDGLEY: We must distinguish Christianity, patriotism, and Christian nationalism. They may overlap, but they are not synonymous.
TRUMP: “Christian nationalism” is often used to smear Christians who love America.
MIDGLEY: Sometimes it is used carelessly. But the belief that legitimate American identity is essentially Christian, and that government should privilege that identity, is a recognizable political position.
MORRISON: In American history, the supposedly universal words Christian and American have frequently carried an unspoken racial content. Formal inclusion can coexist with an imagined citizen who remains white and Christian.
TRUMP: I have never said only white Christians are Americans.
MORRISON: Explicit statements are not the whole of political meaning. The question is whether you challenge exclusionary interpretations among your supporters or benefit by leaving them undisturbed.
TRUMP: Politicians do not endorse every belief held by everyone who votes for them.
ARENDT: True. But leaders bear
responsibility for the movements they deliberately cultivate, particularly when
those movements regard religious and cultural plurality as national
contamination.
Neoliberalism and the Abandoned Citizen
HARRIS: Racism, religious nationalism, and economic resentment should not be treated as competing explanations of Trumpism. They can reinforce one another.
Material insecurity does not automatically produce racial resentment. Political movements teach people how to interpret insecurity. Workers may be encouraged to attribute declining security principally to immigrants, minorities, secular elites, or foreign nations rather than to ownership, bargaining power, automation, financialization, and the organization of capital.
TRUMP: You are saying my supporters were manipulated. They saw their communities decline while experts told them everything was fine.
HARRIS: Many grievances were real. I am asking how causes were selected. You identified failures that political and economic elites minimized. But you often redirected anger toward visible outsiders while leaving much of the underlying concentration of economic power intact.
TRUMP: Before me, factories left and nobody cared. I changed the conversation.
HARRIS: That is a defensible claim. You disrupted the established consensus on trade and industrial policy. But changing the conversation is not the same as redistributing power. Tariffs may protect selected industries; they do not by themselves strengthen unions, democratize workplaces, reduce monopoly power, or transfer ownership to workers.
TRUMP: People want good jobs and opportunity, not government control.
HARRIS: Some do. Others want bargaining
power, healthcare, secure retirement, affordable housing, and protection from
employers and monopolies. “The people” contain conflicting material interests.
National unity does not abolish class.
The Cultural Power of Performance
GEERTZ: Your combative manner is not incidental to your politics. It is one of its central symbols. Supporters say, “He fights.” The act of combat itself authenticates you.
TRUMP: People wanted someone who would not surrender.
GEERTZ: Yes. You transformed politics from disagreement over administration into a struggle between betrayal and restoration. Each denunciation by a newspaper, university, court, or government agency can strengthen your position because it reenacts the drama: the establishment attacks the champion of the forgotten people.
That creates a self-protecting
symbolic world. Opposition becomes evidence of courage. Investigation becomes
evidence of conspiracy. Institutional restraint becomes evidence of corruption.
Personal defeat becomes evidence of fraud.
What event could enter that world as
evidence that you—not merely your enemies—had been wrong?
TRUMP: Criticism does not prove I am right. But much of the criticism has been dishonest.
GEERTZ: Undoubtedly some has been. Yet a political story becomes dangerous when it can absorb every contrary fact as further confirmation of itself.
SOCRATES: Then Professor Geertz and I have
reached the same difficulty by different roads. If no possible evidence can
disprove the story, it is no longer an explanation. It is an article of faith.
Trump Turns the Criticism Upon the
Seminar
TRUMP: Let me ask all of you something. You speak about ordinary people, but you are intellectuals sitting in a beautiful room. How many people lost jobs because of policies you supported? How many neighborhoods changed while leaders told residents their concerns were ignorant? How many people were called deplorable, racist, or uneducated because they objected?
Maybe the institutions failed first.
Maybe people supported me because I listened when people like you did not.
HARRIS: That criticism has force. Intellectual and administrative elites benefited from arrangements whose costs they often described abstractly. Expertise can become a class interest while presenting itself as disinterested knowledge.
GEERTZ: And cosmopolitan culture sometimes treated the attachments of less-mobile people as backwardness. What appeared to elites as openness could appear locally as the dissolution of a familiar moral world.
MORRISON: But suffering does not make every explanation of suffering true. Humiliation may deserve recognition without giving the humiliated permission to seek restoration through the humiliation of others.
ARENDT: Nor does institutional failure authorize personal rule. A damaged republic requires better institutions, not the replacement of institutions by a leader’s will.
SOCRATES: Mr. Trump’s criticism also applies to us. If we can identify every defect in his followers but none in ourselves, we exhibit the same immunity from correction that we have attributed to him.
MIDGLEY: Quite so. Self-examination is not a concession to falsehood. It is the price of opposing falsehood without becoming self-righteous.
The Final Question
MIDGLEY: Mr. Trump, suppose a policy unquestionably increased American wealth and power but required systematic deception, racial scapegoating, religious favoritism, private enrichment, and weakened restraints upon the presidency. Would national success justify those means?
TRUMP: No. But I reject the claim that those are my means.
You have assembled every accusation
made against me and treated it as one package. I see a government that stopped
protecting its citizens, institutions that protected themselves, trade policies
that destroyed communities, borders that were not enforced, and leaders who
were afraid to act.
I used the authority voters gave me.
When institutions resisted because they were protecting failure or partisan
interests, I fought them. That is not destroying democracy. Elections are
democracy, and I won elections.
You may dislike my language or
methods. But millions of people believed the old system was not working. They
were not all racists, religious extremists, or fools. Any explanation that
insults them will fail to understand why I am here.
ARENDT: Winning an election confers office, not unlimited authority.
TRUMP: I said lawful authority.
SOCRATES: And our central disagreement remains: whether the law ultimately limits the leader or the leader determines what counts as law.
HARRIS: We must also distinguish the leader from the conditions that made his leadership possible.
GEERTZ: And distinguish those conditions from the story through which people came to understand them.
MORRISON: While remembering those who disappear when that story decides who properly belongs.
Trump leans forward.
MIDGLEY: No, Mr. Trump. You have had the final response in each exchange.
TRUMP: I was only going to—
MIDGLEY: I know. The meeting is adjourned.
After Trump Leaves
The door closes behind Trump. For several seconds, no one speaks.
MIDGLEY: Well. He obeyed the time limit more faithfully than I expected.
ARENDT: Only because you interrupted him before he could redefine the time limit.
SOCRATES: He never answered my question.
MORRISON: He answered it repeatedly. He accepts an authority when it confirms him. When it does not, the authority becomes corrupt.
SOCRATES: Then he answered without knowing he had answered.
GEERTZ: That is part of his power. Contradiction does not weaken the performance. To his followers, it may demonstrate that he refuses to be confined by the language of his adversaries.
HARRIS: You continue making him sound like a magician. He found a population already prepared to hear him—people injured by economic changes, ignored by institutions, and offered little beyond professional explanations of why their losses were necessary.
MORRISON: Injured people can injure others. Recognition of their suffering cannot require silence about the suffering they redirect downward.
HARRIS: Agreed. But moral condemnation without causal explanation guarantees that another Trump will follow him.
ARENDT: And causal explanation without moral judgment risks turning responsibility into inevitability. Conditions prepared the ground; they did not compel the man to lie or the citizens to believe him.
GEERTZ: We require all three accounts, then: the conditions Harris describes; the story I describe; and the responsibility Hannah insists upon.
SOCRATES: Four accounts. We must also ask why people—including ourselves—prefer explanations that protect what we already believe.
MIDGLEY: (She pours herself more tea.) He made one point we should not evade. We sit in a handsome room discussing people whose lives are often discussed by those who do not know them.
MORRISON: True. But he, too, lives in handsome rooms.
MIDGLEY: Considerably more handsome ones, I imagine.
Geertz smiles.
HARRIS: Did anyone change his mind?
ARENDT: No. But that was never the only purpose.
SOCRATES: I discovered that he is more capable of identifying corruption in others than the possibility of error in himself.
MORRISON: A common human talent.
SOCRATES: Are you referring to him—or to us?
MORRISON: Yes.
For the first time since Trump’s departure, all six laugh.
MIDGLEY: Enough. Before Socrates begins another seminar, let us go home.
They rise from the table and depart. Behind them, The Seventh Chair stands empty again—awaiting its next occupant. Perhaps someone to say something more about leadership virtue and moral society….
