Victor Davis Hanson: On Trump and Tragedy

Hanson’s defense of Trump doesn’t do justice to the classics he touts

Classics is an academic field in perpetual crisis. Over and again its threnodies have been sung, now more than ever. Who in the age of TikTok, after all, retains the attention span for a Thucydidean oration or the memorization of noun declensions? There is an abundance of blame to go around. 

Enter Victor Davis Hanson. His co-authored 1998 tome Who Killed Homer? assigns the guilt emphatically to a generation of professional classicists who failed to celebrate the uniqueness of ancient Greece without apology. Rather than lauding and emulating the Greeks’ superior wisdom and cultural achievements as the basis for the dynamism of western civilization, these scholarly miscreants squandered their privileged academic posts on “multiculturalism,” “relativism,” and “theory.”

Hanson himself, after enjoying a decorated career as a tenured professor of classics, left academia and moved on to political punditry. Now he relies on his scholarly training and Stanford University affiliation (he is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution) as qualifications for expertise on “wokeism,” DEI, or the latest Fox News talking point. 

In his most recent foray, Hanson has released an updated edition of his 2019 The Case for Trump with a new fifty-three-page preface. In this audacious apologia for Donald Trump’s presidency and 2024 candidacy, Hanson narrates the improbable tale of Trump’s rise to power despite the Left’s feverish efforts to thwart him. Hanson tallies numerous achievements, such as securing the southern border, cutting taxes, and strengthening U.S. interests abroad. Trump’s unpolished and crude style—so offensive to liberals—empowered this success, uniquely qualifying him to upend the Washington establishment and undo President Obama’s legacy. 

Unencumbered by the requirements of scholarly footnotes, citations, or bibliographies, Hanson is free to advance claims without evidence. To give a single example, he announces that “violent crime remained at near-record lows under the volatile Trump but soared under Biden,” a misrepresentation that could have been easily avoided by consulting the FBI’s publicly available data.

The Case for Trump is peppered with allusions to the Greeks, mostly in passing, dropping names such as Alcibiades, Demosthenes, and Cleon. But Hanson’s most sustained engagement with a classical literary trope is the chapter “Trump, the Tragic Hero?” Here he evokes the ancient dramatic genre as offering insights into Trump’s persona and even portending his eventual fate. Tragic heroes, Hanson observes, are inherently neither noble nor likable but profoundly problematic. Drawing on Aristotle’s famous “tragic flaw,” Hanson posits that for such individuals their “intrinsic and usually uncivilized trait can be of service to the community, albeit usually expressed fully only at the expense of the hero’s own fortune.”

At this point Hanson, an aspiring Teiresias, divines possible outcomes of Trump’s political career: “In the classical tragic sense, Trump will likely end in one of two fashions, both not particularly good: either spectacular but unacknowledged accomplishments followed by ostracism when he is out of office and no longer useful, or, less likely, a single term due to the eventual embarrassments of his beneficiaries, as if his utility is no longer worth the wages of his perceived crudity.”

Given Hanson’s bold endeavor to mine the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, and even to evoke their mythological plays for predictive power, we should examine how he arrives at his “classical tragic sense.” His leading example is the “tragic hero Achilles in Homer’s Iliad,” an “unstable loner” who rages against “the overrated careerist King Agamemnon.” Certainly the co-author of Who Killed Homer? understands that the Iliad is an epic not a tragedy. Yet readers hoping for sustained engagement with actual tragic dramas will be disappointed to find only a couple of sentences about Sophocles’ Ajax and Antigone. Instead, the central corpus for Hanson’s classical tragic hero is the American western film. He catalogs numerous characters made famous by iconic actors such as John Wayne and Clint Eastwood and defined by their coarse manners and outsider status. Like the gunslingers in The Magnificent Seven who liberated a Mexican village from bandits, they are often deemed unfit to remain among the very beneficiaries of their heroic interventions.

To quibble that Hanson’s hero in “the classical tragic sense” is not derived primarily from the paradigms of classical Greek tragedy may seem pedantic. But precision has always mattered to classicists, and its absence here has striking effects.

Above all, Hanson fails to take seriously the perils posed by the heroes of the Greek stage. They do not simply ride off into the sunset as loners after saving the day. Nor are their flaws mere coarseness or bad manners. On the contrary, they frequently rage against gods and mortals with violence and hubris. In the process they unleash a torrent of calamity upon their communities. 

For example, a curse on the House of Atreus, first unleashed by a cannibalistic feast, finds its continuation when Agamemnon sacrifices his own daughter. Generational strife and a series of retributive kin-killings follow as the violent culmination of the curse.

In another popular tragic myth, Oedipus unwittingly kills his father in a fit of anger and marries his mother. This defilement brings a deadly plague on Thebes and a bloody civil war. Oedipus’ sons vie for power, and in the aftermath of their mutual destruction, Oedipus’ daughter Antigone hangs herself. In several other tragedies also, parents kill their own children, inflicted by madness and delusion from the gods. Consequences are always dire: religious pollution, bloodshed and war, death, disease, and exile. In short, the threats of heroes “in the classical tragic sense” are not merely to themselves but to civilization at large.

With greater circumspection regarding classical heroes, Hanson might have augured something more sinister and catastrophic. As it is, his underestimation of the consequences of a tragic downfall is matched by his repeated reduction of Trump’s flaws to mere “embarrassment” and “perceived crudity.” 

It’s telling that Hanson’s 2024 edition does not revise his 2019 tragic prognostications regarding Trump’s final fate; indeed, he repeats them in his new preface. Could he have predicted in 2019 that Trump would attempt to overturn the election and thwart the peaceful transfer of power, undoing the constitutional procedure at the very heart of American freedom and democracy? Perhaps not. But on January 6, 2021 a real-life tragedy was very nearly enacted when a frenzied mob descended on the U.S. Capitol and sought to make Mike Pence into a Pentheus—the tragic and tragically decapitated tyrant who, after a career of tirades against migrants and attempts to secure the walls against them, discovered that the most deadly perils reside within.  

Thus far, they have not succeeded. Nor yet, as Hanson imagined, has Trump been finally abandoned or ostracized by those embarrassed with his vulgarity. Indeed, his political party remains more loyal to him than ever, and it is now clear that no degree of crudity can shake their devotion. Instead, they’ve remade themselves in his image.

How precisely the final act of Trump’s reality-show drama will conclude remains to be seen. But in the spirit of Hanson’s enterprise, the words of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon may prove true:

Zeus led mortals to be wise, establishing as a rule that they acquire learning through suffering.

Or those of Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchae: 

You recognized me too late, but when it was necessary, you were ignorant.

Courtney Friesen is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Classics at the University of Arizona. His most recent book, Acting Gods, Playing Heroes,  was published with Routledge Press in 2024.