More "Leopard Spots:" Bret Stephens Imagines an Unconvincing Alternative President Trump

It appears that Bret Stephens, like Brian Stelter last month (see LINK), is unfamiliar with Arthur Schopenhauer and the concept of “Leopard Spot Counterfactuals.”  

Otherwise (to be a tad counterfactual), he would not have written his rather flat New York Times op-ed the other day, “The Trump Presidency That Wasn’t.”  See LINK.  

I am grateful for Stephens’ Never-Trump activism and liked his recent 1619 Project, which I thought was well-argued.    

But on the subject of alternate history, he kind of misses the point of the whole speculative enterprise, which is plausibility, not improbable fantasy.  

Stephens declares “let’s imagine an alternative history for a (politically incorrect} Trump presidency" – “politically incorrect” here oddly defined by Stephens as “intellectual independence,” not exactly the reigning definition among conservatives.  

But never mind that.  

What Stephens proceeds to do is list a great many “missed opportunities” where Trump might have behaved differently from how he did in reality.  

To sample a few:  

"January 2017: Shortly after his inauguration as president, Trump fulfills a campaign promise by releasing his full tax returns.  

February 2017: Infuriating movement conservatives, Trump resubmits 64-year-old Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court, saying he wants to uphold the principle — denied to his predecessor — that a president has the right to nominate a candidate to fill a vacant judgeship at any point in his administration.  

October 2017: Following the massacre of some 60 people (and the injury of more than 800) by a lone gunman in Las Vegas, Trump delivers a prime-time address on the subject of gun control. He observes that, at the time the Second Amendment was written, a skilled marksman could fire, at most, three or four rounds a minute.  

July 2019: In a telephone call with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump makes no mention of the Biden family."

And so on….  

In other words, Stephens’ operative premise is that if Trump had only been “politically incorrect” then “what an interesting and fruitful administration it might have been.”  

Ok, so this is shooting fish in a barrel, but to dress it up in Schopenhauerian language, Trump would have had to have “another different character” entirely for any of this to happen.    In other words, it’s entirely implausible.    

We may as well wish that Trump had been Obama, which come to think of it, is exactly how Stephens portrays Trump behaving in his allohistorical essay.  

But to tweak the Trump’s own words regarding COVID-19 and to apply them to his hypothetically alternative behavior, “It isn’t what it isn’t.”  

Since I’m in the business of protecting the reputation of counterfactual reasoning, which has long been under siege for all kinds of reasons, I feel obliged to flag sloppy uses of it when I see them.  

So I thank Stephens for his many important take-downs of the Trump administration and recommend that he stick to the factual rather than dabble in counterfactuals.

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