Donald J. Trump and Robert E. Lee

The other day the president made some news by praising Civil War general Robert E. Lee, and it struck me that Trump and Lee had a certain amount in common. Not in their personalities, but in their situations.

Lee could’ve fought on the Union side in the Civil War. Or he could’ve saved a couple hundred thousand lives by surrendering his army at some point, once he realized they were going to lose. But, conditional on fighting on, he had to innovate. He had to gamble, over and over again, because that was his only chance.

Similarly for Trump. There was no reason he had to run for president. And, once he had the Republican nomination, he still could’ve stepped down. But, conditional on him running for president with all these liabilities (he’s unpopular, he leads an unpopular party, and he has a lot of legal issues), he’s had to use unconventional tactics, and to continue to use unconventional tactics. Like Lee, there’s no point at which he could rest on his successes.

33 thoughts on “Donald J. Trump and Robert E. Lee

  1. > Or he could’ve saved a couple hundred thousand lives by surrendering his army at some point,

    Is that a plausible counterfactual? I don’t know as much about Civil War history as I should, but I find this doubtful, at least prior to Gettysburg. Lee could, obviously have resigned (or killed himself), but the leadership of the South was committed to succession. Wouldn’t they have just picked another general? If so, then Lee hasn’t really saved any lives.

    “Surrendering” an (undefeated) army is not easy . . .

    • I think a couple of hundred thousand people died after Gettysburg, probably just from Sherman’s siege of Atlanta and his sweep through the South, and it was inevitable that the Confederacy would fall after Gettysburg and Vicksburg. The real problem I have with Andrew’s comment is that I don’t know what Lee did that was innovative of unconventional. Grant was innovative. He figured out how separate his troops from his supply lines. Lee was very conventional. I also don’t understand what Trump is doing that is innovative. He has spent his whole life in marketing and sales, and he knows marketing and sales techniques better than politicians who only participate in a handful of marketing campaigns by contrast. He is good at getting attention. Experts didn’t expect him to win, now they have to come up with all sorts of explanations when random error is much more likely. He ran in a field with too many Republican candidates, and he kept the attention on himself long enough that no one else could get any traction. Then, party loyalty pretty much explains why he got to 45% and then a bunch of random stuff happened that he had no control over, and he won. I don’t understand why people keep wanting to ascribe genius to his repeated failures. With the economy in good shape, ISIS destroyed, and no major international crises, where would Hillary or Marco Rubio or Jeb be in the polls?

      • > it was inevitable that the Confederacy would fall after Gettysburg and Vicksburg.

        OK. But, again, what is the process by which Lee, acting alone, could end the war? Would his officers and men have surrendered if he ordered them to in August 1863? Would the other Confederate forces in the field? Would South civilian leadership? I doubt all of these claims.

        • Andrew’s invoked a counterfactual. We cannot know the answer, but it is not implausible. Had Lee surrendered at Gettysburg, instead of retreating, there would have been no one to defend Richmond, and the Confederate government would have fled. Maybe it could have survived, but I doubt it. When Lee did surrender, he didn’t ask permission and Jefferson Davis just ran away. As for replacing Lee, I think that was unthinkable in the South. Plus, the other Confederate generals were even dumber than Lee. Of course, we can’t know, but Andrew’s statement seems reasonable.

        • > Andrew’s invoked a counterfactual.

          Some counterfactuals are reasonable and can serve as the basis for productive discussions, especially counterfactuals that are not too inconsistent to be useful/plausible.

          The classic (?) example of a useless counterfactual is “What would have happened at Waterloo if Napoleon had had B-2 bombers?”

          My point is that Andrew’s counterfactual is too much like that one because there is no (?) way to make it reasonable.

          First, total deaths in the Civil War were around 800,000. So, to somehow save “a couple hundred thousand lives,” Lee would need to have acted well before the war’s end.

          Second, I can’t find a good timeline of deaths-by-date. But this listing of the ten worst battles shows that only three of them happened after Gettysburg. (We seem to agree that there was no way for Lee to stop the war prior to Gettysburg.) And one of them, Chickamauga, occurred two months after Gettysburg in Georgia. Would even a Lee surrender in July have stopped a battle in Georgia two months later?

          Third, even if Lee surrenders in July and, somehow, the Confederate Government in Richmond follows suit, you are sure that fighting stops everywhere else? Union troops in the West just head home? So do the undefeated Confederate troops?

          Fourth, even if Lee surrenders in July and the Confederacy falls that summer, war-related deaths don’t stop. The prisoners in Richmond camps don’t all magically teleport home.

          In other words, Andrew’s counterfactual is nonsense because there is no action that Lee could have taken which would have saved “a couple hundred thousand lives.”

      • Don’t know if I would call them innovations, but he did stake out positions highly atypical of a republican presidential candidate and conventional wisdom thought should be fatal, including anti-foreign intervention (Iraq/Lybia), anti-globalization (existing trade pacts and even NATO), hard-edged anti-migration, infrastructure spending, etc. Even his decision to contend the blue walls of Midwest differed from conventional wisdom on path for a republican.

      • “I also don’t understand what Trump is doing that is innovative.”

        But you seem to undercut your argument, by continuing:

        “…he knows marketing and sales techniques better than politicians who only participate in a handful of marketing campaigns by contrast.

        “He is good at getting attention. … he kept the attention on himself long enough that no one else could get any traction.”

        The genius of Trump (and I am not a fan) is his success in making everything about him, and playing the cable news cycle like Charlie Daniels plays the fiddle.
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9X4gnnjyEw (Charlie Daniels on the fiddle)

        In the 2016 election, even the NYTimes had the word Trump much more often on their website’s front page than Hillary. The man’s a genius at self-promotion.

        • Shameless self-promotion was P.T. Barnum’s “innovation.” The big lie was Goebbels’. I am not sure that lying and shameless self-promotion count as innovations, but the reason Trump is really good at it, and others are not is because of something called ethics and integrity. I don’t think being morally degenerate makes the President or certain used car salesmen geniuses.

      • “it was inevitable that the Confederacy would fall after Gettysburg and Vicksburg”

        What if the election of 1864 had gone the other way? Wasn’t there a sizeable peace movement at the time?

  2. “he’s had to use unconventional tactics, and to continue to use unconventional tactics”

    It’s not the liabilities, it’s the narcissism. A system with checks and balances was never going to work.

  3. I don’t like and follow politics, but since this blogpost is about comparing Trump to Lee i have wondered if Trump is like the Diederik Stapel or Daryl Bem of (global) politics…

    Perhaps Trump, like Stapel or Bem, just does such unconventional things that the whole “system” has no choice but to be re-ordered and re-organized.

      • “I think of him as the carnival barker we hired to work the Freak Show tent a/k/a Twitter.”

        Haha!

        (I think twitter s@cks and might have blown up too much, and be well on its way to self-destruct in the next 5 years or so. Perhaps it’s like a lot of “internet things” where the “cool kids” adopt it, but as soon as everyone’s on it it will lose the 1st adopters, and perhaps even the function, vibe, and goal it originially had)

  4. the Trump/Lee musing makes no sense

    Trump is driven by ego.
    lee was driven by principle.
    Their ‘situations’ are no way comparable.

    Lee was a highly capable general and did not think surrender was his only real option.
    He was in a strategic retreat to join other Confederate forces in North Carolina — when surprised by large Union infantry forces at Appomattox. Lee surrendered only the Army of Northern Virginia, other Confederate forces fought on.

    Lincoln was the villain. The Confederacy merely wanted to peaceably exit the U.S.
    as was their constitutional right. Lincoln chose massive warfare to enforce his personal will.
    History is written by the victors in war.

  5. I think only after Lincoln was re-elected in 1864 was it obvious that Union was going to win. Lee and his generals were hoping that they could drag out the war and hope McClellan was voted President. He ran on a campaign that he would seek a treaty with the South. Would he have done it if he had won. No one knows.

  6. The set of people who have come to the conclusion that, in a highly competitive situation, it pays to take long shots, is not small. In “Great Parliamentary Scandals” Matthew Parris suggests that people who have chosen politics as their career tend to be people comfortable with taking risks.

    Here is another version of this situation: N people take part in a competition. Each has to declare a pre-registered p-value and generate a uniform random number in [0,1]. The winner is that competitor who declares the lowest p-value and also generates a uniform random number no greater than that p-value (ties broken at random, including the case when nobody achieves their declared p-value). I note that if you chose a p-value of roughly 1/N you win with probability roughly 1/N against a field of competitors choosing values far from this.

    • Matt:

      Care to explain what you think is wrong with the above post? Also what’s “highminded” about drawing an analogy? Or where’s the “elitism”? Pretty much everybody knows who Donald Trump and Robert E. Lee are, no? It’s not like I’m drawing an analogy to Anton Webern or something; I agree that would be elitist and maybe even highminded!

    • Quote from above: “It also is the reason people are fed up with the highminded elitism that you all seem to represent.”

      I dislike elitism. Perhaps even more than you (seem to) do.

      Of all the scientific forums and blogs i have participated on, i think and have experienced this particular blog might in fact be just about the exact opposite of “elitist”.

      Although i am not sure what it means to “represent highminded elitism”, i have noticed the following things on this blog which i think do not fit with “representing highminded elitism”:

      # The many different (types of) topics that are being discussed
      # The way topics are being discussed (e.g. have a look around some of the comment sections here and possibly spot the different way people participate, and the different way people use language to communicate)
      # The way humour is being used
      # The way certain words are written, and certain words are used in the blogs (e.g. writing “enuf” instead of “enough”)
      # The fact that commenting is open to everyone (you can even comment anonymously as i am doing)
      # The use of cat pictures from time to time
      # The (possible) fact that i can get away with using “bad words” on here, like writing “SHIT” for no good reason other than trying to make a point

    • This post is the reason people are fed up with highminded elitism? Like, they (Who is they you may ask? People.) were cool with it before, but then Andrew wrote something slightly longer than a tweet and all of the sudden people are like “That’s it! We were okay with the fact that almost nobody went to jail as a result of the financial collapse of 2007-2008, and the fact that our political system is corrupted by dark money and foreign state disinformation, and the fact that the world is a really complicated and scary place that defies easy solutions and every time some nerd in a tweed jacket use six-dollar words and whole freakin’ paragraphs to point out all that nuance it only reminds me of how small I am and how hard all the problems of the world are to fix and that makes me really anxious, but I was cool with all that, I could keep it together, barely, but it was working, until on a random Wednesday what do I see but THIS GODDAMN POST!”

      Andrew, you broke the country.

      • “We were okay with the fact that almost nobody went to jail as a result of the financial collapse of 2007-2008, and the fact that our political system is corrupted by dark money and foreign state disinformation (…)”

        It’s not their, or anybody’s fault really.

        It’s all because of “the incentives” man, haven’t you heard?

        You just gotta change “the incentives” and everything will work out!

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