When Donald Trump spoke at the UN last month, the audience laughed at him. It was an unprecedented insult to an American president. But I have an uneasy suspicion that Mr Trump may have the last laugh. The 45th US president could yet go down as a leader who changed the course of history and embodied the spirit of an age.
Historic figures do not have to be good people, or even particularly intelligent. Mr Trump is a habitual liar, whose administration has set up detention camps for children. Rex Tillerson, his former secretary of state, is reputed to have called the president a “moron”. But none of that need stop Mr Trump from being what the philosopher Georg Hegel called a “world-historical figure”.
The quintessential world-historical figure of Hegel’s era was Napoleon, whom the German thinker described as the “world spirit on horseback”. Oddly, the best definition I have read of what Hegel meant by that term, came from the current president of France. Emmanuel Macron told Der Spiegel that “Hegel viewed ‘great men’ as instruments of something far greater?.?.?.?He believed that an individual can indeed embody the zeitgeist (world spirit) for a moment, but also that the individual isn’t always clear they are doing so.”