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Until it finally opens, there remains much speculation over precisely which artefacts will occupy Donald Trump’s eventual presidential library. My current view is that you could do a lot worse than fill it with all the volumes of text that have been written in the cause of “understanding” him. These increasingly read like the most futile female-targeted self-help books of the 1990s. You Have to Understand He is Very Transactional. Take Him Seriously But Not Literally. Guys, please – no more. We all urgently need rescuing from the Mind, Body & Statecraft section of the bookshop.
As I say, so many gazillions of words have been expended on this cause that Trump reminds me a lot of the men of the 1990s – indeed, he was one. Back then, he had emerged from a decade of valiantly avoiding contracting STIs in 1980s Manhattan – a battle he would later describe as “my personal Vietnam”. For much of the 1990s, the rest of mankind – certainly womankind – felt that personal victories of their own must be just around the corner. It definitely helped that the economy was booming and history had ended. But it was a time when people believed you could change everything through self-control/hard work/the right roadmap. In fact, speaking of roads, one of the biggest nonfiction titles of the 90s in the US was M Scott Peck’s The Road Less Travelled, a hymn to personal growth that was treated by many as the key to all mythologies.
The vast, mostly female contingent of self-help-book buyers of this era seemed convinced that men were desperately trying to communicate with them, and that true harmony/a happy ending was possible if they simply learned how to decode the messages contained in totally inscrutable behaviour like not calling them back, not appearing to care about what they wanted, or stating they were going to put tariffs on all non-US goods. One of those I might have misremembered. But the general gist was: what could it all mean? Once you had deciphered it, men would love you, and you could then set about managing them into their perfect final form. (This may also be what the rest of the G7 leaders thought once Trump got bored with the conference last week and left.)
Then along came an episode of Sex and the City – the absolute classic show about turn-of-the-millennium guys and the women who loved ’em – in which Miranda related to the girls (and one man) how her most recent date had gone. They’d had a nice evening, he’d told her he wasn’t going to bomb Iran, but then he had. What could it all mean? No, hang on – I’m in a muddle – that was a different episode of something. Let’s try it again. They’d had a nice evening, he’d kissed her, she asked him upstairs, but he said he had an early meeting so he didn’t come up. What could it all mean? Something really positive, think the girls. “It means he likes you but he wants to take it slow,” is one of their verdicts. Men can be “afraid of having their feelings hurt”. Or “freaked out by their own feelings”. He could have been stressed out, on deadline, or have a migraine. The only man at the table is eventually asked for his opinion, which he parts with almost reluctantly. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it for you,” he says. “He’s just not that into you.”
Well now. That last line of dialogue promptly became a real-life meme. Then the meme became a book, when two of Sex and the City’s writers ended up writing an entire self-help tome using it as the title. And then the book became a movie, which continued to disseminate its essential message: stop wasting time parsing really obvious behaviour into whatever you want it – need it – to mean. Plus, by this point, among other things, it was the Bush years, 9/11 had happened, and people had learned that two of M Scott Peck’s children wouldn’t talk to him and he’d cheated on his wife multiple times throughout their marriage. So, in many ways, everyone was waking up.
Watching the events of the past fortnight – in which any number of people have been blindsided, crushed, humiliated, whatevered by Trump – felt like it was past time for a similar awakening for politicians and the analysts who love to comment on ’em. (Hi! I’m here twice a week, etc.) Instead, it feels like Keir Starmer could spend the Nato summit stuck drinking cosmopolitans with his little gang of world leaders, going: “I think I’ve worked out what Donald’s trying to tell me – and it’s incredibly positive! He’s just COMPLEX, like all quality men!” “I don’t think he wants to do any of these bad things, he’s just left with no choice.” “Yes,” the perfectly coiffed Emmanuel Macron might agree as he took another sip. “He rang and told you his B-2s were on the way to bomb Iran a whole hour before other people found out – you have a really special relationship!”
Ladies, gentlemen, presidents, prime ministers – can I stop you? He Just Wants it to be About Him. Everything being always about him is the position of maximum control and maximum attention. The end. Maybe someone could get a book out of it – God knows I’ve just got 900 words out of it – but honestly, save yourself time, money and emotion and wake up. He is not REMOTELY into you.
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Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
