The YOLO Presidency

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.Had President Trump, we wondered, possibly been reading or at least thumbing through—just maybe—the works of … Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel?Impossible. And yet. Hegel’s theory of “world-historical individuals,” men who redirected the course of humanity, focused on three figures: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte. Hegel described them as unlikely “heroes of an Epoch” for upending established orders that had previously seemed fixed. They were “practical, political men” who were each condemned in their age for smashing norms and for other conduct “obnoxious to moral reprehension”—as Trump has been accused of, centuries later.And though Trump has long compared himself to America’s two greatest presidents, we were recently told by two people who are in a position to know such things—a senior administration official and a longtime Trump confidant—that the president had, in private conversations, begun thinking about himself less as a peer of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, and more as an addition to Hegel’s immortal trifecta.“He’s been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live,” the confidant told us. “He wants to be remembered as the