What Profit a Man?

Really, what is Trump's own endgame in all this?

July 14, 2026

Donald Trump spoke warmly, to the extent that he is able, of the recently departed Lindsey Graham, but he cannot have forgotten what Graham said about him in 2015, or 2021. Graham was not his friend, not someone who respected him. Those are not the qualities that seem to matter, to Trump. Graham was a loyal soldier. That is the only thing that counts.

In this season of elderly, seemingly dying Republicans, I find myself wondering what the scene will be at Trump’s own deathbed. Will he be surrounded by the early grief of children and a soon-to-be widow? By some accounts, he has a strained relationship at best with his children. Melania, always looking to be seething inside, appears to be the very model for what his devotees call “TDS.”

Will friends and colleagues come to give him succor and pay their respects? Reports have emerged regularly suggesting that most Republicans, those who were not elected because of him, detest him, or view him merely as a means to an end. With all his power drained and only a little bit of life left to follow, it is not clear to me why any would clear their schedules to go, since political power is the gravity that keeps them in his orbit.

Will he die alone? Probably not. However far he falls in the years to come, there will be some hangers-on. With his need above all to be the center of attention, the old bastard will find a way to make his last conscious breath a spectacle. In the end, attention is the thing Trump will give his last full measure of devotion.

Lindsey Graham, likewise, surrendered his principles and his dignity to be of service to Trump, even though he somehow never deleted a social media post saying “if we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.” What an empty death it must have been, knowing he lived so dishonestly, so fully, in the end, in the service of something he did not believe in.

For those who seek power for its own sake, for those convinced of their right to lord it over others, for those who allowed wealth and influence to bloat their self-regard to absurd heights, what can there possibly be to sustain them in the end?

It is Bastille Day, guillotine jokes are bouncing around, and I find myself thinking about the heads, and their roll. More specifically, I am thinking about Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier. A renowned chemist and French nobleman of the 18th Century, he eventually ran afoul of the increasingly bloody revolutionary government, and was, in the end, led to the platform to be beheaded.¹ He reputedly told his assistant to wait by the basket for his head to fall; he would try to blink for as long as he was able, and through that experiment, they would advance scientific knowledge of life and death. Staring at the sky, bodiless, Lavoisier blinked for a full ninety seconds.

And in a way, it feels like a cruel metaphor for how life goes and power ends for the powerful, in particular for the blithely powerful, who were born into extraordinary privilege, too myopic to see the suffering in the streets outside their high walls. He died bodiless, unable to touch anything, unable to summon a breath for speaking any meaningful final worlds, disconnected from the visceral physicality that makes for the awful, sometimes beautiful roughness of the world. Being of the nobility is to float above the messiness of everyday anxieties, in the fantasy of children and nobles, at least. Bodiless.

In his final days, while intimately connected to his own corpulence, Trump too will be detached, disconnected from any body of ideas or principles truly his own that make his life significant. He did what he did, we can presume, because he feels he should be above the constraints of the world, defying gravity in politics and perhaps in the downward arc of a human life. He imagines himself to be different, special. But all the things that tie the rest of us to the world, that make the end of life bitter but also sweet, he is disconnected from.

But not so Lavoisier. As he sat in his cold waiting cell, he hatched a plan to make his final moments useful. He walked up to the cold blade knowing he would, if he could, do one last thing to advance human knowledge. He died fully immersed in what he lived for – not, like Trump, watching the only thing that mattered shrivel up and blow away.

That is a good death.

Power divorced from any purpose, in the end, strikes me as its own hell. Donald Trump has done none of this in the service of anything bigger than his vanity and his impulses. In the final analysis, whether the Trumpian empire falls like Julius Caesar on the Forum steps or lasts well beyond his mortal expiration, he has lived for nothing. He knows it. He will not escape it in the end, when all there is to do is to look back.

Mind you, this isn’t true of all of them. Russell Vought seems to find a sense of purpose in installing Christian democracy, Stephen Miller in the cruelties of his racism. If they succeed at all in their plans for Trump, those two may die with a satisfied mind.

So be it. All of us can have that, and these terrible times provide the opportunity. As the threat from Trump has grown and hardened, Americans who are paying attention have had to look deep and figure out what they stand for. Millions of us are doing what we can to defend democracy, and simple human decency. In the final analysis, everything that Trump has failed to be himself, he has enabled us to be instead. We all still carry our own moral failings forward, but the weird thing about these weird times is that the man who seems to have gained the world remains a debased creature, but we little people are ennobled, a little bit, for having been here to say “no,” to fail to be as venal and empty as Trump probably thought we, too, must be.

1. When his friends appealed to the judge for clemency, noting Lavoisier’s genius, the judge reputedly said “The Republic has no need of geniuses.” Word is he’s Trump’s choice to replace Alito.