Politics is the diversion of trivial men who, when they succeed at it, become important in the eyes of more trivial men.

Nathan’s aphorism expresses a characteristically sardonic distrust of politics as a realm that rewards vanity rather than merit. He suggests that political activity often attracts people of limited intellectual or moral stature (“trivial men”), and that political “success” can manufacture a kind of importance that is merely social—bestowed by an even less discerning public (“more trivial men”). The sting lies in the recursive hierarchy of triviality: politics becomes a closed circuit in which status is amplified without corresponding substance. Read in the context of Nathan’s broader cultural criticism, the line functions less as a policy critique than as an indictment of mass taste and the mechanisms by which reputations are made.