an autodidact meets a dilettante…

I’ve made the prediction that Trump will be out of office by the end of 2018. Not just defanged, due to next year’s congressional elections, but out on his capacious rump. That’s a hope as well as a prediction of course, but there are various areas from which the end can come. It might be the women’s lobby, with apparently more allegations to come about sleazy sex stuff from bullish males, on top of a current rating of 24% among women for Trump. It might be the Mueller inquiry, and Trump’s attempt to stop it. It might be the backlash from the tax bill thievery, and Trump’s unpredictable and violent response to it, or it might be some entirely new disaster created by Trump’s ‘I alone can fix it’ fantasies. It’s quite likely that some voted for Trump as a joke, to see what would happen if an administration worthy of a Marx Brothers movie took over their country, but for those types the joke has worn thin. Others may have seriously hoped that he would rid their world of all those losers who stopped them from getting ahead. They’re the types who are less easily shifted, because they’d be blaming first all those nasty liberals who are blocking Trump’s policies. However, a realisation of Trump’s basic lack of humanity is starting to trickle down to them, if nothing else ever will. The tax bill is hugely unpopular, and will probably be even more so if it’s enacted. African-Americans and women of all backgrounds are finding their voice. Democrats are winning local elections against Trump’s urging…

But in this post I don’t want to focus so much on Trump’s appeal or his demise, but on his character. In the past I’ve always treated him as a bad joke and so I’ve switched off, either literally or figuratively, every time he came into view. Recently, though, I’ve been focusing on him, as much as I can bear.

So here’s my amateur, and only partial, psychoanalysis of Trump, for what it’s worth. I don’t think anyone would deny that he’s a liar, though the degree of outrage caused by this runs across the whole spectrum. On this topic many have described him more as a bullshitter, taking their cue from Harry Frankfurt’s classic (but not entirely persuasive) essay. Another regular criticism is that he’s not really an adult – the White House cabinet being described as adult day carers, coddling the Prez and hiding many disturbing aspects of reality from him lest he react in uncontrollable and destructive ways.

I certainly agree with both these strains of thought. Children aren’t held to the same standards of truth as adults, as they’re still ‘finding themselves’, seeking to assert themselves in the world. This self-assertion, in early childhood, is seen, generally, as more important than ‘getting things right’ – with some obvious exceptions. I’ve experienced, with great delight, a precociously articulate child at age three or four, telling the most grandiose story of her heroic rescue of a grandparent from a shipwreck at sea. Whether she got this story from a dream or a TV drama or from the immediate environment (at the time I was carrying her along a walkway on a small island smacked by ocean waves), or a combination, I can’t say, but I could see she was relishing her story and her central role in it. I was thrilled by it, and full of wonder at her imagination, and I could also see that she was thrilled by her central role, and the question of the truth of the story seemed irrelevant. My own part was to encourage the narrative.

This child is now a teenager and would be both embarrassed and intrigued by this story, I’m sure. She is a very different person now, and certainly no Donald Trump. But the story of her story is instructive. I think it’s common for young children to confabulate and make themselves the heroes of their lives, until reality knocks them into having a different perspective. But that all depends on upbringing and what we’re allowed to get away with. We often talk of spoiled children, by which we usually mean kids who are over-indulged, never corrected, allowed to get away with all sorts of unacceptable behaviour. And when they’re rich spoiled kids, the damages can be commensurate. Trump clearly fits the spoiled rich kid category, though of course every spoiled kid is spoiled in its own unique way. There are doubtless many ways in which Trump has been spoiled, but one of them is this never-corrected, and probably encouraged, tendency to confabulate, to say things because they’re appealing, either to himself or to his audience, but preferably to both.

Trump loves his own words. They comfort him, they fortify him, they give him a boost, especially when they’re received warmly by others. That’s why, when talking to the press the other day, he spoke as if he was back on the campaign trail, with people chanting and cheering his every sentence. And he loves to contemplate the things he says, because they emphasise his power and glory. For example, when he says aloud, ‘We’re going to rebuild the FBI’, he takes great pleasure in those words. They are magnificent, glorious. And he doesn’t say ‘I will rebuild the FBI’, for that would be too vain, he would be generous and accept the help of others. And when he says ‘the FBI’ he has only the vaguest sense of what that entity is, all he needs to be aware of is that it’s a Big Thing, which it would be mighty to rebuild. He might’ve said ‘we will rebuild the Giza Pyramid (or the Earth, or the Universe) and it’ll be bigger and better than ever’, but that would be to lose perspective. It’s not as if he’s crazy or anything.

So he observes these words coming out of his mouth like beautiful big bubbles, so beautiful to see in his mind’s eye that he’s tempted to repeat them, and often does – ‘it’s terrible what’s happening at the FBI, really terrible. It’s really so terrible.’ You might not think these words are so beautiful, but Trump does. President Trump. They’re his magisterial words, his godlike judgment on the FBI, or the Obama administration, or NATO or whatever. And he has gained this authority through the nation’s reverent acclamation of his magnificence. He will vanquish his enemies, who are hacks, lightweights, losers, such lovely words, such definitive judgments, He’ll say them again….

So that’s Trump, the man who loves towers, who wants to tower, who has now been given the chance to tower over his enemies. And yet, thankfully, he’s managed little in power over the last year, though the terrible tax bill looms large and his damage to the judiciary will outlive him. His beautiful bubbles aren’t enough, he vaguely knows that, though that won’t stop him from producing them – he may finally be reduced to doing nothing else. These bubbles have a truth to him that’s inexplicable to anyone else. When he says, for example, ‘I love China, I’ve read hundreds of books on China’, this has a truth to him which is far more vital and beautiful than actually reading a load of books on China (an activity only fit for drones and lightweights), it describes a new-minted aspiration which is masterfully fulfilled through the act of speaking. Trump’s bullshit is intended to deceive himself first, others second. And it’s not really deceiving, I feel, it’s more delighting, enlivening and consoling, like so many bubbles, as I don’t think Trump has ever gotten beyond the stage of talking for the sake of narrative. For him, truth isn’t really an issue, and that’s why science and evidence mean so little to him. His thought processes never reached that level. He’s stuck with his bubbles.

Another way of saying all this is that a large part of Trump’s conscious activity is that of the pre-schooler who invents adventures for himself and succeeds in all of them, largely oblivious of the world around him. For the sake of that real world, he needs to be cut free from his minders and enablers, and vanquished once and for all.