THE KINGDOM, THE POWER AND THE GLORY OF DONALD TRUMP

Jerry Harkins

I’m automatically attracted to beautiful women — I just start kissing them,

it’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they

                     let you do it. You can do anything.  Grab 'em by the pussy."

––Donald J. Trump

    2016

I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody

                              and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?

                                                                                    ––Donald J, Trump

                                                                                        January 16, 2019

Article II allows me to do whatever I want.

––Donald J. Trump

    June 16, 2019

Whether you love Donald Trump or hate him, you can’t argue about certain aspects of his personality. First, he spends a lot more time and money on his hair than you do.  His “do” disproves Lady Clairol’s claim that only her hairdresser knows for sure.  In his case, everybody knows he is the world’s only 73-year old bottle blond (okay, bottle orange) of the male persuasion.  Second, he is not a paragon of truthfulness.  In his first three years as President, he has told more than 16,000 lies according to The Washington Post.  Third, he has a high opinion of himself.  He is not shy about his belief that he is a very stable genius and the greatest President we have ever had with the possible exception of George Washington.  (Washington, of course, never mastered the art of the big lie.)  Fourth, he wears his ties crotch-length, whether for protection or promotion.  Fifth, he displays a truly remarkable range of unflattering facial expressions.  He often puckers his lips so his face looks like that of a very angry pig.  Sixth, his next self-help book could be titled The Art of the Insult.  His memoirs might be called Revenge Is Mine Saith the Lord.  He is a master of hyperbole.  Everything he does is the greatest that has ever been done in the history of the world.  His enemies are invariably doing the work of the devil.  Seventh, he is attracted to autocrats, evangelical preachers and statuesque women.  He surrounds himself with toadies and incompetents and fires anyone with knowledge or talent.  Eighth, he doesn’t smoke or drink.  He does curse and swear a lot but he’s not really good at it.  His repertoire is pedestrian, limited to dirty words he learned in ninth grade.  Ninth, his alleged wealth derives primarily from a worshipful father, his mastery of the bankruptcy laws and his extensive experience as a deadbeat debtor.

With that sort of resume, you might think Trump would have trouble landing a job flipping burgers but you’d be wrong.  He shocked the world by losing the 2016 presidential election by only a little more than three million votes.  Even more shocking was the fact that he actually won in the electoral college by 77 votes, the undemocratic result of one of several undemocratic compromises made in1789 without which the Constitution would not have been adopted.  This same trade-off resulted in Al Gore’s defeat in 2000 and Hillary Clinton’s in 2016.  It also defeated three other Democrats  –– Andrew Jackson, Samuel Tilden and Grover Cleveland ––in 1824, 1876 and 1888 respectively.

For better or for worse, Donald Trump is not your normal politician or your normal business executive or your normal Christian.  In every respect, he is abnormal.  If your Uncle Joe acted the way he does, you would have serious reservations about his mental health and you would keep him away from BB guns never mind the nuclear football Presidents have always at hand.  If you had taken Psych 1 in college, you might readily conclude Uncle Don was a megalomaniac.

Actually, mental health professionals no longer use the term megalomania.  However, it still appears in the literature defined as “a highly inflated conception of one’s importance, power, or capabilities, as can be observed in many individuals with mania and paranoid schizophrenia. In the latter, megalomania is often accompanied or preceded by delusions of persecution.” [1]  Sound familiar?  Is this the root of all the Fake News and Deep State conspiracy theories?

In fairness, it should be noted that history is replete with leaders who might be described as having a highly inflated conception of their importance, power, or capabilities.  Some were decent people and/or brilliant leaders, others not. You can make your own list of which were which.  Here are a few to get you started:  Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Atilla the Hun, Charlemagne, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, Vlad the Impaler, Henry VIII, Suleiman the Magnificent, Elizabeth I, Louis XIV, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolph Hitler, Charles de Gaulle, Idi Amin.  Go ahead, try it.  Make a chart and for each name and list why they might be considered good leaders and why not and the symptoms of any craziness they displayed.

Poor Trump!  Maybe his greatest fear is waking up to the fact that he’s a phony, a failure, a laughingstock.  He wants to believe he’s a god, just as his parents told him he was but he lives in terror that he will be outed as just another dummkopf.   If that’s the case, he’s in good company.  A lot of very talented people have felt the same way.  Others, however, know a terrible truth:  I really am a putz. They can’t escape the fact that their best friends snicker behind their backs.  Even the mirror on the wall laughs out loud now when they ask, “Who’s the greatest genius of all time?”  In most cases, such feelings are not terribly harmful except maybe to those close to the sufferer but in extreme cases they can be devastating.  Unlike other psychological disturbances, patients present a wide range of manic behaviors only some of which are truly symptomatic and therefore useful in differential diagnosis.  It is worth quoting a standard psychiatric source at length in this regard:

Although psychotic features in patients with schizophrenia are typically bizarre and idiosyncratic, patients who are manic are much more likely to present with grandiose delusions that typically impair judgment and self-esteem. These patients may be difficult to manage because of their boundless energy and their grandiose misinterpretation of their situation. Staff may at first mistake mania for unusually high energy, talkativeness, and positive self-esteem; eventually they turn to the psychiatric consultant when the patient refuses to stop pacing or to stop talking to other patients late at night, or when he or she is belligerent or insists that he or she is free of any medical problems. Patients with irritable or dysphoric mania may present with persecutory delusions and can be superficially indistinguishable from a patient with paranoid schizophrenia. [2]

Again, sound familiar?  Bear in mind, this is not a diagnosis of Donald Trump’s mental health.  His doctors have assured us he is in full possession of his wits.  As you know, the Goldwater Rule says it is unethical for psychiatrists to offer a diagnosis about a patient they have not actually seen and this is excellent advice for writers who are untrained in mental health.  I don’t know whether or not Mr. Trump is a narcissist, a sociopath, a schizophrenic or a dysphoric maniac.  All I’m saying is it would be nice to know given that he has the power to destroy the world in his little finger. Then again, if it turned out he is crazy as a bedbug, it would be up to the Republicans to do something about it.  Which would mean they would have to abandon their distaste for evidence and their disregard for the judgement of history.  On December 1, 1862, Abraham Lincoln sent Congress a message which included what became a famous admonition:

Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress

 and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. 

No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or an-

other of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, 

in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the 

Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to 

save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We ––

 even we here –– hold the power, and bear the responsibility. 

For the third time, sound familiar?  Persons of prominence should always worry about the first paragraph of their obituaries which will define for all time how they will be remembered.  No amount of academic revisionism will ever erase the memory of Cate O’Leary and her cow [3] or Lizzie Borden and her ax [4].  By all accounts, Roger B. Taney was a distinguished jurist and Chief Justice of the United States with the single exception of his abominable decision in the Dred Scott case which stained his obituary in 1864 and which forced both the state of Maryland and the city of Baltimore to remove statues of him in 2017.

We live in perilous times.  Extremism is in the air all over the globe:  nationalism, xenophobia, terrorism, racism, sexism, human trafficking, civil war, religious wars, cyber wars, drug wars.  Truly, as William Butler Yeats told us, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; /  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” [5]  Of course, he was writing in the aftermath of the horror of World War I which should remind us that we have experienced horror before and have managed to survive.  Yeats foresaw the turn of history away from the Renaissance ideals of humanism, science, democracy and diversity.  But he could not have imagined the ability of social media and nuclear weapons to amplify the horror and the tragedy.  Like many intellectuals of his era, he looked to mysticism for hope.  There is evidence in his letters that he thought of hope as a strong force in human affairs and it may have been so in the distant past.  We, however, know it as a weak reed.  It may be that, “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to the mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move;  and nothing will be impossible to you.”  But we have lost faith in such nostrums.

If we desire change, then we –– we the people –– must insist upon it.  We cannot afford to indulge our discontents however justified they may be, to exploit our petty differences, to invest our energy in peripheral disputes.  Thomas Paine wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” [6] Americans need first to reverse the error of 2016 and, second, to agree that the reversal is only the first and perhaps easiest step toward renewal of the American Dream.  We cannot afford to be summer soldiers and sunshine patriots in the more important struggles ahead.

Notes

1.  Gary R. VandenBos, Ph.D. (Editor), APA Dictionary of Psychology, Second Edition, American Psychological Association, Washington, D.C.,  2015.

2.  Oliver Freudenreich M.D., Donald C. Goff M.D., et al, Massachusetts General Hospital Handbook of General Hospital Psychiatry,  Sixth Edition, Elsevier, 2010.

3.  This is the cow, at the Leary back gate, / Where she stood on the night of October the eight, / With her old crumpled horn and belligerent hoof, / Warning all "neighbor women" to keep well aloof. / Ah! this is the cow with the crumpled horn / That kicked over the lamp that set fire to the barn / That caused the Great Fire in Chicago! 

4.  Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother forty whacks / When she saw what she had done / She gave her father forty-one.

5.  “The Second Coming,” first published in The Dial, New York, November, 1920.

6.  “The Crisis,” December 23, 1776.