Yes. I know. I’m sick of the Trump White House too. I’m sick of having to write about it. Or to think about it. I avert my eyes from it when I’m taking friends around the National Mall.
But this is still a column about mental health in the United States of America, and we still have a naked wannabe emperor refusing to concede a lawful presidential election.
There are many political takes to be made here — and plenty have been made already. But what I would like to focus on is the appeasement of Trump that is currently happening on all levels of the Republican party, all by people who know better.
Obviously, the appeasement is in many ways a power strategy, a means of keeping up the pressure on Democrats.
At the same time, it’s important to look at the psychological aspect of it all. It’s important to consider how Trump’s refusal to concede is an extension of his narcissistic rage.
The thing about narcissistic rage is that it can’t be reasoned with. There’s not a negotiation involved.
Americans are used to thinking of most politicians as essentially narcissists, but to be honest, the term is overused. The pathological narcissism that appears to define the entirety of Donald Trump’s life is not like the traits that would motivate most regular people to go into politics.
Pathological narcissists are, in many ways, abject failures — even when given all of the chances in the world to succeed. Trump’s many bankruptcies, his habit of stiffing his business partners and his workers, his failed marriages, his clearly controlling relationships with his children, and the revolving door of political appointees in his administration are all a testament to that. In other words, everything I wrote here, at the beginning of his presidency, has come true (I just didn’t foresee a deadly pandemic, my bad).
In order to understand the narcissistic rage emanating from the White House right now, we need to understand that narcissist egos are so fragile, they’re basically like a very unstable chemical compound. Even winning the 2016 election, where a confluence of different factors helped propel him to the presidency, did not satisfy Trump, because he has a fundamentally broken sense of self. Hence all of his fretting about the popular vote and the inauguration turnout and so on.
What did losing in 2020 do to him? It obliterated his most basic connections to reality. Anyone who’s been in the same room with him for extended periods of time knows this — as all of the leaks in the press confirm, as all of his behavior out in public has confirmed. Conservatives, who are more usually motivated by emotions tied to systems of paternalism, are actually the perfect targets for Trump’s current insanity — they have to pretend that things are OK with Big Daddy in order to shield themselves from any fallout.
So think of this as both a debacle of politics and a debacle of basic human psychology. It has major implications for our nation on many levels, but one important takeaway is simply this: tyranny in the home and tyranny in political office are intimately connected.
You can see this in the way Trump’s underlings continue to push the message that he won, and in the way that senior leaders continue to coddle him. This is how, at the start of 2021, we have emerged, collectively, as one big, dysfunctional family.
Maybe we can learn something from this. If we try.
Image credit: The White House