With each passing day of his Presidency, Donald Trump is presiding over and orchestrating the demise of the United States, as we know it. On so many levels the United States is wasting away through the slow death process that results from Trump’s delusional thinking, his ignorance, his lack of truth telling, his lack of regard for civility, his acts of cruelty against others, and for his deliberate attempts to undermine our American social, political and legal institutions. Trump is aided in this decline by a gutless, seemingly morally bankrupt GOP dominated Congress. The Congress appears to be transfixed by watching the slow motion train wreck that is going on before their very eyes.
Trump’s emotional reactivity and his inability to maintain a sense of control over his emotional inner world are on full view for all to see. His ‘tweet tantrums’ reflect his intolerance for and lashing out against those who he feels are critical of him. He becomes consumed with anger when he feels attacked, and will relate on Twitter in ways that reflect the lashing out of an emotionally troubled prepubescent. His recent “James Comey is an untruthful slime ball,” is one such response that clearly reflects behavior that captures Trump’s emotional development and unfitness for the Presidency.
Trump’s ignorance is staggering as his lack of interest in learning about what needs to be understood in order to govern as the world’s leader in matters of defense, economic issues, and human rights throughout the world. Instead of being briefed by those who are still on his staff, who are informed and manifest adult maturity, he turns to Fox news who is still fighting the Clinton and Obama Presidencies with conspiracy drenched theories that have been proven dead and buried on many fronts by noteworthy informed sources.
Fox news has become the role model for ‘fake news,’ and the belief that opinion is equal to facts in its importance to understanding reality. Fox news is Trumps source of inspiration and information. News medias outside of Fox are fast becoming targeted by Trump with threats to increase libel laws in an attempt to eliminate all who speak against his perception of reality. The print media is also under attack for the same reason.
In his first week in office, Trump’s insensitivity strained relations with the President of Mexico and the Prime Minister of Australia. In his first year in office, in addition to withdrawing the United States from the Paris Climate Accord, and NAFTA, he has withdrawn American leadership in a world that we, as a nation, have spent eighty years attempting to build and strengthen, providing economic support, stability and safety for citizens throughout Europe, the Middle East, Asia and the Americas. He has opposed the Iran Nuclear Treaty without his having any understanding about Iran, the history of the treaties creation, the issues that had to be addressed to arrive at an agreement. He has provoked the heightening of tension on the Korean Peninsula and initiated a trade war with China that will have a detrimental impact on various areas of our economy including our soybean farmers and those very people who supported his candidacy.
Added to this list of actions is his reversal of fifteen of President Obama’s Executive Orders. Three of Obama’s orders come to mind as examples of Trump’s attempts to destroy Obama’s legacy. He has reversed clean water and clean air directives. He has reversed insuring that those who seek advise from a retirement program, have the assurance that it is the client’s best interest that counts and not the best interest of the salesman or company. In effect, Trump supports the polluting of streams with the waste from coal mines, the polluting the air with relaxed emissions standards and subjecting retiree’s to greedy, predatory sales people around retirement issues.
During the 2016 Presidential Election, his need was to create a believable message for those who might vote for him including the unemployed of the Rust Belt. He promoted the notion that his supporters are all victims. He did this by asserting that our American economy is flawed. In truth, our economy is the strongest in the developed world and demonstrated that strength by how it survived the 2008 recession.
His idea about ‘Making American Great Again,’ is to return American back to the 1950’s in the days of strong coal and steel production. In fact, our steel industry will never be competitive in this current world because the American steel industry is obsolete. It is obsolete because over the years, it never upgraded its technology and equipment.
The coal industry is being moved to pasture due to newer forms of less expensive energy that are making the coal industry and the need for coal miners obsolete, as well. Such assertions on his part give those, who are former coal and steel workers false hope that the coal and steel jobs will once again support their livelihoods.
But for those coal and steel workers who are out of jobs, a con artist cons and sells his snake oil to those who want to believe. Trump’s plan is pure magical thinking and his word has been proven, over time to be worthless. His promise to the workers at Cutter Industries to keep their jobs was not kept. As of January 10, 2018 The Washington Post reports that Trump has made 2,001 false or misleading claims in 355 days which amounts to 5.6 false claim a day. The question needs to be asked, who in their right mind would believe anything Trump might say?
Trump phantasy world reflects his sense of vulnerability and poor self-esteem. As a result, he compensates for this by creating an exaggerated sense of self-importance and entitlement. His phantasy world allows him to make statements like “I know more than the generals,” or “I know the system better than anybody, I am the only one who can fix the economy.” “I could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes.” “I am a very stable genius.” “Nobody has more respect for women, nobody.” Speech and Language Pathologists have indicated that Trump’s thought process and use of words is at the 8 year level of cognitive and language development.
His lying is another aspect of his phantasy world. He can say anything because anything means nothing to him. He is able to live with his misstatements of fact because he has no mediating concern for right and wrong. His recent statement about our trade deficit with Canada serves as an example of this. He readily admitted that he did not know the facts of the matter and yet, in a discussion with the Prime Minister of Canada made the statement that Canada owes us, when, in fact, we have a trade surplus with our northern neighbors. Such misstatements, such ignorance is not only embarrassing, it makes the United States the laughing stock of the world. They are also dangerous.
Most recently, through a Tweet, Trump warned “ Russia vows to shoot down any and all missiles fired at Syria. Get ready Russia, because they will be coming, nice and new and ‘smart!’ You shouldn’t be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it.” Is this the behavior; are these the assertions towards a hostile nation that we expect from the President of the United States?
Trump also plays to the needs of his “base,” those who support and encourage him. He is aware that there is upset with the way the white dominated society is declining in America. Barak Obama’s election to the Presidency drove the last nail into the coffin of the myth of white supremacy. Now, with Obama, those who used to be members of the slave class can be in the driver’s seat of our nations aspirations. Conservative and Alt-right folks don’t like that fact and feel ill at ease about such realignment in American’s social structure.
Added together with this, is the ‘browning’ of American society. There are more and more people in our American Family that are non-white. He is the spokesman to rile those whites to act out against such realities. His emphasis against immigrants allows him to use the practice of scapegoating to mobilize his base against those who are new to our country, who speak languages other than English and whose religious beliefs are other than Christian.
On another level, Trump is completely unconcerned about the feeling and needs of others. His ‘who would vote for a face like that?’ response to Carly Fiornia as a potential Presidential Candidate in 2016 is one such example of this behavior. His ‘Crooked Hilary, throw her in jail’ comments, his comment about John McCain being a war hero, ‘he was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured. More recently, he referred to the Dictator of North Korea as “little rocket man.”
In truth, Trump creates and thrives on chaos, conflict and confusion. His going from the Russian Probe, to his current trade war with China and other nations, to his affairs with a porn star and a Playboy Bunny, the firing of significant staff, his bombing of Syria, all of which creates a fire storm around him. The more he creates commotion, the more secure he feels at being at the center of the world he has created. Such outer world confusion mirrors the inner world confusion that rages on within him. Such chaos also serves as a way of deflecting attention from any single issue. And, with the sheer number of issues in motion at the same time takes the edge off of any single matter so everything becomes a blur to someone looking in from the outside.
He also demonstrates a kind of cruelty that pours salt on the wounds that he inflicts on others. Trump’s public abuse of his staff, his threatening to fire someone, then reversing his decision, only to fire the person in the media, or through a Tweet has become a common practice. Secretary of State Tillerson experienced a termination tweet while on a trip to Russia. F.B.I. Director Comey was addressing FBI recruits in Los Angeles when he found out about his firing on television.
Nothing highlights this sadistic aspect of Trump’s personality more than his treatment of DACA immigrants. This group had the assurance from President Obama that they were not to be deported from the United States. Trump assured the DACA group that they would be safe from deportation. He even asserts “the immigration solution should be a ‘bill of love.’ Instead, he changed his mind and put a deadline on DACA immigrants to register to remain in country. He then proclaimed his intent to end the program so that all are subject to deportation. Where things stand with DACA individuals, in this moment, remains up in the air.
His use of ICE agents to round up and tear families from one another is unconscionable and should be unconstitutional due to lack of affording people their due process rights. Under Trump, the ICE agents are frightening reminiscent of Hitler’s Gestapo. His method of trying to keep the ‘murders, rapist and drug traffickers out of the United States’ is to make any immigrants’ life in the United States, a living hell. He knows not nor cares about our promise to those “Give me your tired, your poor…Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…The wretched refuse of your teeming shore…Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me…I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
So, in the final analysis, we have a President who manifests all of the symptoms that Erich Fromm, the social psychologist termed Malignant Narcissism. He coined the term in 1964. He refers to this “as a psychological syndrome comprising an extreme mix of narcissism, antisocial personality disorder, aggression and sadism. Often grandiose, and always ready to raise hostility levels, the malignant narcissist undermines families, organizations, communities and nations in which they are involved and dehumanizes the people with whom they associate. The malignant narcissism is a severe mental sickness representing ‘the quintessence of evil.’ He characterized the condition as ‘the most severe pathology and the root of the most vicious destructiveness and inhumanity.” Psychology Today, February 22, 2017
In Trump, we have someone who it is easy to dismiss or treat as a clownish man-child. All the while, he casts a dark, foreboding cloud over our way of life. Our Congress can no longer sit on its hands and allow him to do what he wants. We need to take seriously Erich Fromm’s warning about such a person. Trump is unfit for the Presidency and we need to prevent him from continuing to destroy our essence as a people and as nation.
