Let us agree that Donald Trump is probably nearly everything people are claiming about him: a psychopath, a sociopath, a narcissist, a serial sexual abuser, a rich man (perhaps not wealthy, as he claims, but merely rich), and all-round demon. His niece Mary L. Trump has published a book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, which sold nearly a million copies on the first day of publication (causing writers everywhere to take to their bottles and sigh heavily, even if they were happy for M. Trump’s success). (You can read my review of the book here.) 1Previous sentence about not having read the book deleted, update added July 15, 2024
The details are not new, in the sense that nothing, not even the charge that Trump hired someone to take his admission test for the Wharton School, is surprising. Or the fact that he once commented on his own niece’s breasts in front of family. Trump, we know, is an appalling human being, insulated by his connections since birth.
All of this has led to a great deal of cheap psychoanalysis around and about Trump (I say cheap, because no psychoanalyst worth their fee would engage in the quick and hot takes about his mental state that have emerged). Most of it is useless because constantly diagnosing Trump’s various conditions allows us to avoid a central truth: you have to be at least a sociopath to even want to become the American President in the first place. Constantly trying to analyse Trump’s several failings and tracing them all back to, say, a domineering father and a weak mother (Good Kittehs, could we get more clichéd ?) allows us to forget that the office of the presidency requires that anyone in pursuit of this position needs to be, well, a little bit, shall we say, demented. Every president is a sociopath: that characteristic is a qualification for the office. Who else but a sociopath could be comfortable with the idea of sending hundreds of thousands to their death in war, or be fine with the prospect of setting off a nuclear armageddon?
The United States has recently been exposed as the kind of “shithole” country that Trump has loved to make fun of. As the Pandemic worsens, the U.S is now leading the rest of the world in the worst way possible, with the highest number of infections and a shocking, rising death count, soon to reach 200,000. Everywhere, we are in chaos as our health system (we cannot call it a healthcare system since no such thing as care actually exists) disintegrates, as people’s already fragile lives and employment dwindle and disappear. In the coming months, the degree of our immense failure to provide the basics of life will be revealed even more. For one thing, as David Parsons and I discuss in this episode of the Nostalgia Trap on the concept of home, we’re going to see an explosion in homelessness. At this point, we’re still able to believe that only the people we’re used to thinking of as homeless—indigent people living on the street—are actually homeless. But what we don’t see will burst forth with shocking clarity very soon: that a large number of people are already in fact technically homeless, and have been making do by, for instance, moving among friends and family or low-cost options that they can corrall. At some point, those resources are going to dry up, and many more people are going to end up on the streets or, at best, in their cars, as long as they can. Americans are going to face the ugly reality that the cherished and forced American Dream of home ownership has been an utter, meaningless disaster especially when we can’t even provide adequate food and medicine for millions or even simple tests for a deadly virus when we need them. Before long, we’ll have to face the ugly truth: that a shockingly vast number of Americans has always been on the edge of sheer and complete homelessness.
Those are just some of the issues facing us. There is no system in the country that is collapsing now, as in, nothing is happening in the present tense before our eyes: everything broke down a long time ago, and the Pandemic simply exposes the extent to which this country has long been built on a foundation that is rotten to the core; its utter heartlessness has been revealed for what it is. The Pandemic reveals not only that we were never prepared but that we operate on a system supported by bandaids and the constant hope that problems will just go away. Consider, for instance, that the initial shutdown of schools revealed to us that massive numbers of children would go hungry without regular school meals. What did we do? We rallied to provide philanthropic solutions like rounding up neighbourhood groups to deliver free meals to families. That was a great thing to see, sure, but the larger, bigger problem has already been forgotten: that massive numbers of families are so impoverished that they can’t provide enough food for their children without help.
And now, of course, we’re preparing to send tens of thousands of children and college students to their deaths by forcing schools and universities to open (along with waiters and others who are now forced to interact with the public). As I write this, universities across the country are furious, furious, I tell you, that students, forced to attend in-person classes and face the prospect of death even when numbers told us they needed to remain home, are now daring to do what most 18-23-year-olds do in or out of crisis: party and try to have a good time. Inevitably, infection numbers are on the rise and universities are doing what they do best: refusing to take any responsibility for the catastrophe and, instead, threatening students with dire consequences.
Has Trump’s combination of inaction and misleading and dangerous information caused a spike in these numbers? Of course. Is he responsible for much of the agony we see and face today? Absolutely. But as liberals, progressives and even many on the left clamour to place all the blame on him, they studiously ignore the central fact that Trump is himself the result and a creation of a flawed, broken system and country where lives have meant nothing for decades (arguably, actually, from its start, given that it’s founded upon slavery and genocide).
In the months before the 2016 election, there was much panic about Trump’s ability to use nuclear weapons if he won. In an interview with Chris Matthews on MSNBC, the host asked the then candidate whether he would use nuclear weapons to which Trump replied, “Somebody hits us within ISIS — you wouldn’t fight back with a nuke?” Matthews responded that U.S allies like Japan wouldn’t want to hear such blatant words from an American president. Trump responded with the words, “Then why are we making them? Why do we make them?”
His bluntness has long been cast as the sign of a dangerous man, but in fact it makes perfect sense. Much of the anger and clucking about how unsuitable he is for the office of president emerges from a degree of classism that’s hard to hide, with critics essentially sneering that he lacks the pedigree of, say, either Bush or even a Clinton who may not have been born into wealth but did get into Yale and Oxford. But Trump is exactly right, and points to the central issue that it’s not about who gets to use nuclear weapons but that we have them in the first place. Matthews and the progressives and liberals who bemoan his proximity to such death-making would be and have been perfectly fine with the prospect of a Clinton, a Bush, or an Obama wielding such deadly power: recall that Obama even joked about his ability to send out predator drones.
Trump wasn’t asking the question of Matthews from the perspective of a social justice warrior, but as someone who is used to taking and claiming power as plainly as possible. We can sneer at him or be horrified at what we love to endlessly diagnose as his sociopathic tendencies, and that might comfort many among us who want desperately to believe that this country is actually working, or that the American presidency is mighty, noble, somehow a place from which mankind might receive direction and clarity towards noble goals. But the truth is you have to be a sociopath to even think of wanting to be president. And the truth is also that the American presidency functions in a sociopathic system that guarantees horrible and immense powers to one person. In the best of times, a society and a world might be able to at least control and direct that particular sociopathy, but America as we understand it has been mired in the worst of times since its inception, and the blood of its history is seeping up through the ground. Countries we have long dismissed and even brutalised, like Vietnam, are doing infinitely better in containing a threat that should have been, to us with our immense wealth, our top-notch research centres, and all the brains we have slowly sucked from other countries, a mere blip.
Every American president is a sociopath, and it’s time to acknowledge that the American Age is over. We are not awaiting death, we are surrounded by it. The sooner we give up our delusion that the American presidency is meaningful in anything but the harnessing of brutal power and death, the better off we will be.
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