Wayne O'Leary

Losing It

It could be the accumulated pressures of the Mueller probe, or just the realization that he’s in over his head, but it’s increasingly evident that Donald J. Trump, the fake president himself, is walking a thin line separating delusion from reality. Rod Serling would say he’s inhabiting the Twilight Zone. A more prosaic way of expressing it would be to acknowledge we have one sick puppy on our hands.

The signs of psychosis have been gathering for some time. There is Trump’s chronic Obama derangement syndrome — the kneejerk need to diminish his predecessor and reverse, out of pique or envy, his every policy initiative and accomplishment.

There is also the president’s ill-disguised blanket contempt toward the social minorities inhabiting this increasingly majority/minority country. Hang-ups over race are of particular long-standing with the Donald, dating back to his early New York days and perhaps inherited from his father, Fred, whose dalliance with the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s came to light a while ago.

To these obvious obsessions can be added a consuming preoccupation with immigration, which appears to occupy an inordinate portion of Donald’s tortured psyche. The son and grandson of immigrants (a mother born in Scotland, a paternal grandfather born in Germany), Trump seems to feel his citizenship is insecure, his Americanism provisional.

He compensates for this with a belligerent Eurocentrism apparently aimed at establishing that his own immigrant roots are more legitimate than, say, the Latin roots of many latter-day immigrants. What should provide a basis for empathy has evidently become an outsized badge of superiority. It’s a classic example of climbing aboard, then pulling up the ladder behind you.

We could, of course, delve into Trump’s whole complicated relationship with father Fred, who gave Donald his start (in the manner of Mitt Romney’s dad) by providing seed money for his initial adventures in capitalism. But this subject is fraught with speculative filial psychodrama and best left alone. Suffice it to say that Donald, the youthful bad boy banished to military school, has probably been motivated his entire life to best the old man, whose business help he needed and whose approval was tantamount to an entrepreneurial laying on of hands.

So there’s a lot going on under the Trumpian combover. Still, it doesn’t completely explain the weird behavioral quirks that get ever weirder and quirkier: the almost daily policy reversals; the constant personnel shakeups; the compulsive need to lie and exaggerate, to dominate and always win, while at the same time pathetically seeking reinforcement and validation from an uncritical cheering section — a public pat on the head, as it were.

And, then, there’s the seething anger and hate, the mean-spiritedness that builds to irrational levels and spills out in the infamous Twitter storms that break upon the nation’s consciousness like hurricanes on a Caribbean beach, depositing the flotsam and jetsam of a distracted, unfocused mind teetering on the edge.

Put it all together and you have an unbalanced and potentially dangerous personality prowling the halls of the White House (when he’s actually in residence), certainly the most disturbed individual to reside there since Richard Nixon held late-night conversations with the hung portraits of long-dead former chief executives. Yet, with all that, Trump’s minority of devoted followers adore him. His public-approval ratings remain steadily in the 35-40 percent range, rarely varying, which begs an obvious question: Who are these loyalists, and what motivates them?

The conventional wisdom portrays them as homogeneously white, rural, working-class, and conservative, suggesting consciously shared policy interests, but that misses the essence of the Trumpian appeal, which is not policy driven. In fact, most of the Trump programs and directives either by-pass such individuals or strike straight at the heart of their economic well-being.

For example, in July, Trump’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced plans to attempt using legally dubious regulatory authority to present yet another huge tax cut to the wealthy. Mnuchin proposes allowing those liable for the federal capital-gains tax on investments to index their previously purchased assets for inflation prior to sale, so as to pay far less to the Treasury.

An estimated 97% of the benefits from such indexing would go to the top 10% of earners, two-thirds to the top 0.1%, and government revenues would be reduced by $102 billion over 10 years. Mnuchin’s scheme would do little or nothing for typical Trump supporters, who nevertheless evidence no concern.

Or take the administration’s enthusiastic backing for a pending lawsuit, filed in February by 20 Republican-controlled states, to strip the Affordable Care Act of its legal guarantee of insurance at reasonable cost for those with preexisting medical conditions. This would adversely affect 52 million Americans, 17 million of whom might lose health-care coverage, presumably including lots of Trump fans. Regardless, the prospective demise of such a popular consumer protection makes no discernible difference in the inner sanctums of Trump World.

What we’ve got here, I think, is a unique expression of mass political nihilism previously unseen in American democracy. It doesn’t apply to all Trump partisans, many of whom are committed ideologues or business Republicans and wealthy individuals who have rational, if selfish, reasons for backing the Donald. But it does apply to the foot soldiers of the Trump movement, the middle- and working-class brigades that show up at rallies and issue guttural roars when their leader castigates journalists, immigrants, welfare recipients, liberals, or climate scientists.

These are people who feel, for whatever reason, detached from the system, individuals grown cynical with regard to all public institutions (except, perhaps, the military); they no longer expect anything from government, least of all from Trump. If he provides a show, a continuation of “The Apprentice,” that’s good enough. If he provides an outlet for venting anger and prejudice, so much the better; that’s a bonus. He yells at those his crowds don’t like and massages their resentments and self-pity. It’s performance art tailored to the low-information alienated.

Trump and his disciples: a match made in Hell. Yet eventually, you would think, the followers will realize they’re following an empty suit and a disconnected mind. Then again, it may take the shock of a full mental breakdown of the sort never before witnessed in an American president. Judging by appearances, that implosion may not be far off.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2018

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