The black hole within Donald Trumphttps://www.yahoo.com/news/black-hole-within-donald-trump-000000238.htmlI’m no advice columnist, and normally I wouldn’t use this space for relationship counseling, but here’s a small bit of wisdom that I’ve offered to a few friends over the years and that might be useful to Republicans in Washington.
When you’re deciding whether to plunge into a marriage, don’t ever make the mistake of thinking you’re marrying the person your partner is going to become, once he or she finally grows up or finds that perfect job or stops making meth in the basement. The only person you’re marrying is the one sitting right in front of you, and while some people do improve over time, only a fool would count on it.
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But several weeks after “Never Trump” started giving way to “Trump, I guess,” this better, more sober-minded Trump was nowhere in sight. And then came the meltdown this week, after Trump said the Indiana-born judge in the civil suit against Trump University should recuse himself because he’s of Mexican descent and probably resents that the offspring of his ancestors are now going to be forced to build a giant wall at their own expense.
The problem with this statement isn’t merely its racism.
It’s that Trump’s philosophy, if one can call it that, would negate the very idea that is America’s most important contribution to the advancement of humankind – that we are a citizenry defined by shared values, not by inherited identities.In America, alone among nations, where you’ve been is not the sum of who you are. If Trump isn’t clear on that point (and nothing in his subsequent statements leads me to think he is), then he really has no business speaking to a social studies class, much less leading the free world.
In any event, Republican insiders now resemble Tom Hanks at that moment in “Apollo 13” when he realizes the capsule is adrift and the heat isn’t coming back on. The critical window between Trump’s effective nomination five weeks ago and next month’s convention is closing fast, and far from projecting more gravitas, Trump seems bent on making a fool of every credible Republican who has stepped up to tepidly endorse him.
“I’m with racist!” blared Wednesday’s New York Daily News cover, over a picture of Speaker Ryan pointing to Trump. If you know Ryan at all, you know that had to feel like a horse kick in the solar plexus. But less than a week after endorsing Trump, the party’s elected leader refused to un-endorse him.
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But here’s the thing Ryan and I both should have understood about Trump, and that now seems to me the central fact of his existence: He is man tragically enslaved to his own neediness.
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But for Trump, insecurity is not a manageable motivator. It is the black hole that consumes him.
He needs constantly to be talked about, admired, validated. He has an almost pathological obsession with ratings, polls, flattering profiles – anything that seems to call out, from the unrelenting darkness, “You exist and you are seen.” He talks about being a winner more than anyone I’ve ever met who doesn’t play with Pokémons or watch the Wiggles.
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Everything in Trump’s spectacular American story – the labeling of high-rise towers with giant, gilded nameplates, the impersonating of a media flak so he could gush about his own business acumen and sex appeal – has been fueled by this need to prove himself special and deserving. So has the improbable campaign that has now landed him at the pinnacle of legitimacy.
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Trump’s white, working-class supporters identify with this rage; they find it cathartic. And Republican leaders are loath to push those voters away.
But they also understand that the broader electorate will find the insults and bigotry increasingly reviling. The black hole, left unchecked, could swallow the party’s electoral hopes and leave no trace.
Here’s another psychoanalytical nugget I picked up years ago from a psychologist I knew socially for a while. She told me that however other people make you feel is always a reflection of how the world makes them feel.
No wonder Trump’s campaign seems bound to make us feel smaller and less worthy than we really are.
