Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Fresno, Calif., May 27, 2016. (Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
I’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.
On second thought, this advice probably comes too late for the Paul Ryans and Bob Corkers
of the world, who were exactly this foolish when they wrapped their
arms around Donald Trump and said: “I do.” But you know, they never
asked.
You see, Republican leaders saw Trump reaching out for an insider
like Paul Manafort – who ran Republican campaigns back when balloon
drops were considered high-tech – and started using words like “pivot”
and “coachable.” They wanted to believe the boorish Trump was like a
political Bob Dylan, able to go from freewheelin’ to born-again without
missing a beat.
“I can be more presidential than anybody,” Trump promised. I can be a totally faithful husband. You wait.
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.
Deceived spouses always throw good money after bad. It’s hard to look in the mirror and admit you were had.
I’ll admit: I, too, thought Trump was capable
of broadening his appeal. I thought this not because I presumed he had
some inner Ronald Reagan lurking under that crass exterior, but because
Trump is, if nothing else, a masterful entertainer and diviner of the
marketplace, a man with no discernible ideology beyond his own self-promotion.
I assumed he might approach the fall campaign
as he would another reality show. I assumed the angry, xenophobic Trump
was a persona, soon to be replaced by the reformist, independent Trump.
I expected him to re-spawn, like in a video game.
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.
Most politicians are driven, to some
significant extent, by insecurity – the need to be loved and to have
that love publicly affirmed. (A rare exception, as I’ve written, is Barack Obama, who could stand to crave a little more approval from time to time.)
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.
One of the more illuminating moments of the
campaign, I thought, was when Trump told Anderson Cooper, in a CNN
forum, that his father had warned him away from leaving Queens to do
business in Manhattan, because “that’s not for us.” You could almost
hear the voice of the father whispering, evermore: “We don’t belong,
son. They’ll never accept us.”
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.
Our strengths are always our weaknesses,
though, and what we should have known is that Trump can’t moderate it.
The need is too much to overcome. Every criticism, every judgment, every
potential obstacle seems to evoke in him a latent rage, a sense that
the world – as embodied in Manhattan’s unbreachable elite – is
condescending to him again.
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.
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