Life Without Friends
Armchair psychologizing is something I really shouldn’t be doing. I’m not a trained psychologist, after all. I don’t have the discipline to lay down breadcrumbs through my own thought processes to find my way back to the truth of something. There’s all sorts of traps you have to avoid to prevent yourself from going along the wrong path and reaching a dead end. The Dunning-Kruger effect is something I have to especially look out for. That’s where a non-expert assumes he knows better than the expert.
Looking into someone else’s head to uncover the reasons for their behavior is even trickier than looking into your own. Without the discipline to carefully trace causes and effects, you risk descending into outright speculation and ultimately come to think along the same lines as your friendly, misguided, neighborhood conspiracy theorist.
But the psychologizing I’m going to attempt here is on someone who makes no attempt to hide his inner machinery. He carries a pocketful of breadcrumbs wherever he goes. He’s someone who lays his cards out often and emphatically, and without reservation, so that he comes across as having done himself a thorough self-appraisal. So here it is: On my virtual therapist’s couch lies no other than the illimitable Donald Trump.
Illimitable is the absolutely correct word here, since it characterizes someone without any internal limits or boundaries. In its good connotations, it refers to people who challenge themselves, who believe in their capacity to do it all. It’s the character trait needed to write an encyclopedia, to build a pyramid, to cure cancer. It’s the source of creativity and the spur for social and economic progress needed to better ourselves. On the other hand, it’s also the same character trait that leads to spectacular failures: wars, nuclear weapons, environmental degradation, famine, etc. The bad side of illimitable is what the Greeks called ‘hubris,’ and they didn’t hold back on condemning it. It was the disease endemic to their gods and the cause of all the messes they made.
With all this preface I may be exposing my own hubris in psychologizing outside the guidelines of the professional. So why attempt to get into the mind of the illimitable Donald Trump?
What I’d like to examine is whether Donald Trump knows down deep that people don’t like him. I don’t think, of course, that he would openly admit that. It would be hard for the narcissist that he is. For any narcissist it must be disturbing to think that you’re the only one who likes you. You’d likely even reject the premise that anyone could dislike you. The idea would appear absurd. But the armchair psychologist me doesn’t need his “patient” to actually fess up to his narcissism. Trump is not looking to be cured of a disease he doesn’t believe he has, no more than Zeus himself would.
Trump for his whole life has cheated, welched on deals, avoided social responsibility, misrepresented his intentions, lied (a lot), and, of course, grabbed them by the pussy. None of this in any way has diminished his impression of himself. He is still the greatest, a paragon of empathy, at least for his adoring MAGA Americans.
But as great as Trump thinks he is, he has to know that he is not universally liked. He admits as much in his frequent ranting about the people who come right out and say they don’t like him or especially those who criticize him openly or even ask him questions he can’t or won’t answer.
So far I haven’t speculated about anything, but here it comes. What does someone, like Trump, feel inside when he knows people don’t like him and he feels himself to be faultless. No great mental leap is necessary. He blames them, not himself. And if the feeling is intense, he dislikes them right back and, if he has the means, he punishes them.
But what if it’s a whole community or a whole country that dislikes him? Would it logically follow that he would end up disliking the whole community or the whole country? We know from Trump’s own admission that he does not like certain entire communities: New York City, Los Angeles, Minneapolis. And his actions to withhold visas from residents of certain countries (shit hole countries, his term) is clear enough in how he regards them. And here we have actual evidence of his dislike in how he abruptly ended USAID, PEPFAR, and CDC support for them. Nothing could give more evidence of his disregard than letting residents of these countries die of Ebola, AIDS, even Polio by the dismantling of vaccination and treatment programs.
And though he hasn’t ever admitted to not liking the whole of the United States, there’s the evidence of his words to think that he probably does not like it all that much. Taking the Constitution as a proxy for the United States, it’s pretty clear that he’s dismissive of that “all men are created equal,” diversity, equity, and inclusion stuff. So much bullshit to him.
He’s openly declared that the First Amendment (freedom of speech, press, religion, assembly, and petition) has to take a backseat to keeping the peace and he’s gone on to criminalize protest on many occasions. He’s attacked the 14th amendment by trying (unsuccessfully) to eliminate its provision for birthright citizenship. He’s declared allegiance to the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, but has acted in ways to restrict their voting rights and their control over their bodies.
And I might go out on a limb here and suggest that he feels Black and Latino people are inferior to White people. That seems a reasonable conclusion from his antipathy to the 1619 Project, his warmth toward the Confederacy, his axing of civil right safeguards, his dismissal of Blacks in military command roles, his demeaning of the Obamas in crude racial stereotypes, his rounding up of Latinos to whisk them away to gulags, and on and on.
And let’s consider what he does to America’s friends, meaning the countries that over the past couple centuries we have befriended and those who have befriended us back — all those countries that we have entered into partnerships, treaties, and allegiances with. Consider what he has done to Europe, Mexico, Canada — breaking treaties, imposing tariffs, castigating their leaders, threatening them, involving himself in their politics, blustering about their supposed disrespect. We have lost friends and we have lost trust. Neither are easy to get back. Naturally, Trump wouldn’t even think of having them back anyway, unless they demonstrate their fealty and kiss his ring.
But in the meantime, the market place, which operates on trust, will react. We won’t be able to sell our grain, our hotels and resorts will empty of foreign visitors, our defense industry will lose overseas contracts, our entertainment industry will promote false narratives, our universities will lose their prestige, our people — all our people — will be branded as selfish, arrogant, ignorant, and uncaring. If America is not actually perceived as an enemy, we’ll be looked on as increasingly unfriendly and unreliable. Our former friends will work around us, rather than with us. And we will go into decline. It’s hard to live without friends.
There has to be blame attached to the policy decisions that this Trump administration has made, because even though so many people here disapprove of him — more every day — the rest of the world will hold all of us, all Americans, culpable.
I remember the decade of the 1960’s when the phrase “the ugly American” was current. It was a time when I was exploring my initial venture out of the country for a $5 a day first trip to Europe — Eurail Pass serving as both transportation and hotel. The ‘ugly’ referred to the arrogance of Americans, deficient in language skills; loud, demanding, and culturally boorish, in a Europe with higher standards of politeness and decorum. This young American traveler clinging tightly to that $5 a day guidebook couldn’t afford to exhibit as a typical ugly American and he learned to be quieter and more respectful.
I don’t know how long it took to change Europeans’ attitudes to not see Americans as ugly anymore, but it didn’t happen overnight. It took effort and time, bolstered initially by the Kennedy presidency with its overt policies creating the Peace Corps and strengthening the US Information Agency. And there was also his French speaking wife, Jacqueline Bouvier, and Kennedy’s own Ich bin ein Berliner speech.
Wow! Being sensitive worked. It worked again to some effect during the Obama presidency to counter the war birds of the Bush years. But will it work again or have we set a cyclical pattern of ugly then nice followed by ugly then nice again that’s going to permanently keep the world guessing whether Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde is running the country? Eventually, you’d want to keep your distance.
This little introspection about our national character applies as well to our state and local communities. It’s as if Washington (or Mar-a-Lago) is carrying a communicable disease. We may not get it ourselves, but we’re still affected by it. But in some states and localities, the locals have actually caught the disease as well. Even here in Jefferson County, West Virginia, it’s clear that our Republican delegates and senators, our commissioners, our police are showing symptoms.
They worry about bringing in so-called good jobs, even when those jobs bring along with them a lot of damage. They worry about invasions of foreigners, even when immigrants could help reverse our declining population. They worry about how to take away the rights of people not exactly like themselves. They worry about a crumbling education system and blame educators for the problems. They worry that we give too much to undeserving people and think the solution is to be stingier yet.
In other words Republicans see enemies everywhere, and in doing so they’re scaring away most everyone who could be a prospective friend and neighbor. And in this kind of atmosphere, the outsiders who actually do come here, come reluctantly, typically work in neighboring states, only bed down here, and ultimately leave when something better comes along.
