Tranquillus in Exile
New member
For his entire adult life, Donald Trump has created his own alternate reality, complete with his own alternate set of facts. He has shown himself to be erratic, impulsive, narcissistic, vindictive, mendacious, and devoid of empathy. None of that is new.
But we’re now entering the most dangerous phase of the Trump presidency. The pain and hardship that the United States is only beginning to experience stem from a crisis that the president is utterly unsuited to deal with, either intellectually or temperamentally. When things were going relatively well, the nation could more easily absorb the costs of Trump’s psychological and moral distortions. But those days are behind us. The coronavirus pandemic has created conditions that can catalyze a destructive set of responses from an individual with Trump’s character defects and disordered personality.
The qualities we most need in a president during this crisis are calmness, wisdom, and reassurance, a command of the facts, and the ability to communicate them well. We need a leader who can persuade the public to act in ways that are difficult but necessary, who can focus on a problem for a sustained period of time, and who will listen to - and when necessary defer to - experts who know far more than he does. We need a president who can draw the nation together rather than drive it apart, who excels at governing, and who works well with elected officials at every level. We need a chief executive whose judgment is not just sound, but exceptional.
But we need to consider something else, which is that the coronavirus pandemic may lead to a rapid and even more worrisome psychological and emotional deterioration in the commander in chief. This is not a certainty, but it’s a possibility we need to be prepared for.
Let’s start with what we know. Someone with Trump’s psychological makeup, when faced with facts and events that are unpleasant, that he perceives as a threat to his self-image and public standing, simply denies them. We saw that repeatedly during the early part of the pandemic, when the president was giving false reassurance and spreading false information one day after another.
After a few days when he was willing to acknowledge the scope and scale of this crisis - he declared himself a “wartime president” - he has now reverted to type, once again becoming a fountain of misinformation. At a press conference he declared that he “would love to have the country opened up, and just raring to go, by Easter,” a goal that top epidemiologists and health professionals believe would be catastrophic.
“I think it’s possible. Why not?” he said with a shrug during a town hall hosted by Fox News later in the day. (Why Easter? He explained: “I just thought it was a beautiful time, a beautiful timeline.”) He said this as New York City’s cases are doubling every three days and the U.S. case count is now setting the pace for the world.
A former White House adviser who has worked on past pandemics told me, “This fool will bring the death of thousands needlessly. We have mobilized as a country to shut things down for a time, despite the difficulty. We can work our way back to a semblance of normality if we hold out and let the health system make it through the worst of it.” He added, “But now our own president is undoing all that work and preaching recklessness. Rather than lead us in taking on a difficult challenge, he is dragging us toward failure and suffering.”
The thing to understand about Donald Trump is that putting others before self is not something he can do, even temporarily. His attempts to convey facts that don’t serve his perceived self-interest or to express empathy are forced, scripted, and always short-lived, since such reactions are alien to him.
This president does not have the capacity to listen to, synthesize and internalize information that does not immediately serve his needs: praise, fealty, adoration. “He finds it intolerable when those things are missing,” a clinical psychologist told me. “Praise, applause, and accolades seem to calm him and boost his confidence. There’s no room for that now, and so he’s growing irritable and needing to create some way to get some positive attention.”
Trump’s success as a politician has been built on his ability to impose his narrative on others, to use his experience on a reality-television show and his skill as a con man to shape public impressions in his favor, even if those impressions are at odds with reality. He convinced a good chunk of the country that he is a wildly successful businessman who knows more about everything than anyone else.
But in this instance, Trump isn’t facing a political problem that he can spin his way out of. He’s facing a lethal virus. It doesn’t give a damn what Donald Trump thinks of it or tweets about it. Spin about COVID-19, including that it will soon miraculously disappear as Trump claimed it would, don’t work. In fact, they have the opposite effect. Misinformation will cause the virus to increase its deadly spread.
As the crisis deepens - as the death count increases, hospitals are overwhelmed, and the economy contracts, perhaps dramatically - it’s reasonable to assume that the president will reach for the tools he has used throughout his life: duplicity and denial. He will not allow facts that are at odds with his narrative to pierce his field of deception.
But what happens to Trump psychologically and emotionally if things don’t turn around in the time period he wants? What happens if the tricks that have allowed him to walk away from scandal after scandal don’t work so well, if the doors of escape are bolted shut, and it dawns on even some of his supporters - people who will watch family members, friends and neighbors contract the disease, some of whom will die - that no matter what Trump says, he can’t alter this reality?
As the health care and economic crises worsen, Trump’s hallmarks will be even more fully on display. The president will create new scapegoats. He’ll blame governors for whatever bad news befalls their states. He’ll berate reporters who ask questions that portray him in a less-than-favorable light. He’ll demand even more cultlike coverage from outlets such as Fox News. Because he doesn’t tolerate relationships that are characterized by disagreement or absence of obeisance, we’ll see key people removed or silenced when they try to counter a Trump-centered narrative.
All of these things are from a playbook the president has used a thousand times. But there’s something distinct about this moment, compared with every other moment in Trump's presidency, that could prove to be utterly disorienting and unsettling for the president. Hush-money payments won’t make COVID-19 go away. He cannot distract people from the global pandemic. He can’t wait it out until the next news cycle, because the next news cycle will also be about the pandemic. He can’t easily create another narrative, because he is often sharing the stage with scientists who will not lie on his behalf.
The president will try to blame someone else, but in this case the “someone else” is a virus, not a Mexican immigrant or a reporter with a disability, not a Muslim or a Clinton, not a dead war hero or the family of a fallen soldier. Trump will try to use this crisis to pit one party against the other - but the virus will kill both Republicans and Democrats. He will try to create an alternate story to distract people - but in this case the story is too big and the carnage will be too great for distraction to work.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/presidents-character-unequal-task/608743/
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What do you think? You may or may not approve of Trump's politics, but that's a secondary issue now. What do you think of him as the nation's leader at a time like this?
