When the bough breaks
Dec. 31st, 2018 03:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
garoteEveryone knows Donald Trump is a rich person, and has always been a rich person, even though his exact dollar value is hilariously debatable. He was was born in the lap of power and luxury, and that almost guaranteed he would be out of touch with reality unless he had wise and careful parenting -- which he did not get. But that outcome is not remarkable. Plenty of rich and out of touch men are around, and plenty have been elected to public office.
However, when your money problems are permanently solved, you concern yourself instead with issues of respect and acceptance. Your true friends become your version of priceless treasure, and unfortunately, beyond a certain point it is hard to make true friends that can relate to your problems and needs unless they too have their money problems permanently solved. That is where Donald took a hard right turn, because he never managed to win acceptance among the exclusively rich upper class of New York society, even though he clearly finds the idea of having to convince anyone else that he belongs there absurd and unfair. So after years of trying to buy, bribe, or ransom respect, and being rejected or ignored, he decided instead - consciously or no - to style himself as a hero and mentor to the working class. They are a far larger group, and they are far easier to impress. You won't get understanding, but you'll get adoration, and perhaps that can fill the gap.
Not to actually be a hero and mentor to the working class. That would mean selfless acts of charity, and difficult, humbling work mostly unobserved behind the scenes. No, it's about the styling. So he began to cultivate his brand: He was the guy who's rich as shit, that everyone knows is rich as shit, and he has no problems, never has to endure backtalk, never makes a mistake, and can never be fired because he's always the boss. In other words, he is exactly what the working class dreams of being, no more and no less. This brand cultivation peaked with a television show where The Donald himself acted out the role he had spent a lifetime trying to project and beamed it into a zillion working class living rooms.
Spend a long adulthood behaving this way, along with the more typical rudderless rich man indulgences of sexual conquest and conspicuous spending, stir in a handful of that special sense of detachment from one's early life decisions that those entering old age can embrace, and you end up with a person who truly believes in his own power, his own role, and his populist ideas. To him, his outsider status among the rich makes him uniquely positioned to change politics. When he declares, "I alone can fix it," he believes every word.
Matching his own blinkered worldview with those in his audience, matching his lack of interest in the truth with their lack of access to it, he climbed to the top of a wave of anger that grew larger than he ever expected, and to his surprise, it swept him into office.
Now that he's there, he remains totally uninterested in winning the cooperation of the establishment class, and feels no need to treat them - or anyone - with respect. To him, their rejection is a done deal. To him, they are the swamp and must be drained. That means replacing anyone who can reject him or question him with sycophants. Build a team that can execute? No. That entire paradigm went away when Bannon was kicked out. Find people sympathetic to his ideas? Not possible - he has no fixed ideas. (He says whatever comes to mind, just as he always has, which pleases his base but doesn't get traction in the legislature or the legal system.) As the hopeful and the thick-skinned are pushed out the revolving door, his power - feeble from the beginning - only diminishes further. And now we get to the unflattering core of the Trump presidency, as it stands during this half-time break, during a federal government shutdown that was easily avoided and could not possibly end well for him:
The Donald is a baby, reaching for things with no impulse control, surrounded by handlers who keep him from causing injury or damage; and now the handlers are leaving, and people are afraid that the baby will randomly trigger a disaster.
Before we all panic, we should draw the baby metaphor out just a little more: If you leave a baby alone in a dangerous place, for example the control room of a nuclear submarine, what's the most likely thing to happen? The baby will cry for attention, maybe swing and feebly hit a few buttons which the system will ignore as invalid commands ... and if the baby is propped up where the controls are, the baby will eventually topple over and fall on the floor, getting a nasty bump on the head.
And the blinking lights will keep on blinking, around the empty command console, until the next shift begins, and someone comes in and discovers the poor furious baby on the floor.
Within the next month, congress will vote to override Trump's veto of their spending bill. That will be the bump on the head. What will be the fallout of Trump's embarrassing self-inflicted injury? Only time will tell. Personally, my money's on several pages of twitter put-downs, and a long string of rust belt "rallies" spent excoriating congress and stoking fear of another caravan of rapists from Central America. Unless the Russia investigation or some fresh outrage threatened via executive order drowns it out. Or perhaps if Ginsburg retires -- can you imagine the gnashing of teeth over that??
Good thing we've got plenty of popcorn... (And roasted sunflower seeds, for you Balkanites!)
However, when your money problems are permanently solved, you concern yourself instead with issues of respect and acceptance. Your true friends become your version of priceless treasure, and unfortunately, beyond a certain point it is hard to make true friends that can relate to your problems and needs unless they too have their money problems permanently solved. That is where Donald took a hard right turn, because he never managed to win acceptance among the exclusively rich upper class of New York society, even though he clearly finds the idea of having to convince anyone else that he belongs there absurd and unfair. So after years of trying to buy, bribe, or ransom respect, and being rejected or ignored, he decided instead - consciously or no - to style himself as a hero and mentor to the working class. They are a far larger group, and they are far easier to impress. You won't get understanding, but you'll get adoration, and perhaps that can fill the gap.
Not to actually be a hero and mentor to the working class. That would mean selfless acts of charity, and difficult, humbling work mostly unobserved behind the scenes. No, it's about the styling. So he began to cultivate his brand: He was the guy who's rich as shit, that everyone knows is rich as shit, and he has no problems, never has to endure backtalk, never makes a mistake, and can never be fired because he's always the boss. In other words, he is exactly what the working class dreams of being, no more and no less. This brand cultivation peaked with a television show where The Donald himself acted out the role he had spent a lifetime trying to project and beamed it into a zillion working class living rooms.
Spend a long adulthood behaving this way, along with the more typical rudderless rich man indulgences of sexual conquest and conspicuous spending, stir in a handful of that special sense of detachment from one's early life decisions that those entering old age can embrace, and you end up with a person who truly believes in his own power, his own role, and his populist ideas. To him, his outsider status among the rich makes him uniquely positioned to change politics. When he declares, "I alone can fix it," he believes every word.
Matching his own blinkered worldview with those in his audience, matching his lack of interest in the truth with their lack of access to it, he climbed to the top of a wave of anger that grew larger than he ever expected, and to his surprise, it swept him into office.
Now that he's there, he remains totally uninterested in winning the cooperation of the establishment class, and feels no need to treat them - or anyone - with respect. To him, their rejection is a done deal. To him, they are the swamp and must be drained. That means replacing anyone who can reject him or question him with sycophants. Build a team that can execute? No. That entire paradigm went away when Bannon was kicked out. Find people sympathetic to his ideas? Not possible - he has no fixed ideas. (He says whatever comes to mind, just as he always has, which pleases his base but doesn't get traction in the legislature or the legal system.) As the hopeful and the thick-skinned are pushed out the revolving door, his power - feeble from the beginning - only diminishes further. And now we get to the unflattering core of the Trump presidency, as it stands during this half-time break, during a federal government shutdown that was easily avoided and could not possibly end well for him:
The Donald is a baby, reaching for things with no impulse control, surrounded by handlers who keep him from causing injury or damage; and now the handlers are leaving, and people are afraid that the baby will randomly trigger a disaster.
Before we all panic, we should draw the baby metaphor out just a little more: If you leave a baby alone in a dangerous place, for example the control room of a nuclear submarine, what's the most likely thing to happen? The baby will cry for attention, maybe swing and feebly hit a few buttons which the system will ignore as invalid commands ... and if the baby is propped up where the controls are, the baby will eventually topple over and fall on the floor, getting a nasty bump on the head.
And the blinking lights will keep on blinking, around the empty command console, until the next shift begins, and someone comes in and discovers the poor furious baby on the floor.
Within the next month, congress will vote to override Trump's veto of their spending bill. That will be the bump on the head. What will be the fallout of Trump's embarrassing self-inflicted injury? Only time will tell. Personally, my money's on several pages of twitter put-downs, and a long string of rust belt "rallies" spent excoriating congress and stoking fear of another caravan of rapists from Central America. Unless the Russia investigation or some fresh outrage threatened via executive order drowns it out. Or perhaps if Ginsburg retires -- can you imagine the gnashing of teeth over that??
Good thing we've got plenty of popcorn... (And roasted sunflower seeds, for you Balkanites!)
