by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
President Donald J. Trump is a very sick man.
He’s sick physically with COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus that has created a pandemic which has not only killed 215,000 Americans at this writing but has infected over eight million just in this country. He announced he had it a little over two weeks ago and, with the total and bizarre lack of any trace of humility that has marked his character almost since he thrust his way out of his mother’s womb 74 years ago, he’s claimed that he’s been “cured” of the disease thanks to state-of-the-art medical care and the “good genes” he’s claimed for his family.
He’s sick psychologically. Ever since he emerged from his penthouse at Trump Tower over five years ago to begin his foray into politics, he’s been diagnosed by psychologists studying his actions, statements and overall character as a narcissist, a psychopath with delusions of grandeur. Most of the psychologists who offered these diagnoses acknowledged that since they had never even met Trump, much less treated him professionally, their analyses should be taken with a grain of salt. Then Trump’s niece Mary, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and has literally known him all her life, came out with her book about him that seconded all the pathologies he’d been diagnosed with from people with her expertise but without her personal connection to him.
And he’s sick spiritually. Trump’s evil genius has been to drag down everything he touches to his sordid level. The United States of America has done an awful lot of bad things in its history -- most notably the genocide against Native Americans (as Adolf Hitler told Edward R. Murrow, “I’m only doing to the Jews what you did to the Indians”) and the importation of Africans as slaves. But it’s also done some good things; it’s been a beacon to the rest of the world that a large, heterogeneous nation can govern itself as a representative republic and can give its citizens the final say over its affairs as well as opportunities for economic advancement far beyond what the class-bound societies of Europe and Asia offered.
Trump’s sickness has infected not only the American body politic but the world’s as well. At home he has completed the process Richard Nixon began of using the White House to divide the nation, declaring its whiter, more rural, more “traditional” in religion and lifestyle, the “real Americans” and everyone else beyond the pale. He’s insisted that there are “good people on both sides” in clashes between white supremacists seeking to remake the U.S. as a whites-only country and recycling the Nazis’ anti-Jewish slogans and the counter-protesters in the streets who challenged them. In his debate with major-party opponent Joe Biden September 29 and his solo town-hall TV appearance October 15 Trump made pro forma statements that he opposed white supremacy but then launched his bitterest and most severe (and most sincere) attacks on the Left-wing “Antifa” activists who challenge them.
Worldwide, Trump has not only pulled the U.S. out of international agreements like the Paris climate-change accords and the Iran nuclear deal, he’s taken America out of the World Health Organization at the height of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. He’s sucked up to enemies of freedom like Russian President Vladimir Putin, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and, most notoriously, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un (of whom he said, “We fell in love”). At the same time he’s systematically undermined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), founded in 1949 to protect Western Europe against the threat of a Russian invasion, and most recently he’s announced sharp cutbacks in the numbers of U.S. troops stationed in Germany to deter or resist such an attack.
Trump’s sickness has corroded even America’s and Americans’ willingness to believe in the cornerstone of republican (small-”r”) governance: the faith and trust that elected officials will leave power when the voters tell them to. In 2016 he said at one of his debates with Hillary Clinton that he would consider the election outcome fair “if I win,” and in 2020 he’s used the considerable powers of the presidency to make sure he can’t lose, including trashing the entire U.S. Postal Service just to make it harder for voters concerned about the pandemic to cast their ballots by mail. He’s pre-emptively denounced the whole process of mail-in voting as inherently rigged and fraudulent (unless it’s run by Republicans, as in his adoptive home state of Florida, from which he himself will vote by mail) and has made it clear that if he leads the count as it stands on the night of November 3, 2020 he will regard that result as final no matter how many votes for Biden come in after that.
Indeed, I suspect Trump’s determination to rig this year’s election and ensure he will stay President whether American voters want him to or not is at the heart of his unseemly rush to get federal appeals judge Amy Coney Barrett onto the U.S. Supreme Court before November 3. Part of his determination to get Barrett on the court is that, based on her law review articles and other public statements, Barrett is a nearly certain vote to throw out the Affordable Care Act -- the landmark health insurance law passed by President Obama and a Democratic Congress in 2009 -- and to reverse Roe v. Wade so that states will have virtually unlimited power to make abortion illegal. But Trump is also doing it for himself: he has said publicly that “the election will be decided by the Supreme Court,” and he wants three of his own people, as well as at least two other justices he thinks he can count on, to hear the lawsuit he will file to stop the vote counting after November 3 and make the decision he wants.
When Trump announced that he was positive for SARS-CoV-2 and was almost immediately rushed off to Walter Reed Medical Center (the state-of-the-art facility named after the courageous public-health official who in the 1890’s figured out what caused yellow fever and thus allowed the Panama Canal to be constructed safely) for treatment with experimental drugs unavailable to virtually any other COVID-19 patient in the world, I had hopes that he would see the error of his ways. I hoped that, like British Prime Minister Boris Johnson -- who also had downplayed and ridiculed the dangers of COVID-19 until he caught it himself -- Trump would learn how serious this illness is from having it himself, and that understanding would inform his judgment about it and improve his policy decisions on the pandemic.
My hopes were shared by Scott Jennings, a former policy advisor to Republican President George W. Bush, who wrote in the October 2 Los Angeles Times (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-10-02/op-ed-trumps-covid-19-diagnosis-gives-him-a-huge-opportunity-if-he-can-muster-some-humility):
“Trump’s illness also provides him with an opportunity to change the trajectory of the conversation on coronavirus, something he has badly needed. He can now cast himself with the people he governs, and offer at least a thimble-full of humility.
“Essentially, for a president who has presided over a very divided country, there’s a simple message for this moment: We are all in this together.
“It’s a sobering moment for the world to see the U.S. president contract a potentially deadly virus in real time. From their president, the American people will want resolve, optimism and a sense of calm. And they will want — and need — to hear from him some acknowledgment that he is now experiencing the same disruption that American citizens have since early this year.”
We were wrong. As Jennings also wrote: “Trump’s usual style is to project that he’s uncommon — uncommonly wealthy, uncommonly suited to fix the nation’s problems, uncommonly credentialed (i.e. not a politician), uncommonly accomplished (‘I’ve done more in 47 months than you have in 47 years …’).”
Donald Trump has always presented himself as essentially Superman -- both in the sense Friedrich Nietzsche meant when he coined the term, as an advance in human evolution comparable to the leap from ape to human, and in the sense of the comic-book character created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. It wasn’t surprising when reports came out that Trump had actually wanted to wear a T-shirt with the comic-book Superman logo and thrust open his suit jacket and shirt to reveal it when he returned to the White House from Walter Reed after just three days. He was talked out of that stunt, but it’s a pretty good insight into how he wanted the world in general, and the American electorate in particular, to perceive him as so totally uncommon a specimen of humanity that he could quickly and easily beat a virus that had already claimed the lives of 215,000 of his countrymen.
As I’ve written before about Trump, his most salient characteristic is an uncanny ability to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. He did it in 1991, when he was able to convince the bankers he owed millions to on his Atlantic City casinos that they shouldn’t force him to declare bankruptcy and sell those properties because they’d be worth more with his name on them than without it. The bankers let Trump keep his name on the casinos as long as he agreed not to have anything to do with actually running them -- and Trump suddenly found he had a new business model. He could sit back on the top floor of Trump Tower and collect worldwide royalties on the use of his name without the bother of building or operating anything.
As the New York Times recently revealed, Trump once again came within a hair’s-breadth of a catastrophic business collapse in the 1990’s. This time his savior was TV “reality” show producer Mark Burnett, who after getting turndowns from other, more genuinely successful financial bigshots, offered Trump the lead in a series called The Apprentice. The show paid Trump enough to cover his huge business losses -- which led the Times reporters to make the acid comment that Trump had made more money playing a tycoon on TV than he had actually trying to be one. It also helped elect Trump president: despite his at best uneven and at worst disastrous record as a real-life businessperson, millions of Americans believed Trump was the most intelligent, brilliant, sagacious and successful capitalist who’d ever lived -- because that was the role they’d seen him play on The Apprentice.
It worked for Trump again in 2016, when he ran for President and closed in on the general election with all the polls saying he’d lose by margins of up to 10 points -- exactly the same leads for Hillary Clinton the same pollsters are giving Joe Biden today. Though he didn’t win the overall popular vote -- and therefore he wouldn’t be President if America were truly a democracy instead of the republic the Founding Fathers created (quite deliberately, as James Madison explained in Federalist #10, in which he said that unlike a democracy, a republic would “refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations”) -- he exploited the anti-democratic features Madison and the other authors of the Constitution had inserted into it and became the fifth President in U.S. history to carry the Electoral College without winning an actual plurality of Americans’ votes.
Indeed, it’s indicative of Trump’s obsession with himself as the “Comeback Kid” who will triumph over any adversity and come out on top that, before his niece Mary Trump broke with him, he wanted her to ghost-write a book for him called The Art of the Comeback. And it will be far more satisfying psychologically for Trump if he wins re-election in 2020 after a whole campaign season of polls saying he was behind than it would have been if he’d led in the polls throughout the campaign. A victory against all the odds in 2020 would only confirm the sense he’s had his entire life that he is an unstoppable figure of destiny -- while a defeat, in case the polls are right and Biden leads in the vote count on election night and does so by such a margin even someone as unscrupulous as Donald Trump can’t mount a credible legal campaign against it -- will still leave Trump a formidable political figure.
He’ll still have millions of Twitter followers who will hang on his every word. He’ll still have a huge influence over Republican base voters who will buy his contention that he and they were “robbed” of a victory rightfully theirs. And he will still be eligible to run for another term in 2024 -- which will tie the Republican Party into virtual knots as they wage an internal battle royal over whether the long-term course for their party is to re-embrace Trump or repudiate him once and for all and deal with their gigantic case of post-Trump PTSD. Previous Presidents who lost re-election campaigns either went gently into that political good night or found other ways to serve their country -- as John Quincy Adams, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter did.
Not Donald Trump. Already, as the Los Angeles Times noted in a front-page article October 17, Trump is closing out his re-election campaign by making defeat seem like a personal insult. Times reporters Eli Stokols and Noah Bierman began their article, “Sinking in the polls, strapped for cash and facing a potential tidal wave of early Democratic voting as coronavirus cases have soared, President Trump has found new culprits to blame for his political mess -- his own supporters, Cabinet members and even fellow Republican leaders.”
The article quotes Trump’s bizarre comment at one of his recent rallies -- huge events attracting thousands of people at a time when the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has closed theatres, concerts and virtually all other forms of mass in-person entertainment -- to suburban women voters: “Suburban women, will you please like me? I saved your damned neighborhoods!” It’s a weird statement that speaks to Trump’s eternal sense of status anxiety as well as his racism, since what he’s telling suburban women he “saved your damned neighborhoods” from is Obama-era regulations that would have required suburban developments to include “affordable housing.” To Trump, and to the racists that are such a key part of his base, “affordable housing” is code for letting those [insert racial slurs here] move next door to you.
On the October 16 episode of the PBS news show Washington Week, some of the commentators were noting that in 2016 Trump’s campaign reflected and expressed the grievances of his supporters -- particularly the sense white working-class people had that their jobs were being taken away by immigrants or outsourced to Mexico or China by corrupt trade deals (one reason Hillary Clinton was so awful a choice for the Democrats to run against Trump was her husband’s instrumental role in pushing those deals and getting them approved by Congress) or threatened by preferential treatment for women and/or people of color.
Today, the Washington Week commentators argued, Trump seems to use those big campaign rallies no one else dares have at all to express his own sense of grievance, his narcissist’s obsession with hearing (or making) the rest of the world tell him he’s as wonderful as he believes (or likes to pretend) he is. The commentators were saying that Trump’s campaign has become too self-referentlal to appeal to masses of disenchanted Americans the way he did in 2016 -- and yet to a large extent Trump has built a huge sense of identification between himself and his base. “They’re attacking me because I’m standing up for you,” Trump tells his base voters, “so when they attack me they’re really attacking you. Therefore, you must strike back at them by voting for me.”
Donald Trump is both simple and highly complex at the same time. He’s simple in the sense that he’s straightforward about who and what he is -- including the fact that he really only cares about himself and is willing to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans to SARS-CoV-2 just to keep the economy looking good. At the same time he’s highly complex in the sheer number of pathologies he has and the huge amount of destruction he’s willing to wreak on his country just to salve his chronically wounded sense of self-worth. Often when I read or hear journalists reporting on the sheer number and extent of Trump’s lies -- and how often one set of Trump lies flatly contradicts another set -- I think of Walt Whitman’s lines from Song of Myself: “I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large; I contain multitudes.”
And perhaps the most frightening aspect of Trump’s pathology is the sense of invincibility he has created around himself. Earlier in this year polls were reporting that two-thirds of Americans thought Donald Trump would be re-elected President in 2020, even though overwhelming majorities in those same polls didn’t want him to be. An op-ed in the October 15 Los Angeles Times said that, despite months of polls saying Trump is behind, 56 percent of the respondents in a recent Gallup survey said they thought Trump would win the 2020 election -- and only 40 percent thought Joe Biden would.
That’s why the Democratic Party is responding to the polls favoring Biden by demanding that people redouble their efforts to make sure they get their ballots in and counted early. If the Democrats learned one lesson from 2016, it’s not to trust too much in polls -- especially when your opponent is Donald Trump. I’ve long thought Trump had a “reverse Bradley factor” going for him -- a body of about five percent of the electorate who are racist enough to vote for him but too ashamed or embarrassed by it to admit it to a poll taker -- and I suspect a major factor in his 2016 win is that Democrats didn’t realize that and believed they had the race won on the basis of the polls.
It’s hard to make any predictions as to just how the 2020 election will turn out. Just about anything from a sweeping Biden victory to a sweeping Trump victory seems possible. Voter suppression by the Trump administration and Republican politicians -- especially in GOP-controlled state governments (and in the U.S. it is the states that actually run the election) -- has become not just a strategy but the strategy of the Republican Party. Even before Trump took office, but especially during his Presidency, the Republicans have rejected any attempts to broaden their appeal beyond their base. Instead, they have sought to win elections by subtracting voters from the other side’s base.
America is living through an existential nightmare. Our country is being led by a madman who doesn’t care about anything or anyone but himself. A re-elected Donald Trump will hasten not only the demise of American democracy but -- because of his relentless attacks on any law, regulation or international agreement to protect the environment against the threat of human climate change -- the death of human civilization itself. And yet at least 40 percent of the American people want to stay on this lemming ride off the cliff to disaster … and it’s impossible for a man who’s made as many comebacks against seemingly impossible odds as Donald Trump to be written off just because he momentarily seems to be behind in his re-election effort.
