Vol.104: Here we go again

The second coming of you-know-who

Stop me if you’ve heard this…

Donald Trump first crossed my radar screen in 1978, when I researched a list of “Wealthiest Americans” for Town & Country Magazine. In those days, many of the truly super-rich resisted my periodic efforts to probe their net worth. A few of them threatened to sue me for invasion of privacy if their names were included on my list. Trump, then the 32-year-old son of a Queens real estate developer, was the exception: He lobbied to be included, claiming to be far wealthier than I sensed he really was— wealthier, even, than his own father. In retrospect, I’m proud to note that Trump never wangled his way onto any of the “rich lists” I compiled for various magazines back in the ’70s.

Who knew then that, 47 years later, I’d still be writing about Trump, not to mention supporting him with my tax dollars; or that Trump, for his part, would still be demanding my attention as well as everyone else’s?

For most of that time, Trump struck me as an amusing buffoon, and consequently when he ran for president in 2016, I failed to take his candidacy seriously. I assumed, wrongly, that most Americans would see through Trump’s act, just as I had.

His real goal

Following his stunning victory that year, it began to dawn on me that, having studied Trump for decades, I was perhaps uniquely endowed with insight into his brain. Seasoned political commentators, never having dealt with such a strange man, assumed that Trump, like his White House predecessors, would “grow into the job”; that he was a canny strategist shrewdly pursuing specific policies; and that his ultimate goal was political power. (Only last week, a headline in the New York Times op-ed page wondered, “What’s Trump going to do with his power?”.) But my own long years of observation, beginning well before he got into politics, persuaded me that Trump was incapable of growth; that he knew and cared nothing about strategy; and that his real goal in life was not power but attention and approval.

I resolved then to do what any good journalist should do: share my insights with my readers, in the hope of providing some understanding as to what makes this man tick. Now that Trump has further astonished the world (and me) by winning a second term despite two impeachments, four criminal indictments, and one conviction, I hope to continue sharing my insights. You, of course, are free to accept or reject them.

A baseball star?

The key point to bear in mind, I submit, is that Trump is not evil. Contrary to what many observers believe, he is neither a fascist nor a populist nor a racist nor a misogynist. He’s not a conservative or an autocrat. He’s not even a strategist. He is, I would argue, a sick man who sincerely believes his delusions large and small— whether that he was a billionaire back in 1978 (when his true net worth was at most $5 million) or that he graduated first in his class from Wharton (he earned no academic honors there), or that he was once a professional baseball prospect and the best high school baseball player in New York State (as a senior at New York Military Academy, according to the available newspaper reports, Trump got one base hit in 21 times at bat). To me, Trump suffers from narcissistic personality disorder— that is, someone who subordinates everything to his need for attention and approval, a hunger that can never be fulfilled. To 225 mental health professionals who signed a joint letter last October, Trump displays symptoms of a “malignant narcissism” that makes him “deceitful, destructive, deluded, and dangerous.” Tony Schwartz, who spent a year ghostwriting Trump’s first book, The Art of the Deal, has gone a step further, concluding that Trump is a sociopath— that is, someone who lacks a sense of right and wrong, or any regard for the concerns of others.

Most American voters, obviously, disagreed with these diagnoses. But truth is not a popularity contest. The search for truth relies on courageous individuals doggedly trying to figure out what’s going on despite the distractions around them. Which is what I’ve tried to do.

If you view Trump through a narcissistic prism, much of his bizarre conduct makes sense. Trump’s recent threats to annex Greenland, the Panama Canal, and even Canada may be ridiculous, but they do attract attention. Fact-checkers at the Washington Post tallied more than 30,000 lies that Trump allegedly told during his first term in the White House, yet his lies have served no particular strategy and indeed often contradict each other. To qualify for the Forbes 400 in 1981, Trump falsely claimed that Fred Trump had transferred more than 90% of his assets to his son Donald; yet years later, while trying to paint himself as a self-made billionaire, Trump falsely claimed that he had started out with nothing but a $1 million loan from his father. (In fact, as the New York Times reported in 2018, Fred Trump repeatedly bailed Donald out of numerous business failures, to a grand total of $413 million.) During Barack Obama’s presidency, Trump commanded media spotlights by insisting that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.; but during the 2016 campaign, he blamed Hillary Clinton for spreading such a falsehood and claimed credit for exposing it.

What about 2028?

My Trump narcissism theory was the basis for six predictions I made about Trump’s presidential behavior when he first entered the White House in January 2017. Most notable was this one:

“In any given situation, Trump will take the action that makes waves or creates headlines, even if it makes no moral, practical, or political sense…. From a narcissist’s perspective, how can you attract attention if you simply endorse conventional wisdom?”

I take no great pleasure— well, maybe just a little— in noting that all of my predictions about Trump’s presidency came to pass. As he prepares to return to the White House next week, permit me one more prediction:

Assuming he survives the next four years, Trump will attempt to amend the Constitution in 2028 so he can seek a third term at age 82. Whether or not he succeeds, Trump won’t leave office graciously— not because he craves power, but because graciousness can’t be found in a narcissist’s tool kit.

Groundless lawsuits

Believe me, I never aspired to be a Trumpologist. I could have been a Metropolitan Opera baritone or a pro football star or a jazz trumpet virtuoso. (Did you know that, in kindergarten, I was the top-rated kazoo player in New York State?) This column seeks, among other things, to discover humor or joy in even the most horrible situations, but there’s nothing joyful about narcissistic personality disorder. (Has anyone ever heard Trump laugh?) Yet somehow, I’ve spent the best years of my life analyzing this charlatan. And here I am now, in my declining years, once again feeling compelled to deal with Trump’s insatiable demands for everyone’s attention because, apparently, nobody knows him as well as I do I (even though I’ve never met him) and also because, in a few days, he will again have his fingers on the Pentagon’s nuclear triggers.

I feel like Patricia Neal as Marcia Jeffries in A Face in the Crowd (1957), screaming at the megalomaniacal but charismatic demagogue Lonesome Rhodes (played by Andy Griffith), “Get out of my life! Get out of everybody’s life!”

Trump recently filed two lawsuits that strike me as groundless but appear designed to intimidate or silence his critics. He sued the Des Moines Register for reporting the results of a pre-election poll that erroneously showed him losing Iowa. When ABC’s George Stephanopoulos erroneously remarked that Trump had been found liable for rape in a civil suit (the correct legal term was “sexual abuse”), Trump filed a defamation suit— and ABC News cravenly settled for $15 million, explaining that the legal fees would have exceeded that amount. A self-respecting news organization like the New York Times, not to mention the Philadelphia alternative weekly, the Welcomat, when I was its editor in the ’80s, would have followed this policy: If you make a mistake, apologize and correct it. If you’re sued for libel and you think you’re right, fight the suit. If you lose the suit, pay the judgment. But don’t settle. The bottom line is: Don’t let outsiders or their lawyers interfere in the conversation between you and your audience.

I intend to hold fast to that philosophy during Trump’s second coming. In the event— unlikely, to be sure— that Trump or his minions target this column for retaliation, I’m determined to go on doing what I’ve been doing. Although I’ll continue to offer free subscriptions to this column, you can assist this cause by taking a paid subscription for as little as $7 a month. As I see it, that’s a small price to pay for our precious right to continue our conversation, wisely or foolishly, without interference from those who would silence or distract us from our continuing search for truth.

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com