My biggest problem with Donald Trump has nothing to do with politics
After penning my last post, in which I referred to Donald Trump as a “steaming, putrid pile of human excrement,” a “flabby, obese, spray-tanned, rancid, festering clump of aged waste,” and an “embodiment of human refuse,” I wrestled with some momentary yet significant pangs of guilt.
Is it morally acceptable to refer to another human being this way, no matter how repugnant he may seem?
“Another human being.” Therein lies the rub, I think. I have an incredibly hard time viewing him as human — because in him I see no humanity.
I have an incredibly hard time viewing him as human — because in him I see no humanity.
He’s utterly incapable or unwilling (most likely, both) of expressing guilt or regret. He refuses to admit mistakes. He’s utterly unbound by norms, rules, and laws; he has zero compunction about violating all three if it serves his agenda. He lies incessantly and with impunity. His decision-making seems to be informed solely by what benefits him, no matter the consequences to others. As I pointed out in my last post, he casually throws people under the bus as soon as they’re no longer useful to him.
Of course, these are common traits of a psychopath. But in the case of Trump, they’re taken to an off-the-charts extreme.
It’s almost like he’s a machine rather than a person, one that is programmed to see the world only through the narrowest of lenses — where life is nothing more than a zero-sum game in which someone else must always lose in order for him to win, where winning is all that matters, and where any activity or interaction that isn’t purely transactional and doesn’t hold the promise of personal profit is not just pointless but incomprehensible.
It’s almost like he’s a machine rather than a person, one that is programmed to see the world only through the narrowest of lenses…
Like I said, no humanity.
By the way, when I say “humanity,” I’m referring to a couple of different things. First, of course, is one’s ability to both experience and express the full range of human emotions. Second, but equally important, is one’s ability to recognize and embrace others as separate human beings just like oneself, rather than mere objects of one’s pathological ego.
By all appearances, Donald Trump is lacking on both of these fronts, which is why the recent revelations about his contempt for military service members who either died or were captured in combat is both fully believable and wholly unsurprising.
First of all, for years he’s already been publicly unambiguous on this point as it relates to John McCain, so what exactly is so shocking about this story? Second, if indeed he’s incapable of understanding any human endeavor that isn’t motivated solely by lust for personal gain or triumph, why on earth would he think of war heroes as anything other than “suckers” or “losers”?
I come from a spiritual mindset that no one is beyond redemption, no matter how lost they may be or what terrible things they’ve done. I’ve written about this on numerous occasions, and I still believe it to be true. If it is, it’s great news for everyone, myself included, because everyone is deeply messed up in their own unique way.
But I’d be lying if I said that someone like Donald Trump didn’t cause me to struggle mightily with this belief. As Robert De Niro has put it, there’s nothing redeemable about Trump—at least nothing observably so.
I come from a spiritual mindset that no one is beyond redemption, no matter how lost they may be or what terrible things they’ve done…but I’d be lying if I said that someone like Donald Trump didn’t cause me to struggle mightily with this belief.
And trust me, I take no joy at all in saying that. I’ve actually spent the past four years desperately looking for something—anything at all—that might point to some glimmer of humanity in the man.
Why? Because I have no choice; we’ve been stuck with him all this time, and it’s both deeply painful and exhausting to be perpetually led to the same depressing conclusion that the person who occupies the highest office in my country is a monster.
Yet when it comes to any sustainable evidence to the contrary, I keep coming up empty. Every single time I’ve been even remotely hopeful—like that time this past spring when he appeared to concede, like any feeling human being would in that scenario, that the COVID-19 pandemic would usher in some brutal times — his subsequent words and actions have crushed those hopes before they were ever even fully formed. (This is how you can most easily tell the times he’s reading from a script or referring to previously prepared remarks.)
The most charitable thing I can say about Donald Trump at this point is that he’s a deeply damaged soul. Can he ever be redeemed? I think so; at the very least, I have to hope so. But it probably won’t be on this side of eternity, and it certainly won’t be while he holds his current position. If anything, his current position does nothing for him but make his pathologies exponentially worse — one reason among countless others why he needs to go.
All of this, by the way, has nothing to do with politics. Obviously I think the policy consequences of his tragic tenure have been both devastating and despicable, but that is a separate conversation. What I’m talking about here is my ability to simply see him as a…person, rather than a conniving snake. Nothing else.
Were my words about Donald Trump crude, and maybe a bit over the top? Undoubtedly so. Did I betray some of my own frailties in choosing to use them? Sure. Most importantly, were they cathartic as hell? Damn right they were.
I’m exhausted. I don’t even care anymore about having a president who aligns well with my ideological convictions; at this stage, I’d settle for one who just comes across as human. We do not have that now.
