Donald J. Trump is a damaged human being. That does not excuse his cruelty, lawlessness, deceitfulness, abuse of power, or all the rest. He is the Seven Deadly Sins on two legs if not a walking DSM. But at his core he is pathologically insecure and needy.
He needs constant praise and affirmation. If Trump is not the center of attention in every setting, he gets angry. He becomes jealous of anyone who might draw away attention from Himself. He will publicly demean them or seek retribution.
It is Trump’s very neediness and insecurity that inspires his cult-like following. Followers see themselves reflected in him. Not in his silver-spoon upbringing, his gilded accommodations, or his pretensions to self-made success, fortune, and vigor. Like him, Trump’s faithful need to see themselves at the center of American civic life. They grow angry at anyone who threatens to draw away the spotlight or who demands a share. Like him, they seek retribution against rivals political, economic, religious, and social.
His believers have always been at the center of American civic life. As was grandpappy, and his grandpappy. That’s the way they grew up. That’s the way it is. That’s the way it always was. That’s what God intended when he bequeathed dominion over this land to white, Christian, European males. That is the natural order of things, the inheritance Trump promised to restore. He alone.
That natural order has been upset. By civil rights for Blacks. By women’s rights. By LGBTQ rights. By immigration. By diversity. By climate change. By anyone and anything that vies for a share of attention at the center of American civic life that Trump followers claim exclusively — just not in so many words. Stop the Steal is not about elections.
Freedom for the cultists means being unencumbered by responsibility for any good greater than one’s own. It is a shriveled, Scroogian view of the world costumed as personal responsibility and frontier self-reliance. There is no such thing as society to which they owe allegiance if their tribe alone is not at its very center.
It is not just Confederate monuments coming down off pedestals. It is the myth of the American Übermensch. Neither Trump nor his cult are happy about that. Not at all.
That’s not terribly profound. I just needed to write it down.