… and even that won’t be enough
The NY Times’ Jamelle Bouie discusses Trump’s need for domination in his column today. I’ve made the same point before, as have many others but I think Bouie’s insight that he cannot be satiated is very smart:
Trump’s desire to dominate others is the driving psychological force of his administration. His obsession with territorial conquest — seen in his effort to coerce the Canadian government into relinquishing its sovereignty as well as his calls for both the acquisition of Greenland and the Panama Canal — is an obvious product of his predatory approach to human interaction. His authoritarian attempts to cow and coerce key institutions of civil society into compliance with his agenda and obedience to his will are, likewise, a kind of dominance game. They are meant to demonstrate his mastery over his perceived enemies more than they are to achieve any policy aim. He even said as much during an event on Tuesday, where he bragged about the law firms “signing up with Trump” and said that “they give me a lot of money considering they’ve done nothing wrong.”
You could even say that this need to dominate — this overwhelming drive to show mastery — is constitutive of Trump’s self. There must be a loser or else there is no Trump. Or, as Hegel put it, “self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or recognized.”
The upshot of this understanding of Trump’s personality is that there is no point at which he can be satisfied. He will always want more: more supplicants to obey his next command; more displays of his power and authority; and more opportunities to trample over those who don’t belong in his America…
Viewed in light of the president’s psychological need to dominate, it is almost certainly true that his flagrant abuse of the rights of migrants, asylum seekers and foreign-born students in the United States — snatching them off the streets to be imprisoned or, worse, sending them to an unaccountable foreign prison with no practical legal recourse — is just the beginning. In the same way that there was nothing that could stop Trump from imposing a tariff regime that, in his mind, humiliates America’s rivals, there is nothing that can dissuade him from using the coercive power of the state to dominate those he disfavors at home.
Trump is a winner, and he’ll show it by making all of us the loser.
I have to say that he’s doing a remarkable job of it.