Manifesto: Life vs. Trump

Who but a monster decides, as president, to remake an entire country in his own image? To take his angry and contemptuous character, which he reifies as slogans, principles and policies of nationalism, and make it the atmosphere we all breathe. The man farts and builds a cloistering dome over all of us.

Who but a grossly disordered person has the audacity to think he’s the abusive, controlling parent, the owner of the nation? To acid-burn its fingerprints – the centuries-old imprint of freedom and human value – and replace them with his own?

It’s beyond difficult to name all the psychological flaws, both his and ours – layered, metamorphosed, synergized through our histories – that could lead a wounded and dull man to become this dangerous. His narcissism has been widely acknowledged, but we know that that disorder isn’t sufficient to have made him himself. He was born and raised to be narrow: a predator, ungrown in intellectual and emotional intelligence beyond early adolescence, blind to a soul horizon beyond money and winning. A normal human being knows that “winning” and success mean things different from toys and victims.

Many of us have accepted that we are our unique nature, “warts and all.” We see ourselves, not others, as the source of our frustrations (which may have been launched by our parents). We see our wives or husbands as lonely kings in their own world, not as failed need-meeters in ours. We don’t try to “manipulate” them against their own heart, their own self. A predatory Narcissist, though, is burnt and burning from the first failed bond in his life and cannot join anyone in care and love. He is too needy to actually know beyond himself. Since the world is himself (he is a solipsist), he can masturbate it to his satisfaction.

To me, a major question is: What can give us the character to let us despise this carnivore, to hate “alternative facts,” to impeach, ostracize, disprove him? The answer to our crisis is almost entirely a question of our own character and the fact that it has to be the stronger and the brighter.