Trump: Taking a dump in the kitchen (or – "Obsequious Pride Syndrome")

I don’t know why the line has stuck in my head after forty-five or fifty years. An interview in Playboy or Esquire, a seamy piece about some seamy criminal or fifteen-minutes-of-fame artiste, some cheap renegade – the article with faux pretension of intellect because of the magazine. The runty guy was talking about the droves of indiscriminate sex he’d had from early teens on. His smiling maxim was: “You’ve gotta draw the line somewhere.” He had just said he wouldn’t or hadn’t slept with his sister.

The insults “tacky,” “slimy,” “sleazy,” “lying,” “two-faced,” “corrupt,” “gross,” “disgusting,” “crude,” “boorish,” “trashy,” “low-life,” “indecent,” “vulgar” seem, when uttered by any given person, to be terms of subjectivity. Who can say what “should” be offensive or condemnable to people, considering their different makeups and backgrounds? One person’s or group’s snobbery about, say, a velvet Elvis painting, those maudlin images of sad, wide-eyed children, or some crude graffiti on a church door, seems to judge the snob as much as it does the creation’s admirers.

And in part this is so: We do internalize prejudices of judgment or hate from our parents. We do have seeds of deep, child-based injustice and shaming that morph into derision, in our later life, of others who secretly trigger our pain. Alice Miller, in The Drama*, writes of a parent’s stuckness in the “vicious circle of contempt,” where his early mistreatment is projected, decades later, into callous disregard of his child’s personhood and needs. In these instances, our condemnation of the other person is but a mirror to our own soul.

But there is, I believe and would evidence, an area where all those insulting terms do land on an objective, solid target beyond ourselves; where clear understanding, not a bent and angry heart, assesses the person and his behaviors. We, from a healthier vantage point, see someone condemnable and unfit, and we are right. We are right because there is a stronger or psychologically healthier set of eyes; there is a sicker or dysfunctional misperception of facts and individuals. When I “evaluate” a serial killer or swindler to prison and punishment, I am more right than is he or his sympathetic relatives. This doesn’t mean that I can’t, through the psychotherapist’s lens, appreciate the deeper validity of all behaviors: Every action does have a meaningful reason, from murder to self-mutilation, pedophilia to self-sacrifice. But as we must live among others in the alter theme, the different plane of adult not id-primitive values, we are sanctioned to divide acceptable from unacceptable, life-promoting from life-devaluing.

Donald Trump, the person and president, is tacky, slimy, sleazy, lying, two-faced, corrupt, gross, disgusting, crude, boorish, trashy, low-life, indecent, vulgar. That many of us can see this and many of us can’t is a litmus test of psychological clarity rather than of political prejudice. We see the man’s anti-human values expressed through an abortive and malicious character, and we know this is sickness, no different from a doctor’s assessment of cancer or a victim’s damnation of a rapist who disfigures her.

There are truths that people will not like and must deny because they need a delusion to give them a prosthetic sense of balance. Schizophrenics, “who have undergone terrifying, heartbreaking, and damaging experiences, usually over a long period of time, and as a consequence are emotionally disturbed – often to the point of incapacitation”**, must believe they are Jesus or Napoleon or a famous person to delude themselves from the factual collapse of their identity. Many men, beaten and soul-murdered with shame by their father, must believe they are superior to women, are ascendant by birth. Without that belief, they would collapse into the disintegrated boyhood that never left its prison. Large numbers of people grew up to have to filter out the damage that authoritarian bluster, narcissism, crudeness, sarcasm, non-objective rule and violence did to their child selves. They became self-protectively blind to a father-figure’s callousness, primitiveness, ugliness – his failure to be an adult. Like children who “identify with the aggressor” and believe they admire the neurotic strength of their alcoholic or belittling father, they see and hear the crudity of this president and their hearts swell with obsequious pride. Like children who, ‘returning to the bad object,’*** cannot quit an abusive parent as their starved core still hopes for love and nurturing, they follow this effigy of arbitrary power who doles out false promises (as their father did), and who helps them project their pain into the “other.”

Little can be tacky or indecent to the followers of Trump. His foul breath, in the form of their caregiver and their childhood, became the oxygen that sustains them.

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* Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child – https://www.amazon.com/Drama-Gifted-Child-Search-Revised/dp/0465016901.

** John Modrow’s How To Become a Schizophrenic – https://www.amazon.com/How-Become-Schizophrenic-Biological-Psychiatry/dp/0595242995.

*** Ronald Fairbairn’s theory of “return to the bad object.” See David Celani’s exposition of it in The Illusion of Love: Why the Battered Woman Returns to Her Abuser – https://www.amazon.com/Illusion-Love-David-Celani/dp/023110037X.