There are a few fundamental laws that govern the life of Donald Trump. The first and most fundamental, the one from which all the others directly or indirectly flow, is that self-interest is the North Star of all his actions. National interest, public interest, even family interest are all secondary, even tertiary, to the one consuming goal of his life: the pursuit of what is good for him. Money is good, fame is good, ostentatious self-glorification is good, adulation from others is good, subservience and loyalty from others are good. Anyone who disagrees with him is both wrong and bad. Private sector work is good (despite six bankruptcies); public sector work is, if not quite bad, not really work (Kamala Harris has never had a job, he says). Military service is particularly bad—filled with “suckers” and “losers” as Jeffrey Goldberg first reported. Goldberg cites two other quotes acquired from anonymous sources close to Trump: With Marine General John Kelly at Kelly’s son’s grave in Arlington, a son who died in Afghanistan, Trump asked “his” general: “I don’t get it. What’s in it for them?” The fact that he doesn’t get it is precisely the problem—he simply does not have a psychological make-up capable of understanding national service; for him it’s a waste of your life, a strange acknowledgment that self-interest and your own safety might not be paramount. This same obliviousness was evident when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford gave a presentation and Trump asked an aide, “That guy’s smart. Why did he join the military?”
A second Trump law is to never, ever admit that you were wrong. Admitting error is weakness, and a projection of pretended strength is critical to the man who, at some subconscious, reptilian level, knows he is weak. In this same vein, he can never apologize, for the very reason that to do so is to admit error and thus weakness. When charged with something for which he should apologize, he must never retreat; he must double down on the original claim. The most egregious example is his January 6th coup attempt. The election, he must continue to claim (and in total self-delusion may actually believe), was rigged, and the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol are now “patriots,” all deserving pardons. Offense is always better than defense; not only should you never apologize, you should accuse your enemy of the very thing you are guilty of. I-did-nothing-wrong-Trump of course never attempted a coup, but Biden and Harris actually committed one—Trump actually uses the word coup—when Biden stepped down and passed the baton to Harris.
For Trump, and for dictators and despots the world over, lying has no moral opprobrium at all but instead is a legitimate means of self-service. All lies—unless they issue from former opponents such as “lying Ted” Cruz or current ones like Kamala Harris—are, for Trump, natural statecraft, as natural as breathing, akin to a trick play in football. One is a fool not to lie: they are useful in that they hide unpleasant truths, glorify oneself by taking unjustified credit, smear enemies, or divert blame to others: thus he never had a sexual relationship with porn star Stormy Daniels or Playboy model Karen McDougal; he never sexually assaulted Jean Carroll; his inaugural crowd was the largest ever. The lies can be easily disproved or fact checked by a vigilant press such as The Washington Post’s documenting over 30,000 lies and untruths just in the four years of his administration, or by a knowledgeable insider: Trump claims he never called U.S. military service members suckers and losers, while a trusted general like John Kelly says he most certainly did. So you never retreat and just double down on the lie—No, I never said that—and move on. You never trouble yourself that a lie might have a moral dimension, even if you do possess a moral imagination. Whether the lie claims something good or denies something bad, it is always for self-advancement, and that is good. Hence lying itself is good. In Trump’s inverted moral universe–to the extent he has one at all–lying is a virtue.
When things go south, the Trump Way is always, always blame others. Externalize all blame since taking responsibility for your bad actions or statements is for suckers. He couldn’t, for example, go to the World War I graveyard in France because (he claimed) the Secret Service said it was unsafe to helicopter there because it was raining, when the real reasons were that he did not want to go because the cemetery was filled with “losers” for getting killed and he didn’t want to muss his hair in the rain. While the rule is to blame others for the bad, the corollary is that you claim credit—and the devotion it entails—for anything good, even if you in fact worked against that very good. Trump claims that he was and will be the best president for black people since Abraham Lincoln. From his demand for the death penalty for the eventually DNA-exonerated Central Park Five, to his dinner at Mar-a-Lago with avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes, to the recent “black jobs” comment, to his support for voter suppression laws, his racism is undisguised.
The fact that forty-seven percent of Americans will vote for this ignorant, dishonest, and dangerous narcissist—after all we have seen with our own lying eyes—continues to amaze me. He accuses Harris of being a flip-flopper. This from a man who once said Hillary would make a great president and whose views on abortion have shifted with the wind literally overnight. His own flip-flopping is never the result of a reflective and conscientious change of mind, or even the result of necessity in the process of political compromise. Rather it results from his attempt to ingratiate himself with whichever voting bloc he is addressing at the moment. Every statement, every act, no matter how feigned, is designed for personal and political applause.
In his pretense of religiosity he has used the Bible as a political prop, and in his pretense of respect for military service he used Arlington National Cemetery as a political prop. The photo of a grinning, thumbs-up Trump standing by the graves at Arlington of those he believes to be “losers” with some family members who support him is a desecration nothing short of nauseating. This political stunt had nothing to do with actual respect or reverence for thirteen deaths in an American war, nothing at all. It was all for perceived political gain, namely to blame Biden and by extension Harris for those deaths in the evacuation of Kabul, an evacuation Trump himself had set in motion as president. The fact that federal law prohibits the use of Arlington for political purposes is one more law to be ignored and broken for his personal gain.
If Trump is re-elected, it will be, to use one of Trump’s favorite accusations, a disgrace. If he is re-elected, shame, shame on us—our greatest national shame since slavery.
John Rachal's Blog
The Trump Way
September 7, 2024 at 3:51 pm (Political Commentary)
There are a few fundamental laws that govern the life of Donald Trump. The first and most fundamental, the one from which all the others directly or indirectly flow, is that self-interest is the North Star of all his actions. National interest, public interest, even family interest are all secondary, even tertiary, to the one consuming goal of his life: the pursuit of what is good for him. Money is good, fame is good, ostentatious self-glorification is good, adulation from others is good, subservience and loyalty from others are good. Anyone who disagrees with him is both wrong and bad. Private sector work is good (despite six bankruptcies); public sector work is, if not quite bad, not really work (Kamala Harris has never had a job, he says). Military service is particularly bad—filled with “suckers” and “losers” as Jeffrey Goldberg first reported. Goldberg cites two other quotes acquired from anonymous sources close to Trump: With Marine General John Kelly at Kelly’s son’s grave in Arlington, a son who died in Afghanistan, Trump asked “his” general: “I don’t get it. What’s in it for them?” The fact that he doesn’t get it is precisely the problem—he simply does not have a psychological make-up capable of understanding national service; for him it’s a waste of your life, a strange acknowledgment that self-interest and your own safety might not be paramount. This same obliviousness was evident when the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford gave a presentation and Trump asked an aide, “That guy’s smart. Why did he join the military?”
A second Trump law is to never, ever admit that you were wrong. Admitting error is weakness, and a projection of pretended strength is critical to the man who, at some subconscious, reptilian level, knows he is weak. In this same vein, he can never apologize, for the very reason that to do so is to admit error and thus weakness. When charged with something for which he should apologize, he must never retreat; he must double down on the original claim. The most egregious example is his January 6th coup attempt. The election, he must continue to claim (and in total self-delusion may actually believe), was rigged, and the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol are now “patriots,” all deserving pardons. Offense is always better than defense; not only should you never apologize, you should accuse your enemy of the very thing you are guilty of. I-did-nothing-wrong-Trump of course never attempted a coup, but Biden and Harris actually committed one—Trump actually uses the word coup—when Biden stepped down and passed the baton to Harris.
For Trump, and for dictators and despots the world over, lying has no moral opprobrium at all but instead is a legitimate means of self-service. All lies—unless they issue from former opponents such as “lying Ted” Cruz or current ones like Kamala Harris—are, for Trump, natural statecraft, as natural as breathing, akin to a trick play in football. One is a fool not to lie: they are useful in that they hide unpleasant truths, glorify oneself by taking unjustified credit, smear enemies, or divert blame to others: thus he never had a sexual relationship with porn star Stormy Daniels or Playboy model Karen McDougal; he never sexually assaulted Jean Carroll; his inaugural crowd was the largest ever. The lies can be easily disproved or fact checked by a vigilant press such as The Washington Post’s documenting over 30,000 lies and untruths just in the four years of his administration, or by a knowledgeable insider: Trump claims he never called U.S. military service members suckers and losers, while a trusted general like John Kelly says he most certainly did. So you never retreat and just double down on the lie—No, I never said that—and move on. You never trouble yourself that a lie might have a moral dimension, even if you do possess a moral imagination. Whether the lie claims something good or denies something bad, it is always for self-advancement, and that is good. Hence lying itself is good. In Trump’s inverted moral universe–to the extent he has one at all–lying is a virtue.
When things go south, the Trump Way is always, always blame others. Externalize all blame since taking responsibility for your bad actions or statements is for suckers. He couldn’t, for example, go to the World War I graveyard in France because (he claimed) the Secret Service said it was unsafe to helicopter there because it was raining, when the real reasons were that he did not want to go because the cemetery was filled with “losers” for getting killed and he didn’t want to muss his hair in the rain. While the rule is to blame others for the bad, the corollary is that you claim credit—and the devotion it entails—for anything good, even if you in fact worked against that very good. Trump claims that he was and will be the best president for black people since Abraham Lincoln. From his demand for the death penalty for the eventually DNA-exonerated Central Park Five, to his dinner at Mar-a-Lago with avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes, to the recent “black jobs” comment, to his support for voter suppression laws, his racism is undisguised.
The fact that forty-seven percent of Americans will vote for this ignorant, dishonest, and dangerous narcissist—after all we have seen with our own lying eyes—continues to amaze me. He accuses Harris of being a flip-flopper. This from a man who once said Hillary would make a great president and whose views on abortion have shifted with the wind literally overnight. His own flip-flopping is never the result of a reflective and conscientious change of mind, or even the result of necessity in the process of political compromise. Rather it results from his attempt to ingratiate himself with whichever voting bloc he is addressing at the moment. Every statement, every act, no matter how feigned, is designed for personal and political applause.
In his pretense of religiosity he has used the Bible as a political prop, and in his pretense of respect for military service he used Arlington National Cemetery as a political prop. The photo of a grinning, thumbs-up Trump standing by the graves at Arlington of those he believes to be “losers” with some family members who support him is a desecration nothing short of nauseating. This political stunt had nothing to do with actual respect or reverence for thirteen deaths in an American war, nothing at all. It was all for perceived political gain, namely to blame Biden and by extension Harris for those deaths in the evacuation of Kabul, an evacuation Trump himself had set in motion as president. The fact that federal law prohibits the use of Arlington for political purposes is one more law to be ignored and broken for his personal gain.
If Trump is re-elected, it will be, to use one of Trump’s favorite accusations, a disgrace. If he is re-elected, shame, shame on us—our greatest national shame since slavery.
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