Donald Trump is the main character of America this year. It’s impossible to look at the country or the year any other way; he is the black hole around which everything orbits. The natural result will eventually be that we all crash into him and are absorbed into him, a singularity from which there is no escape. We’ll fly past the event horizon and time will elongate and our bodies will be torn apart piece by piece and there will be nothing but him, infinitely, forever.
Okay, that was maybe 4% overdramatic, but the point stands. It’s all about him. Everything that happens in this country, every piece of news we imbibe, they all come back to him within a quarter of a step. Even in sports, he’s the wallpaper, because the 2020 baseball season started off weird and remained exactly that weird for 60 games, and is in the weird playoffs, and you can’t help but wonder how all of this would be different if we had strong leadership in Washington.
Or competent leadership.
Or mediocre leadership.
Or anything other than a lazy asshole who’s never had to live with a consequence in his whole life making policy based solely on what he thinks will get him positive press tomorrow.
There is no more to Donald Trump than that, no hidden depths to uncover, no buried trauma whose compexities can explain everything. The part of being President that he likes is the attention, so he does big rallies where people chant his name and he fumes about the coverage other politicians get on TV and he tweets all the time, just all the fucking time, like Jesus Christ dude shut the fuck up for a couple minutes.
The attention at those rallies is fawning; the attention paid to him in every other situation less so, but it’s still attention, and like an ignored child, he craves it. But he still wants to be liked, so he’ll say shit like “A strong man came up to me, tough kind of a guy, and said: ‘I want to thank you, Mr. President, for saving our country.’ And he had tears coming down his eyes.” The strong man was a miner when he told the story in Indiana, and a steelworker when he told it in South Dakota.
When the remains of US soldiers who died in the Korean War got repatriated, he said that their parents were approaching him and thanking him; when someone pointed out that those parents would be well over 100 years old, suddenly it was the soldiers’ children who were coming up to him, thanking him, and, yes, crying.
Does it matter that nothing like this ever happened? Friends, it does not. Because truth is irrelevant to what he gets out of telling those stories, which is this: it makes him look good in the moment. This is not just something he wants, but something he feels entitled to: an endless series of moments in which he looks good.
This is why his response to Covid was so pathetic in March and April, and why his behavior since being diagnosed has been straight out of the Kim Jong-un Finished An 18 Hole Golf Course in 7 Strokes propaganda playbook. He thinks it makes him look good to act like none of this affects him, like he’s better and stronger than a tiny virus, like he can overcome it through willpower alone. He is the ultimate in manliness, he believes, and you should too, because he believes it, and that’s the one thing that matters.
To Donald Trump, nothing is more important than believing. This comes from the only book that I am confident he has read in his life: The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale.
When asked what his favorite book of the Bible is, Trump demurs, saying that it’s a very personal question, and eventually he pivots to The Power of Positive Thinking, which is his real Bible. It’s a book that basically says you can manifest any positive change as long as you believe it really hard, like The Secret of the 1950s. And he loves this book. He brings is up often, and always has, and sees nothing wrong with it. If there’s one book that you can look at to explain Donald Trump’s worldview, it’s this one.
The precepts of The Power of Positive Thinking are in full view right now. Trump got his Covid diagnosis last week sometime, and walked around knowing he was positive, interacting with people without wearing his mask for several days before developing symptoms. He did this because he truly believed that if he wanted to be invincible badly enough, then it would work. The White House held a large, maskless party celebrating Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination because Donald Trump (then presumably uninfected) believed that if he truly wanted to not get the virus badly enough, then it would work. He is having his doctors blatantly lie to the American people because he believes that if he truly wants to appear strong and presidential badly enough, then it will work.
People are getting sick because of these decisions. Some of those people may very well die, Trump included, as he is part of several groups with high risk factors if they get Covid. But he’s never had to live with a consequence in his whole life. When American bankers realize he won’t pay his debts, well, he can find foreign bankers. When business partners realize he’s going to stiff them on what he owes them, he can find new business partners. When he’s on tape being sexist or being ignorant or being indifferent to a certainly high death toll from a new coronavirus, he can just say that’s fine long enough that his media allies start berating anyone who says it’s not fine, and then suddenly we’re having a conversation about those media allies instead.
Nothing Donald Trump has done has ever hurt him, because he glides through life assuming it can’t and surrounding himself with people who put off consequences as long as possible. Of course someone who has lived that life will fail miserably to lead the country through a pandemic, and shockingly fail to protect himself from that pandemic. He thinks he doesn’t need to be protected. He thinks as long as people are saying good things about him, then he’s winning. His positive thinking must be powerful indeed, and that’s all he could ever need.