I was having a conversation with a friend about the NYT podcast earlier this week about Trump's abusive relationship with Deutsche Bank. It's perfectly emblematic of Trump's m.o. My friend was arguing that we underestimate Trump's genius when it comes to the way he does business, and I retorted that he's a genius when it comes to manipulating people to bail him out of the remarkable messes he gets himself into. As Deutsche Bank lost hundreds of millions of dollars supporting Trump through his financial fiascoes in the '90s and '00s, so now it appears that Wm Barr is willing to spend himself in getting Trump out the mess he's got himself in by becoming president.
The Deutsche Bank story is astonishing, but so are all the stories of people who fall for this guy's con. It is astonishing how a man who is so ignorant, so crude, so malevolent, abusive, and self-absorbed can elicit the submission of so many people. He is a spiritual cipher, and yet he has this eerie power over people. Sure, he's a bully, and most of the careerist types he deals with are easily intimidated and go along to get along. There's no reason to resist him if they think that doing his will benefits them in some way, no matter to what degree it diminishes their dignity. American corporate culture is authoritarian, and it promotes sycophants and proto-authoritarian toadies into decision-making roles, which might account, at least in part, for Deutsche Bank's ridiculous willingness to be abused by Trump. If Trump is a genius, it lies in his animal cunning to exploit weak humans by charming them with his celebrity, and then once he hooks them he demand their cowering obedience.
But that doesn't seem to explain what is particularly extraordinary about the scope of Trump phenomenon. Many if not most Americans are, in my view, Oedipally confused. By that I mean that the rules and norms for right and wrong they learned as children have been abrogated by consumer capitalism's legitimizing of self-indulgence, and they are caught in the middle without much guidance from cultural cues about what's ok.
This is particularly confusing for traditionalist evangelicals. Most people who profess to be Christians are only products of their Oedipal cultural formation. They are torn between what they learned in Sunday School and what they see on TV. Trump in some peculiar way integrates both things. He is an authority figure who seems to stand for traditional American values--his successful businessman con suggests he has a Calvinist work ethic and discipline--and yet at the same time he is a model of unrestrained, consumer-capitalist self-indulgence. What could be more "American".
This explains, at least in part, why evangelical Christians support him. He is both Oedipal Father/Superego in his role as authority-figure-in-chief and unrestrained Id in his personal behavior and speech. The former legitimates the latter, and Oedipally confused Americans feel a certain exhilaration in the way he legitimates their repressed racism, their fears in being demographically displaced, and in their resentment of educated cosmopolitans who see them as naive, ignorant rubes.
But Trump is not really the Oedipal Father--the figure who represents cultural rules and norms--he's the Primal Father, the King Lear type, the primal narcissist for whom there are no rules except that the world conform to his will. His presidency creates a collective psychology that supports the worst tendencies of authoritarian personality types, i.e., people who have no inner moral compass and who need strong authority figures to tell them what's ok. And when you have an authority figure who tells people that their worst instincts are ok, you have a truly destablizing crisis of legitimacy.
And so his American supporters find themselves sucked into his force field for reasons they don't really understand, and unable to free themselves from it because there is only the void outside of it. Why give up this exhilaration for the bleak, arid thing that would otherwise be their normal lives. It's a mirage, of course, and sooner or later it will dissolve. Reality will assert itself. But it's an open question whether reality will ever catch up to Trump himself.
That's where we are now, and it's not clear at all how this is going to play out.
There are two basic sane positions anti-Trumpers can take at this point, and I'm not sure which is correct. There's the one taken by institutionalists like Nancy Pelosi who believes that the basic institutions, especially the courts, are still intact. If we're patient, they will do their job, and eventually things will return to normal. The other position is that we're at the beginning of a civil war and that we have to use every weapon at our disposal to push back against Trump and the sycophants who surround him. I honestly don't know which is correct. I'd like to believe that Pelosi is, but I fear that we've crossed a threshold where we're involved in naked power struggle in which adherence to the old rules puts one at a significant disadvantage.
Pelosi is thinking in the long run. She is justifiably concerned that if the Dems impeach Trump on the substance, the GOP, once it regains a congressional majority, will impeach a Democratic president on no substance. That's their m.o. Bill Clinton was revenge for Nixon, even if twenty years later. This is where a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind. Nixon abused power; Clinton fell into a perjury trap about sex.
Most Americans understand the difference of degree there, and no matter how nauseating Clinton's behavior, they saw the GOP as over-reaching in its impeaching Clinton. The question is whether most Americans see the difference now. I think most do, but American culture has become destabilized in a way that makes me wonder if something hasn't changed at a fundamental level.
More and more people are suffering from the ontological dizziness that afflicts the Oedipally confused. And that makes them more than ever willing to clutch at anything that will give them a sense of stability, including the strong man, even if he's a stunted, primal narcissist. But in the short run, the Primal Father creates the kind of chaos that will require the nation's embrace of a repressive Oedipal Father--a Savonarola or perhaps a Robespierre. Either way, a smarter, shrewder, more ruthless imposer of top-down state repression.The surveillance infrastructure is in place to insure his effectiveness.
Trump has real advantages that institutionalists do not. He has no vested interest in the institutions. He doesn't understand their rules, and he doesn't care, and that gives him enormous power. Because while everybody else feels bound by them, he just doesn't. So those who oppose him are hamstrung in a way that he's not. And so it's an open question whether the Liberal establishment will find a way to adjust, to cope with this aberration, or whether the aberration comes to define a new normal.
In other words, will reality finally catch up with Trump? I honestly don't know.
Shakespeare's story about Lear is about a primal narcissist whom reality slaps upside the head in such a way as to crash his delusional self-understanding. This enables him to become a human being capable of real, vulnerable connection with other human beings. He becomes "the thing itself"--a human. Somewhere underneath all the bluster, there is a human being in Trump, and Pelosi is right that praying for him is a good idea. Because as for Lear, the real issue here is a deeply spiritual one--both for him and for the nation. Will Trump be able to maintain his own de-humanizing self-delusion and with it the power to mesmerize so many Americans, or will reality 'intervene' and shock him and those in his delusional force field into an awakening to the way things really are.
We have to hope that the Democrats find a way to effect that intervention.