written 14 May 2023
published 21 May 2023
I listened to the first half hour of the CNN Trump Town Hall. He repeated his same tired story, so we just turned it off. Over the years, I have struggled to clarify my view of the man.
We all live in an individual psychological "personal" reality, which filters and defines our experiences. Each is shaped by patterns from our culture, family, childhood experiences, birth order, race, gender, and religion, to name just a few. However, we also all live in a shared "collective" reality, the ground that supports us, which transcends our personal reality. This is the reality of living on planet Earth, inhabiting a body as a human mammal. As the saying goes: You stub your toe on collective reality. Life is an ongoing conversation between our personal reality and the collective reality. The more the two correspond, the more graceful and creative our life can be. The more they diverge, our life gets more chaotic and tends toward insanity.
Trump exudes a complete confidence in what he says, despite spouting lies in almost every sentence. His personal reality bubble completely defines his life. Consequently, while his world view is internally consistent, it is closed off to input from the outside world, disconnected from collective reality.
His father raised him to believe the world consists of killers and losers. Trump seems to have internalized that he is never a loser, which allows him to take no responsibility for any adverse consequences of his actions. In addition, everything he ever does is "the greatest". There is a great YouTube video collecting his claims to "know more than anyone" about thirty different subjects (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GqJna9hpTE).
However, never admitting he has ever lost, means he can never learn from past experiences, and must continually deny some parts of our shared reality. The "Big Lie" is a perfect case in point. In the collective reality, he lost both the popular and the Electoral College vote in the 2020 election. Despite being told he lost by numerous Republican leaders and high Trump administration officials, a fact further confirmed by losing over 60 court cases, his personal reality is so divorced for collective reality that he has never accepted that truth. Because he can't acknowledge that loss, the election MUST have been stolen, and everything he has said and done in the last few years has pushed that perspective.
Another aspect of his derangement is his attitude toward women. Misogyny is deeply baked into our culture. Ask any woman. Trump is proud of his attacks on women, witness the Hollywood Access tapes or his public humiliation of any woman that challenges him. In his defense in the recent sexual assault case he lost, he claimed "she wasn't his type", implying he would have assaulted her if she had appealed to him. As with every other attempt to bring him to face the consequences of his actions, Trump claimed the trial was a "witch hunt", with money and political gain at the root of the "false" charges. Anything bad happening to him is always someone else's fault, never his.
If Trump were an ordinary person, this would just be a sad case of delusional behavior, perhaps mediated by counseling, suitable medication, or time in a mental hospital. But in this money obsessed culture, Trump has been rich enough to get away with his deranged patterns for his whole life. What makes his case even worse is that he has been elected President, and still has a following of loyal voters who are attracted by his misogyny, racism, and "Big Lie" as part of their personal reality.
For the most part, these folks are not in the billionaire class that benefits from Trump's political "accomplishments". These people feel life has been unfair to them, and relate to the grievance drama that is Trump's stock in trade, resonating with Trump's claims "nobody has been treated this unfairly". This highlights a metal health crisis endemic in our culture, where so many people chose to blame "others", rather than claim any personal responsibility.
Trump grows more extreme, fanning fear and hatred as a way to energize and control his supporters, while providing no actual solutions and alienating an increasing portion of society. We have real problems in our collective reality which require cooperative effort to solve. Trump and his followers contribute nothing to this discussion.
