Donald Trump, Human Character Flaw
Donald Trump doesn’t have a personality so much as a seemingly bottomless series of character flaws. I’m honestly hard-pressed to think of a single positive quality he possesses, although I guess no one can accuse him of being unduly hamstrung by false modesty. As a matter of the historical record, Trump is embarrassingly immature, frighteningly narcissistic, bullying, transparently insecure and crazily over-compensating, as impatient as a three year old in the midst of a marathon temper tantrum, wholly devoid of humility, vulnerability and self-reflection, racist, sexist, transphobic, a serial sexual harasser and objectifier of young women, many hovering around the age of consent, a compulsive liar, fantasist and con man.
And that's being nice.
These are not my subjective opinions. These are statements of fact. Trump doesn’t just possess one glaring character flaw, like, I dunno, greed, although holy living fuck does he ever possess that in bigly amounts. No, he pretty much possesses all of the character flaws.
If I were to behave even occasionally the way Trump does all the time, the world would think I had gone insane and become a cartoonish caricature of an insecure would-be alpha tyrant and cast me out. If I were to begin the day with a Tweet like, “FAILING A.V CLUB keeps losing readers! Never should have dumped RABIN. Flops a smash! Bigger than ever! Happy Place burning up internet! Media conglomerates lining up to buy! Too bad! Not for sale! Sad. Shame!” I’m not sure people would take the time to actually email or message me to ask what the hell had broken in my brain that would lead me to write something like that, and then publicly disseminate it, but they sure as shit would be thinking it.
But I would never write a tweet like that, both because it’s way longer than 140 characters but also because I don’t feel that way. Also, it’s not true in that I will at least consider exceedingly generous offers for the site. But I don’t tweet shit like that because I don’t want people to think I’m an asshole and only an asshole would communicate that way.
Needless to say, the part of the brain that controls worrying about whether or not your words and actions and tweets make you seem like an insufferable, irredeemable asshole because you are an insufferable, irredeemable asshole seems to be unusually under-developed (not unlike his notoriously tiny little Ken doll hands!) or non-existent in Trump.
Trump’s public record is one of an endless series of belligerent faux pas and unhinged aggression. He is everything I am teaching my son not to be but there must be people who like his awful, bullying, pathologically narcissistic, unhinged personality because, you know, he was elected President of the States and all, and it sure wasn’t on the basis of his wonk-like obsession and understanding of policy, both domestic and foreign. No, it was because people liked a personality that’s all defects, that’s all flaws.
How do you get Catholics and Evangelicals to vote for you when you’re pretty much the Seven Deadly Sins in human form? How do you get a majority of the white women vote when you’ve clearly spent much of your life parasitically attacking that demographic from every conceivable angle?
It’s hard to look at Trump’s seemingly inexplicable appeal and see anything other than a Fascist worship of a strongman’s “strength.” Of course, Trump isn’t actually strong. He’s weak, and his continual macho posturing, his talk of “his” generals and troops, are clearly the product of desperate, deep insecurity, yet a weirdly sizable number of people seem to still dig the whole routine.
It’s baffling to me how on anyone can believe in Trump on a political or personal level, and God knows there’s no separation of the two where he’s concerned. I couldn’t get away with a tenth of what Trump has. Heck, I couldn’t get away with a hundredth of it. I wouldn’t want to. I’d want to be stopped at some point, as Trump undoubtedly does, consciously or unconsciously. We live in strange, strange times. All I’m saying is that it’s a little weird when an unemployable Juggalo who recently spent over a year living in his in-laws’ basement is held to a higher standard of conduct and morality than the goddamn President of the United States. I'm not sure that's right. Maybe we should be a little tougher on the guy. He's a bit of a creep.
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