Donald Trump's Obsession With Crowds

The man in his element.

I was positively gobsmacked this morning reading about Donald Trump fantasizing dreamily about the great American re-opening leading to packed football stadiums in the not too distant future. Only this is Trump we’re talking about, so in his mind at least 50 to 80 thousand people congregating in the same building, tongue-kissing and high-fiving to celebrate each touchdown or field goal isn’t a wildly unrealistic, if not impossible dream so much as it is a concrete, achievable goal, if not an inevitability considering the historic greatness of his administration.

I felt the same way when Trump gushed about pews overflowing with worshippers on Easter Sunday before it became horrifyingly apparent just how serious COVID-19 would prove to be. When crowds, particularly large crowds of people packed like sardines in college football stadiums, or mega-churches, are synonymous in the public mind, and the public imagination, with the exponential spread of COVID-19, death and disease, then who in their right mind would daydream loudly and frequently about yuge crowds gathering for worship or college sports in a way that suggests that he’s not day-dreaming at all?

But the more I thought about Trump’s history with crowds, the more his comments made sense. After all, when Sean Spicer was given the impossible position of White House spokesman, pretty much his first duty involved lying egregiously about something nobody other than Trump cares about at all, let alone is pathologically obsessed with: inauguration crowd sizes. 

Name a more iconic duo!

Spicer was forced to pretend that in their frenzied bid to discredit the president, the FAKE NEWS media, the enemy of the people, deliberately and maliciously under-reported the size of the crowd at his inauguration in an attempt to make him seem less popular than his predecessor, Barack Obama. 

To help assuage his boss’ enormous, easily pricked ego, Spicer claimed “Photographs of the inaugural proceedings were intentionally framed in a way, in one particular tweet, to minimize the enormous support that had gathered on the National Mall. This was the first time in our nation’s history that floor coverings had been used to protect the grass on the mall. That had the effect of highlighting any areas where people were not standing while in years past the grass eliminated this visual.”

If Trump had not angrily insisted that a million and a half people attended his inauguration, in clear defiance of all available evidence, the story wouldn’t just have gone away instantly: it wouldn’t be a story at all due to near-universal apathy. 

But Trump made it a story for a very good reason: crowds are of enormous importance to him. Like television ratings or electoral college votes or Twitter followers, they tell him that he is not just winning, but absolutely crushing it, that he isn’t just attracting a good crowd for his inauguration but the biggest crowd ever. 

With the exception of Fox News, crowds might just be Trump’s best friend. I suspect that part of the reason that Trump is in a furious hurry to re-open the country regardless of the danger and death involved is because he doesn’t just want to be throwing YUGE campaign rallies where his every incoherent utterance is greeted as the gospel by great throngs of worshippers who define themselves through their cult-like adoration of the President and his family, he NEEDS to be throwing these rallies to satiate his bottomless need for validation. 

Crowds tell Trump that he’s the biggest, the best, the most successful ever. He feeds off the toxic energy of his crowds, on their bloodlust and xenophobia and mindless rage towards people who are different than them. 

Incidentally, between writing this blog post and polishing it I learned Eric Trump had actually gone on Fox News to explicitly argue that the danger of COVID-19 is being purposefully overstated solely for the purpose of hurting his dad politically and keeping him from holding the kinds of massive rallies the president’s son sees as his greatest tool and asset. Eric predicts that COVID-19 will magically disappear after November 3rd, which should provide great comfort for maroons who believe conspiracy theories promoted by the president’s stupidest, most embarrassing child.

It’s solitude that terrifies Trump. Nothing is scarier to him than being alone with his thoughts. Trump understandably prefers mass adulation to self-reflection. He’d rather gaze out at a basketball stadium full of mindless acolytes chanting “Build a wall” or “Lock Her Up” than look in the mirror and be forced to come to terms with who he really is as a leader and a human being. 

Trump needs crowds so badly that he’s clearly willing to indirectly kill the very people who elected him, which is bad politics as well as the actions of a crazed narcissist with strong sociopathic tendencies. 

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