Donald Trump's Magical, Tragical Thinking
I recently read an excerpt from Landslide, Michael Wolff’s upcoming book about the end of Donald Trump’s presidency. In it, the author recounts how just about everybody in Donald Trump’s inner circle understood and accepted that Joe Biden would soon be moving into the White House after being declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election.
It was pretty big news at the time. Historic, even. I distinctly even recall dancing merrily in the streets over it alongside throngs of similarly ecstatic revelers.
Even Donald Trump Jr. knew that barring a miracle, Joe Biden would soon become the 46th president despite his father’s extreme displeasure over this seemingly incontrovertible fact.
Donald Trump, however, apparently woke up the morning of January 6th genuinely believing that there was a very strong chance that in the moment of truth Mike Pence would once again prove his unwavering loyalty and trustworthiness and refuse to certify Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election using what Trump was told was a Vice President’s extensive leeway in the matter.
well if there’s a Facebook page devoted to it, then it’s got to be legit!
Pence wouldn’t necessarily declare Trump the winner but in the disgraced twice-impeached ex-president’s fevered imagination Pence could dramatically declare that due to unprecedented electoral fraud the matter was being thrown back to the States, with Trump remaining in power until a final determination could be reached.
The president’s delusions were fed by his lawyer Rudy Giuliani. According to Wolff’s book, Giuliani inflamed Trump’s fierce conviction that his loss in the election was nowhere near as concrete and irreversible as everyone insisted and that with a little testicular fortitude from HIS Vice President, a man seemingly overjoyed just to be able to linger lovingly in his boss’ impossibly vast shadow, Trump could once again shock the world with an upset victory in a presidential election.
I do not know, however, if Giuliani genuinely believed this to be true or if he was expressing extreme optimism regarding Trump’s chances of staying in office in violent defiance of the realities of the situation for the sake of his biggest, most important and most insecure client’s ego.
Giuliani apparently felt the odds of things unexpectedly swinging Trump’s way were about fifty-fifty and that there was at most a seventy percent chance that Pence would do what everyone else in the world other than his old boss expected him to do and confirm Biden’s electoral victory.
So it wasn’t a sure thing, obviously, but Trump thought his chances were pretty good all the same. Reading the excerpt, I was struck that on this historic day the most powerful man in the world and someone we once collectively chose to give the nuclear football was living in a state of total delusion violently divorced from reality.
On some level that shouldn’t be at all surprising. It’s very in character for Trump, after all, to hold onto incorrect beliefs with ferocious determination long after everyone else has abandoned them, like his unwavering belief in the absolute guilt of the Central Park 5 or his long-standing conviction that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and faked his American birth certificate.
Trump is an inveterate believer in magical thinking. He’s a natural-born conspiracy theorist, which is to say that he believes a lot of things that aren’t true and believes them deeply.
Organizations invariably tend to take on the personality, strengths and weaknesses of their leaders. Donald Trump led the United States for four endless, traumatic years so it makes all the sense in the world that during that time more and more people came to believe bigger and bigger lies with more and more terrifying certainty.
It’s similarly not a coincidence that many of the biggest, most toxic lies were spread primarily by Trump as a way of feeding Trump’s ego and sense of himself as infallible and besieged at every side by evil enemies.
Studies show that something like one sixth of the American people believe the central tenet of QAnon, which is that an evil cabal of satanic, pedophile globalists control the world behind the scenes. Then again, considering how deeply rooted QAnon is in long-standing anti-semitic conspiracy theories it would be just as accurate, if not particularly comforting (particularly to me as a Jew) to say that one sixth of the American public is anti-Semitic, and believes that Jews have too much power and control society.
A majority of Republicans believe that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election from Donald Trump despite a preponderance of evidence to the contrary.
Trump has infected the whole damn world with his fierce, unshakable belief in the demonstrably untrue. He’s the true Prince of Lies and the scariest thing about his troubled relationship with reality might just be that Trump genuinely seems to think that the insane things coming out of his mouth are actually true.
Pre-order The Joy of Trash, the Happy Place’s upcoming book about the very best of the very worst and get instant access to all of the original pieces I’m writing for them AS I write them (there are six so far, including Shasta McNasty and the first and second seasons of Baywatch Nights) AND, as a bonus, monthly write-ups of the first season Baywatch Nights you can’t get anywhere else (other than my Patreon feed) at https://the-joy-of-trash.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace
Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang!
Only 23 dollars signed, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here