DJT doesn’t know Parnas.
He doesn’t “know” anybody.
A current rec list diary is asking the question who has breakfast with someone he doesn’t know.
I find it easy to believe DJT has breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks, board meetings, business partnerships, affairs, marriages, all kinds of encounters with people who barely register in his consciousness.
DJT is DJT’s whole existence. To him, he is real and the rest of us are just accessories to his reality.
That’s why he doesn’t know anybody or remember anybody. He goes through life not really paying much attention to anyone but himself.
IANAD, but it is my lay opinion that his narcissism is such that other people do not even exist for him except in relation to him.
He notices whether women appear sexy (to him). He notices whether men appear strong (to him). When he meets someone new, he decides quickly whether he can control them, and whether they will serve him.
In the moment when a person is giving him what he wants, he takes note: “this person is giving me something I want, which is exactly the way things should always be, since that is what I am due anyway.”
But their names, or something about them other than the fact that they are giving him what he wants, or are likely to give him what he wants in the future?
No. That is superfluous information, to be kept track of by other people he pays for the purpose.
I might as well ask you whether you remember a particular twenty dollar bill you spent five years ago. Or last month. Or this morning. Why should you pay any attention to individual pieces of money as they pass through your hands? You value them while you are holding them, not for what they are, but for what you can get for them. And one is the same as another, isn’t it? Who bothers with paying attention to serial numbers? Aren’t all pieces of currency more or less alike?
And if I say indignantly—But I can prove it! I have a picture of you holding this exact twenty dollar bill in your hand! See the serial number???!!! And here is the day you spent it!”
You might calmly reply—Maybe you do. So what? I spend lots of money. How can you expect me to remember any one particular bill? Why should I?
That’s what transactional relationships are like. And transactional relationships are all DJT has.
We may never get a meaningful psychiatric examination of DJT that could test whether this supposition is true.
But it does match with everything we have seen him say and do, and we’ve never seen him say or do anything that contradicts it.
Counterbalancing this, everything DJT does is designed to make sure that he is always the most visible person in any situation. He is quite desperate to avoid being ignored and overlooked in the same way that he ignores and overlooks everyone else.
Remember—his world is the only reality; so he assumes that if he regards everyone as objects to be used and discarded as convenient, that everybody else must be doing the same thing, and he is absolutely determined not to also be ignored or overlooked by anybody. Hence the gaudiness, the glitz and gold, the showmanship, the bluster. Even the bullying and namecalling and other cruelty is a way of being noticed.
It’s quite sad, really.
In the words of that J.K. Rowling/Harry Potter quote I keep using in comparing DJT to Voldemort: He’ll never know love. Or friendship.
Sometimes I wonder what or who wounded him to make him so pitiful.
But then I am grateful for having a reason to pity him, because it keeps me from hating him.
And I am determined not to hate him, because hating him would make me too much like him.
look right through me, walk right by me, and never know I’m there