This is one hell of a long opinion piece; my apologies to anyone who starts thinking of putting a tl;dr into a comment. And it is, arguably, nothing but my opinion. I dunno, though, because the more I look at it, the more solid it looks. And it all comes down to what Maya Angelou said, translated via Meteor Blades’ rule of thumb:
“When somebody shows you what they do, believe them.”
We’ve had all the pieces for a long time. We got distracted, time after time, because that’s what the man is best at. When he tells us who he is, he lies, but he told us what he does, or rather doesn’t do, a long time ago. And it wasn’t complicated enough. Or malevolent enough. Or maybe just not in the DSMV, so people could write learned papers about it.
I feel like kicking myself for not seeing it sooner, but, hell, nobody else did, either. This morning, listening to the Woodward tapes, it just kind of fell into place. What follows isn’t a full workup, but hopefully it’s enough to let someone run with it and add bells and whistles.
Remember the Howard Stern interview from 2008 that was revived in 2018? The link already has as least two layers of commentary built in, but try to ignore that, and just think about what’s being said.
Trump can’t handle the sight of blood.
Add in his comments on the military, whenever he can’t concentrate on how awesome a parade he wants to put on, and his reluctance to deal with cemeteries and the returning war dead.
He can’t handle injury, he can’t handle trauma, he can’t handle disabilities, and he doesn’t do well with death.
Add to that, that he’s not very good with sickness, or real physical threats (remember the eagle?), or pain. Come to think about it, that’s exactly the expression that’s on his face with a softball coming at him…
And I’m going to bet he has a hell of a time with needles, either for injection or blood work.
And when I say he can’t handle them, I mean it literally; if they happen around him, or are described to him, he is uncomfortable, possibly to the point of nausea. He distracts, he shifts the subject, and as soon as he can, he forgets about it. When he can’t forget, he rewrites things so that they don’t have anything to do with him, and jokes about it. If he can forget, he does so as quickly as possible.
Trump doesn’t listen to his briefings; they’re full of things that could go wrong, things that have gone wrong, and things he knows he’s incapable of dealing with. And the more he had to sit through them, the better he got at not paying attention to them, or distancing himself from them so that they weren’t anything to worry about.
Listen to the Woodward tape; this is a man who has already shunted the information about the pandemic into a convenient slot — he can’t ignore it, but he can absolutely refuse to deal with it or accept any responsibility for it. If he hadn’t done that, he would not have been able to talk about it to Woodward. Just the fact that he sees no political downside in talking about it says very plainly that he’s already dissociated himself from the problem. From then on, I think he was incapable of taking any relevant action, or even accepting that someone from his office had taken it, because it didn’t connect with his reality.
I have no idea what might have initiated this pattern. I suspect a really traumatic event when he was a kid could have produced this kind of reaction, especially if it were combined with punishment.
Prior to becoming President, my guess is that he’d very much compartmentalized his life to be able to avoid the majority of these things. Unfortunately the first thing that he had to cope with as a candidate was a whole lot of people whose job it was to make sure he couldn’t keep them separate, because dealing with them is part and parcel of the job of President. By the time he was inaugurated, he would have had a whole new set of compartments built, and each new separation made him less likely to be able to cope with any of the unpleasant realities people were asking for his approval on. The greater the separation, the stronger the fantasy world; the stronger the fantasy, the greater the fear that someone will catch him at it, and the harder he builds and holds the fantasy.
So, from my standpoint, he’s not evil, just literally incapable of dealing with the kind of life that is actually affected by trauma and death. I think maybe that’s worse, though, because of the opportunities it gives people without the responsibilities of the office to screw things up deliberately. I’m feeling no sympathy, and the last thing I am is sorry for him, but putting a psychological label on top of this mess and expecting it to make a difference hasn’t been of any help up to now. Maybe this perspective can.
He believes that any solution to Covid-19 has nothing to do with him; anything else would have him unable to leave his bedroom. And since it’s not his problem, it’s simply not a problem.
That’s all I’ve got. It does seem that, if that shift in perspective is legitimate, there might be a couple of actual solutions possible. If any of it clicks, feel free to play with it.