Trump as the Ever-Present Mid-Term Election Elephant in the Room

 As with Biden, so it is with Trump, my assessment is based on the available record, which I integrate within my understanding of contemporary history, political culture, public ethics, and my capacity to make reasonable, evidence-based inferences. With Biden, I see a flawed individual with a generous heart, who can make very consequential errors in judgment. His core values resonate around an inviolable loyalty to family, public and community service, a foundational belief in patriotism, and a desire for public concord broadly along the lines of his core political beliefs rooted in the values of the New Deal and Great Society. As an avowed liberal, I find much to admire, despite his sometimes-substantial flaws.

I search long and hard to discern any positive values embedded in Trump’s public persona. The fundamental problem is rooted in his deep-rooted narcissism, which underlies his need for adulation and his rage against personal or public slights which clouds any capacity to govern on a mature policy level basis. (https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/narcissistic-personality-disorder/symptoms-causes/syc-20366662). This narcissism is compounded by his vast ignorance of history, the intricacies of constitutional governance, and lack of, or interest in, in-depth knowledge of policy issues. His potential capacity to learn from others is blocked by his compulsion to pump himself up as the smartest person in the room on any subject. 

 His “I alone can fix it,” whatever “it” may be, is symptomatic of this conceit, which seems to be rooted in a gaping hole at the center of his identity. If this were merely a personality tick, that would be one matter. The fact that this person ascended to the highest office in the land and continues to have inordinate impact on GOP voters and party leaders, raises his personal dysfunctionality to a much higher, and more dangerous level, that speaks to a pervasive debility at the heart of the U.S. body politic.

 A case in point is the “love letters” between Trump and Kin Jong of North Korea, which, in an interview with Bob Woodward, Trump claimed were part of the Top-Secret documents that the former president refused to turn over to the DOJ and National Archives.  Trump’s effusive, “we’re in love,” based on the high praise the North Korean dictator allegedly bestowed on him, is perverse in every sense of the term. In stoking Trump’s vanity, this brutal dictator played Trump for the fool that his actions and his personality compulsions compel him to embody.

 It may be difficult to disentangle all the connections between Trump, Putin, Russian oligarchs, and Trumpian intermediaries such as Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, and General Flynn. What was clear in the ill-fated Helsinki, 2018 Trump/Putin press conference is that the former president placed more confidence in Putin’s denial that he did not interfere in the 2016 in favor of Trump than the evidence to the contrary provided by his own national security experts. What is also evident is the close association between Trump, Russian oligarchs, and perhaps Putin himself, extending back to 2013 when Trump hosted the Miss America Pageant in Moscow. Based on the Russian leader’s own words at Helsinki, Putin wanted Trump to win the 2016 president election and had ample means to intervene. Trump’s fawning was as never obscene as in his high praise of Putin at the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In Trump’s words, “I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine — Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. So, Putin is now saying, ‘It’s independent,’ a large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘how smart is that?’” One wonders, what’s so wonderful or smart about Putin’s effort to dominate Ukraine?

 Conspiratorial spectacle mongering looms large within the heart pulse of Trump’s political life, which began in earnest with his racist-implied charge that Barack Obama may have been born in Kenya. Initially a fringe conspiracy on the right-wing stratosphere, Trump stoked this birthersm, to give it a sufficient level of visibility among the gullible viewers of right-wing news outlets, which ultimately gravitated to mainstream venues. The result is that millions of people believed this inanity, which reinforced Trump’s conspiratorial demagoguery that provided the core fuel for his political ambitions.

 The claim that the 2020 presidential was stolen is his most dangerous rant. There is no space here for a detailed rebuttal. According to Trump appointed, Chris Krebs, head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, “there was no manipulation of the vote on the machine count side,” in which claims to the contrary are a hoax. Trump’s response was to fire Krebs. Over 60 courts rejected Trump’s claims of a fixed election. On 12/14/2020, the Electoral College recognized Biden as the winner. None of this impeded Trump as he pulled out all the stops that led to the Jan. 6^th insurrection. While he failed in one sense, the fact that 70% of GOP supporters believe that the election was fixed, has injected a potentially incurable cancer into the US body politic. By actively working against the 220-year tradition of the peaceful transfer of power, Trump’s rumor peddling post-election actions threaten the very fabric of this nation’s political order.

 A MAGA conspiratorial hysteria has been let loose on the land. If this sector of the GOP gains ascendancy, the 2020s will not only be a lost decade; more fundamentally, the core premises supportive of this nation’s Constitution governance may very well be irreparably harmed. The fact that Trump could have such negative power says more about the fragileness of the collective us than him, which, nonetheless does not exonerate him for the evil he has injected throughout the body politic.