As a young man 48 years ago I minored in psychology in school and never quite lost my interest in the deviations of the human mind that cause people to do the kind of things they do to themselves and each other, often that directly contradict what they claim to believe. I’ve borne witness to it time and time again throughout my many business relationships, through a couple of marriages that ended in divorce, with several bands I’ve played in over the decades and - most especially - over 50 years of watching the political parlor tricks that our so-called “leadership” in Washington have passed off on our people, expecting us to accord them the respect and honor of their positions while they rob us blind, kill our people and treat us like their personal slaves while they pretend to represent our interests in government...
When Mary Trump’s book- “Too Much and Never Enough” came out, I began to read it with a certain amount of skepticism at first, thinking that it might have been intended as a vindictive screed designed to inflict retribution for the legal damages her uncle caused her at the death of her grandfather; but as I got deeper into its well-written and precisely constructed narrative, it cleared up a great deal of unanswered questions for me and filled in a lot of blanks with regard to how someone like Donald Trump could so easily swindle a large proportion of simple-minded, single issue evangelical zealots and conservative zombies. I have to admit that I’ve known my fair share of that kind of person in the business world over the years, so it was easy to identify the emotional traits and behavioral patterns she identified throughout, although it did surprise me that they appeared to be so deeply rooted in familial dysfunction. A trained psychologist with credentials from a highly regarded institution and an intimate understanding of such a deviant personality that is Trump could be the only qualified professional capable of such an accurate analysis such as what was presented in her book instead of the legions of pundits and media talking heads, and in fact that was pretty much the entire scope of Ms. Trump’s thesis - a plainly written explanation in layman’s terms of Trump himself and the components of his makeup that attract like-minded people. However, her book left me with one extremely important unanswered question: What about those Trump supporters with an actual education? - the ones who come from good families composed of parents with professional careers who, unlike the toxic, dysfunctional Trump family, give their kids a stable, caring, loving environment in which to develop, flourish and grow? How on earth can those people possibly come to the conclusion that overt racist, fascistic Trumpism is the ultimate solution for 21st century America?
Oddly enough, the answer came to me in Mr. Cohen’s book, “Disloyal: A Memoir”. I won’t get into the minutiae of that book’s details here as there are more than enough journalists out there these days to dissect chunks of it - much of it dredged out of context, in fact - but the beginning thrust of it bears witness to the fact that it all started out as a nice Jewish kid from a nice Jewish immigrant family who worked their way through the usual immigrant hardships, then the rigors of professional schools to become doctors and then moved to New York because they wanted to build and expand their practices and send their kids to good schools to become doctors or lawyers and advance their standard of living. Problem was, one of their kids took an interest in hanging out with the friends of some of the wealthy organized crime people in the city who befriended the kid based on that unique deviated form of gangland “loyalty”. Eventually that loyalty turned into admiration, which over time morphed into gangland “trust”, which in turn eventually affected his career choice in school: instead of medical school, he chose law school for two reasons… first, because it was academically easier… and second because it would be more “useful” in the future as he was reasonably certain who the bulk of his clientele would likely be from his pre-school associations and therefore more financially profitable long-term . And it wasn’t too long thereafter that a phone call from Don Jr. to his small law firm office on behalf of Don Sr., based on his newly established reputation among mutual “associates” in need of a favor would send him along his way to his future fate.
Having seen similar examples of intellectual cult leader recruitment in various forms by religions, political parties, “movements” and the like by thugs, bullies and evangelical snake oil phonies over the course of my own lifetime, my take from the Cohen book is that there is a type of person in this world - some 25% of the population in fact - who possesses a mindset that needs a controlling authoritarian, absolutist, fist-pounding high drama fanatic to lord over them which embodies the antithesis of the issues that they feel powerless to fight against themselves. If they can’t personally execute, butcher, decapitate, impale, poison, gas, knee-choke, garrote or lynch their “enemies”, they can rely on their chosen sycophant to either do it for them or else their cult leader can muster his army of willing gunsels and militias to carry out the executions either through intimidation or direct attack and still keep their hands clean and their consciences pure.
In Cohen’s case, his method of attack was through intimidation, collusion, back-room deals, manipulation, power brokering, misrepresenting and reinventing facts, and making sure that whatever evidence that could be directly traced back to Donald Trump after stiffing contractors, sexually assaulting women, raping teenage girls, undervaluing real estate on Trump’s tax forms, paying off high priced prostitutes for their silence so that the latest replacement trophy wife would not discover Trump’s infidelity - was summarily eliminated at all costs. In a nutshell, that was Cohen’s job. He did it with pride, gusto and enthusiasm, for no other reason than he was fearful of losing Trump’s favor - because at the end of the day that was the only thing he valued above all else, intoxicated with cult worship and servile to the needs of his lord and master. But having been caught up in Trump’s web of lies and corruption, it took the prosecutorial reality check of nearly losing his wife and two children, losing his law practice, his entire private fortune and his freedom to understand what had happened to him and realize the finality of what cult worship had cost him. I still consider Cohen to be among the worst of the top Trump brigands, but when any man finally comes clean after having done so much to dehumanize humanity and damage those around him, perhaps there’s some glimmer of hope for us as a species.
The point here is that it wasn’t just Trump who had corrupted Cohen: Cohen had chosen to embrace the cult lifestyle at an early age long before with his casual associations in the New York crime family scene outside of his parent’s family. The day he took that call from Don Jr. after law school, he had already been primed and ready from an early age to seal his fate; it wasn’t simply a spur-of-the-moment decision.
It’s important to understand that what we choose to do, who we associate with, how we behave towards other people, what we listen to, what we watch and what we read all influence our decisions in life to some degree. What we choose to do with all of those preceding experiences determines the character of the person we become going forward each day- as a husband… as a wife… as a parent… as a voter… as a citizen… as an employee… as a steward of our planet. We have to be vigilant every day of our lives, or else risk making a seemingly small mistake that might cascade into an irreversible life of regret, fealty and shame. It’s so incredibly easy to do with the slightest, silliest oversight.
Living has always been kind’ve like driving a car: even a moment of inattention has the potential to ruin the rest of one’s existence.
