Lots of cartoons and photoshopped pictures before the election depicted how Trump would decorate the White House. Many of us speculated that the White House would not only be way too small for him and his plastic creepy family; but there would be too many rules against ripping out walls to put in escalators and cathedral ceilings, and hanging crystal chandeliers. Now that Trump has to live there, a place he sees as downscale as Navin R. Johnson’s sharecropper house (right), he also wants to live at Trump Plaza.
Those with a psychological bent and real psychotherapists like me wrote about his malignant narcissism, his vanity, and his hedonism. Hell, if not for other factors I’d reluctantly accept even his misogyny and pussy grabbing. If that was all that was wrong with him and he wasn’t a demagogue, authoritarian personality, know-it-all, and enabler of white supremacists I could put-up with his personality disorders and character flaws.
However with Trump you get the whole package. His psychopathology, including his dangerous quick trigger temper combine with his lack of values. The narcissist’s lack of empathy combine with his couldn’t care less attitude about who he hurts.
His wife jokingly compared dealing with her son and husband as coping with two adolescents. When I hear commentators talking about Romney being Secretary of State and saying “the more adults in the room the better” I realize that Melania’s comment was a portentous warning.
Now we have Trump without a doubt being told by the Secret Service and perhaps the NYPD (at least on television) that it is absolutely unsafe for him to spend time in Trump Tower when he’s president.
It is insane that Trump is spending ay time at all in Trump Tower. The reasons are obvious to anyone that’s seen a few spy movies. It isn’t a joke. The Secret Service doesn’t make jokes. Their job is not just to protect a person, it is to protect our democracy.
My fear is that Trump with his misplaced but deeply help machismo sense of self will be the most difficult president to protect in modern times. And protect him we must.
The t-shirt at left, I would venture an educated guess, met with Trump’s approval. Somebody from the Secret Service needs to sit him down and say “Mr. President, welcome to the bubble. You have chosen to live in this the rest of your life.”
Meanwhile, back to the start of this story, none of the old jokes about the clownish Trump are the least bit amusing anymore.
He will be President Trump and his family and loyalists will be running the country. Only Congress can restrain Trump and his team from following through on the authoritarian, and (to say the hell with Godwin’s Law), downright Hitlerian campaign promises.