How to manipulate Donnie from Queens
William Saletan has advice on how to deal with the pathetic needy narcissist that is Trump.
To understand Trump, you have to set aside the scripted speeches he gave before his election and the canned videos he has released since. You also have to set aside the caricature of him as a Klan-loving, Nazi-sympathizing woman hater who will deport every immigrant he can find. Instead, look at the four interviews he has given since his election: to the Wall Street Journal, 60 Minutes, the New York Times, and a group of TV anchors and executives. In these exchanges, all of them conducted outside the behavior-warping context of the campaign, you’ll see how squishy he is. Trump did run a despicable campaign, and he’s a menace to the country and the world. But it’s not because he’s a strongman. It’s because he’s a weakling.
That’s the short version. The longer story is more complicated.
Narcissism is complicated. Trump demands universal love and adulation.
Emotionally, he’s a child. He can love others, but only if they love him first. And that’s how he sees his presidency. In his interview with the Times on Nov. 22, he explained that his job is “taking care of the people that really have proven to be—to love Donald Trump.”
He’s vindictive. His ego is terribly fragile.
To understand how central this is to Trump’s sense of himself, check out the first 19 paragraphs of his interview with the Times. Invited by the publisher to give opening remarks, Trump spoke at length, not about the future but about his genius and prowess on the campaign trail. In his Nov. 11 interview with 60 Minutes, he bragged about the number of Twitter followers he had gained.
I did marvel at his opening remarks to the Times – at the self-obsession and irrelevance.
He craves approval. Trump often comes across as indifferent to the feelings of others. That’s misleading. He cares intensely about being respected and loved.
That’s an odd way to put it. That is being indifferent to the feelings of others. If your only concern about the feelings of others is how much they love you, then you are indifferent to their feelings. Trump doesn’t give a flying fuck how others feel when he insults them; that’s being indifferent to the feelings of others.
He’s easily soothed by flattery. Trump is a champ at nursing grudges when he feels cheated, threatened, or disrespected. But his grudges, like his commitments, can be washed out by small doses of affection. He speaks glowingly of generous post-election phone calls he received from the Clintons and the Bushes. He has praised both families in return. Those threats to prosecute Hillary? Never mind. Trump also can’t stop clucking about his Nov. 10 meeting with President Obama. At least three times, Trump has claimed to have “great chemistry” with the man he had never previously met and had repeatedly denounced as the worst president ever. That’s how easily Trump’s wrath can turn to warmth—and vice versa.
It’s also another illustration of his indifference to the feelings of others – his ability to forget all about the years he spent pretending to believe Obama was born in Kenya and the revolting way he talked about Clinton. To put it another way, it’s one more illustration of his total lack of a theory of mind. Obama was nice to him during their meeting, so Obama must love him; nothing that went before has any relevance.
He’s a softie. If Trump hurts a lot of people as president, it won’t be out of malice.
That one seems dead wrong to me. Trump boils with malice.
He’s obtuse to the pain he inflicts. If Trump cares so much about feelings, why doesn’t he see all the fear and stress he has caused? Because that would require him to accept criticism, and his ego can’t handle it. On 60 Minutes, he batted away questions about his invective during the campaign, insisting that “my strongest asset is my temperament” and that he “can’t regret” anything he’d said. If some folks are upset by his election, that can’t be his fault, so it has to be theirs. “There are people, Americans, who are scared, and some of them are demonstrating right now, demonstrating against you, against your rhetoric,” Stahl told him. Trump seemed baffled. “That’s only because they don’t know me,” he said.
Trump is virtually lobotomized. Unable to acknowledge his role in stirring up hatred and fear, he blames others. When Stahl told him that “African Americans think there’s a target on their back,” and “Muslims are terrified,” he shrugged that such fears were “built up by the press, because, frankly, they’ll take every single little incident … and they’ll make [it] into an event.” In his interview with the Times, Trump claimed that low black turnout showed how popular he was: “A lot of people didn’t show up, because the African-American community liked me.” The vanity of this man is bottomless.
He cares about his friends but not people he considers enemies. That’s universal, in a sense, but in Trump it’s absolute.
12. He’s easily manipulated. Having a fragile, approval-craving narcissist as president isn’t the end of the world. It just means that to get him to do the right thing, you have to pet him. In Trump’s post-election exchanges, we have several useful models. The first is Obama, who gave Trump a tongue bath in their 90-minute meeting on Nov. 10 and may have saved his signature legislative achievement in the process. Three days after that meeting, Trump told the Journal he was reconsidering his pledge to abolish Obama’s health insurance program: “Either Obamacare will be amended, or repealed and replaced.”
Well, all I can say is, I’m glad I’m not one of the people in a position to manipulate him that way. I’m glad I’m free to keep saying what an awful shit he is.
Silly me. I thought it might have something to do with the 898 voting places that were abolished, leading to long lines that a lot of people who work for a living couldn’t wait for. A friend of mine has parents in Arizona; they went out the second day of early voting, thinking they could avoid the lines, and waited for hours.
iknklast,
(1) Why doesn’t the US adopt Saturday voting which gives the workers a chance to visit a polling station?
(2) Why do Americans put up with long lines and such obvious manipulation, has the electoral system always been so ramshackle?
For obvious reasons American democracy is everyone’s business.
RJW – if we did that, it would be nearly impossible to suppress the vote of minority and working class voters! Why, then people might elect the “wrong” people! How terrible that would be!
The reason we don’t do those things is because so many people are in the mode of “well, we’ve always done it this way” and “the founding fathers” (as if they didn’t set up a flexible system with a built in means of changing, so they obviously didn’t expect we would always do everything the same way). The problem is, this system tends to benefit those in power…which is how they got in power…so they have no incentive to change.
Has it always been this ramshackle? Not that I remember, but then, I’ve never lived in one of the areas that have had to deal with these monstrously long lines…the longest I’ve ever had to wait was an hour, and that was for my opportunity to vote against Ronald Reagan. Fat lot of good that did me.
Some people have talked about online voting, but the specter of “illegal voting” comes up every time anyone mentions it. That usually means, in translation, people who vote for someone other than the Republican candidates.
“Trump needs love and understanding. The latest #slatepitch from the guy who invented the #slatepitch.”
iknklast,
Conservative subversion isn’t confined to the US. Amendments to the Australian Constitution require a popular vote with a majority of voters in a majority of states. Most of the time propositions are rejected. By the time conservatives have confused the issue, voters usually vote ‘no’ to play safe. So even with a more democratic electoral regime here, the forces of reaction often manage to sabotage progressive initiatives.
The prospect of president Trump certainly puts Brexit into perspective. Soon that vulgar, mercurial windbag will be in charge of the planet’s most powerful war machine. Most probably the Trump administration won’t be able to re-industrialise the US rust belt or make any significant changes to unemployment rates since most of the problem is caused by structural and technological change and the plans of transnational corporations. Trump’s hare-brained economic autarky ideas will eventually damage to the US economy. The Chinese are already manoeuvring to fill the vacuum in the Asia-Pacific left by America’s possible retreat into isolation.
So when he doesn’t deliver on his promises, what straw will his disaffected followers grasp, which demagogue will they follow?
RJW@2:
The date of the election is fixed in the Constitution. Changing that date would require a constitutional amendment, which are extremely difficult to get made. That being said, the date isn’t actually that fixed (explanation to follow below).
Not too many do, anymore, because with early voting, absentee voting, and voting by mail becoming so prevalent, the tuesday election day is really nothing more than “the last day to vote”. So in the many areas where these methods have been adopted, only the procrastinators must stand in line. In my state (Washington) the vote is entirely by mail, with ballots mailed several weeks before the actual election day. There are a couple of go-in-person voting locations in the county where you can vote on election day, but I have yet to encounter anyone who has used them.
These things having been said, the convenience of early voting methods is not yet universal throughout all the states. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that it’s the blue states that have largely adopted these methods.
Interestingly enough, the tuesday election day was chosen by the founders specifically because it was the easiest day for rural farming populations to vote, given the schedule of farming life during that time in the harvest. So a saturday election day would definitely make more sense in this modern era.
James Garnett,
Interesting. I certainly understand the political difficulties in amending constitutions.
We have early, absentee, and mail voting here as well. Voting in my Council elections (Local Government) is entirely by mail.