The yearning for dominance and praise
David Remnick on the cesspit that is Trump’s white house.
The yearning in the character of Donald Trump for dominance and praise is bottomless, a hunger that is never satisfied. Last week, the President gathered his Cabinet for a meeting with no other purpose than to praise him, to note the great “honor” and “blessing” of serving such a man as he. Trump nodded with grave self-satisfaction, accepting the serial hosannas as his daily due. But even as the members declared, Pyongyang-style, their everlasting gratitude and fealty to the Great Leader, this concocted dumb show of loyalty only served to suggest how unsustainable it all is.
The reason that this White House staff is so leaky, so prepared to express private anxiety and contempt, even while parading obeisance for the cameras, is that the President himself has so far been incapable of garnering its discretion or respect. Trump has made it plain that he is capable of turning his confused fury against anyone in his circle at any time. In a tweet on Friday morning, Trump confirmed that he is under investigation for firing the F.B.I. director James Comey, but blamed the Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, for the legal imbroglio that Trump himself has created. The President has fired a few aides, he has made known his disdain and disappointment at many others, and he will, undoubtedly, turn against more. Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner, Jeff Sessions, Sean Spicer—who has not yet felt the lash?
It’s hard not to be pleased that the adder is striking at them. They found his venom acceptable enough to agree to work for him, so it’s cosmic justice that he’s spitting it at them now.
Trump’s egotism, his demand for one-way loyalty, and his incapacity to assume responsibility for his own untruths and mistakes were, his biographers make plain, his pattern in business and have proved to be his pattern as President.
Veteran Washington reporters tell me that they have never observed this kind of anxiety, regret, and sense of imminent personal doom among White House staffers—not to this degree, anyway. These troubled aides seem to think that they can help their own standing by turning on those around them—and that by retailing information anonymously they will be able to live with themselves after serving a President who has proved so disconnected from the truth and reality.
It’s unkind to say it serves them right, but all the same, it does.
The Dark Lord has no friends, only servants.
There are few Earthly beings who require regular paeans of praise to be directed at them by the gullible multitudes who seek their favour, or alternatively, to avoid their wrath. Kim Jong Il, the fat grandson of the supremely at Kim Il Sung is one. His supremely fat grandfather (who I personally once had occasion to meet, with photo to prove it) and who now has the status of a god in his native North Korea, was another. Joseph Stalin was so holy that it became a capital offence to ‘take his name in vain’: meaning to blow even the tiniest raspberry in his direction.
Watching on TV the Babylonian homilies and tributes forming into an oblate whirlpool round that table in the White House was a sobering experience. Even Washington DC is capable of a good old fashioned Pyongyang moment or a 1936 Moscow day.
But would really like an answer to the following question: does Donald Trump own a cat? And if so, does a veterinarian give it a regular check for signs of having been kicked?
In some down-market households, rage and frustration are routinely eased by kicking the cat. Dogs can be a problem, so I am told, because small or large, if kicked enough they incline to turn savage and seek sweet revenge, which can have disadvantages from mild through to catastrophic for said kicker.
But not cats. I am reliably told that they just clear out of a house whose occupant they find too disagreeable, and seek better digs elsewhere: usually with a neighbour, but even in a drain or sewer pipe.
So it is a serious question. Has the Egomaniac of Pennsylvania Avenue managed to form any sort of friendship with a Felix domesticus?
More pertinent, Omar, is does Trump have a Baldrick? In the third series of the brilliant Blackadder Edmond Blackadder explained to Baldrick that ‘the Prince annoys me, I kick the cat, the cat chases the mouse, and the mouse bites you’.
Ah yes, Acolyte. But that puts poor old Baldrick right at the bottom of the pecking/kicking/biting dominance hierarchy. Ethologists studying the pecking orders that arise in chook yards, have found that any bird higher up the order in the yard assumes the right to peck any bird lower down. Result: the lowliest of them gets pecked from left, right and centre.
Which translates to certain human situations quite well, perhaps best seen in the bar room brawl.
So if chairs, crockery etc come flying outwards through the glass windows of the White House, we will know that a certain instability has been reached in the status order of those left inside.
So Donnie kicks the cat, the cat chases the mouse, and the mouse sends Spicer out to tell us that all is wine and roses at the White House.
That’s about right.
But stand by for further developments in the Saga of Trump.
I know this isn’t quite what your comments were getting at, but I’ve found it peculiar and suspicious that the Trump family doesn’t have any pets–I’d be wary of anyone who has the means to have companion animals and no reason (e.g. allergies, travel) not to, and yet doesn’t.
Would you wish the Trumps on an innocent animal, guest?
Looks to me like they probably have close personal friendships with some of the alligators in the swamps nearest Mar-a-Logo.
Nah, they’re extended family.