The Three Rings of Castle Trump

A Japanese castle doesn't look at all like one of those haunted Scottish castles, nor yet like that swooning mad-king affair in Bavaria. Seen from ground level, it may strike you as a cross between a pyramid and a pagoda.

From above, you can tell that this effect is due to its having been designed, not as an edifice, but as a huge compound with concentric stages of fortification, each looming above the one before it and fronted by a roofed wall. The first line of defense was an outer moat immediately overlooked by the sannomaru or third ring of fortification, counting out from the center. Farther in, attackers would face the second ring and then an inner moat overlooked by the main ring. In the center of all this stood the keep, where a besieged lord of the domain would do whatever seemed important in the days before Twitter.

President Donald Trump's political defenses happen to take the same form. The outermost ring consists of dispirited Americans who thought they had nothing to lose by taking a flutter on a fleabag in the late presidential race. This ring will disintegrate first and seems to be in the process already. Here are people losing heart they didn't know they had as they watch their champion go from marveling that health care could be so complicated to slashing various programs they need, to digging the ground from under his own feet in search of new and bigger lies. Some of these people, the ones represented by the water in the moat, will quietly evaporate and re-condense at a safe distance from Castle Trump. Meeting them for the first time, you won't know they ever supported such a dolt. Others will manfully or womanfully admit that they made a bad choice. They can't be expected to remember what possessed them to make it, but let us hope they don't say, "Nobody knew that seeing through Donald Trump could be so complicated."

Once the outermost ring has fallen, Trumpist Republicanism is doomed, with or without Trump himself. The votes won't be there. America may get more demagogues, but their hopes will lie in running against the compromised Republican brand.

It's only a matter of time, then, till the second ring falls in its turn. Here we have an assortment of long-haul Republicans and fellow travelers: cynical but plausible politicians and party hacks joined by individual Americans who look to get rich or richer through Republican control of government. With Trumpism recognized as a fluke, these people will no longer tolerate the president's heresies and will probably use their congressional committee chairs to appear in the forefront of opposition to his misdeeds. It may not be possible for them to rehabilitate their brand in time for the mid-term elections or the next presidential election, but they'll start trying in short order. To know when Trump's second ring of fortification disintegrates, you'll need to be listening for a crisp snap.

That brings us to the one ring that will hold forever though it becomes a forgotten island. You'll recall that the Japanese-castle model includes an inner moat -- just the thing for last-ditch efforts. Within this is the main ring (honmaru) containing the castle keep, above and beyond which there is nowhere to go. Here, bitter-enders will hole up with their hero. The more privileged among them will shelter in the keep while the red-capped legions huddle on the ground in all weather, full willing to eat their hats literally but never figuratively. No doubt these legions will still be there after the occupants of the keep have taken the money and run. It's like this:

The 1970s American TV series Project UFO dramatized actual US Air Force investigations of UFO-related cases. In one, a woman reports that her husband has invested all their savings in a dubious company that claims to be developing a flying saucer. The investigators expose the scam. They show the couple that the prototype "flying saucer" is only a hollow prop once used in a movie. They even get the people’s money back. The wife thanks them, but the husband becomes furious -- saying the investigators have kept him from getting rich and traveling in outer space!

Foolish pride springs eternal in the human breast. So does bigotry awaiting its night to howl. So, since the twentieth century, does the dream of sitting in a television studio audience and paying court to a king of glitz, maybe even getting pointed at by the smirking despot as he makes his entrance. To leave when the show was over would be to leave behind the camaraderie of the dazzled and return to bleak square one. For all these reasons the smallest and bitterest of the bitter-enders will stay on, and Castle Trump will settle down to being a mad-king affair without the king.

More Awful Than Trump's Ego

It dawned on me and plunged me into darkness all at once, if you know what I mean.

There I had sat for months, thinking and talking about the danger to America and the world posed by Donald Trump's ego. I had seen the narcissism, the vanity, the craving for adulation, the selfishness that blots out other claims on his care. I had worried that the office of President of the United States would cease to function because the current occupant could not be dragged away from his reflecting pool.

Then the blow fell. It was not the first such blow by any means, but it was the one that finally brought the dawn and the darkness in quick succession and made me think, "Oh, right!" Donald Trump, in one of his early-morning screeds via the Internet, accused Barack Obama of having tapped his phones. Here was a bombshell of an accusation, hurled by the President of the United States in a cryptic message on social media (and not even his official account) without a hint of evidence to back it up. And the sign-off? Not the usual Trump boilerplate of "Sad!" or "Not nice!":

How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!

That's one president writing publicly about another. He might at least have made a Freudian slip in the direction of reality by typing, "the very scared election process."

Though much of Freudian psychology has gone the way of the five-cent cigar, it retains the key to spotting the source of greatest danger with Donald Trump. It's not his ego, which distorts his sense of values, distracts him from presidential business, and makes him prey to flatterers. It's his id.

The ego has acquired a bad name over the years, but it's a friend to man compared with the id. As long as Trump follows his ego, he'll remember to do what's good for him, and not just anything he feels like doing. While it's not altogether true that what's good for Donald Trump is good for the USA, that kind of thing is better than the possibilities that arise when he follows his id. The id, if Freud is to be believed, produces things like rage and the urge to deliver crushing blows right and left. The ego knows just how the id feels but worries about getting hurt. It looks for the lasting gratification of a net gain and skips the more fleeting gratification of a tantrum that breaks all its toys. Now, the superego yearns to do the right thing regardless of self, but never mind that. We're talking about Donald Trump.

When Trump abruptly made a grave accusation against his predecessor without any reference to evidence and apparently without having consulted anyone who is supposed to be working with him, he was in mid-tantrum. He wasn't egoistically demanding notice, much less was he craftily scheming to gain an advantage over his enemies. He was mentally rolling on the floor of the nursery, all alone but for his id.

This is bad. Watching a president waste four years in narcissistic distraction is not good, but this takes us into the realm of the bad. There's no need to survey the harm that can be done by such a person armed with such power. What we need to do is promote self-interested solidarity among the rest of us, regardless of our usual differences. We needn't trouble our superegos about this. Our egos can handle the job nicely. Survival is the order of the day.

While an id-driven presidency is -- for want of a better word -- bad, it's probably also self-correcting if other powerful people will just act in timely fashion (before the button is pushed, and not after). It's quite possible that this latest, most extreme incident has already tipped the balance and started the wheels turning behind the scenes in Washington. So many people have so much to lose by waiting too long. What's most important, Republicans must see that any further attempt to harness Donald Trump to their own purposes can only end in a wreck. People in the administration, if they're not afraid for their lives and their souls by now, must at least see that their careers depend on emerging as noble conspirators who saved the day.

The obvious solution is to invoke the Twenty-fifth Amendment with an unanswerable show of bipartisan solidarity. If that move is successful (after the president contests it), we'll be faced with a President Pence. But that will at least take us back into the realm of the not good.