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.
