You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to grasp that not in recent memory has the state of our country been so intertwined with the particular psychology of a single individual. As a general proposition, there’s no excuse pretending we don’t know what Donald Trump is like — we’ve had nonstop coverage of him for the last year and a half. He’s petty, vindictive, belligerent, incurious, illiberal, egomaniacal, narcissistic, and otherwise temperamentally unqualified to hold a position of public power — and now he holds the most powerful position in the world. Apart from the last days of Nixon, we haven’t been in an analogous situation in the nuclear age. And as we’re reminded in this article, don’t go thinking Trump is going to change. I’ve thought a few times recently whether the election wasn’t decided so much on politics, as on voters’ basic ability to perceive whether a candidate was an unstable personality (or was a con man). . .
Speaking of the challenge of dealing with such a deranged personality, though, here’s something that’s been building at the edge of my consciousness since Trump’s inauguration, and that’s finally heaved itself up from the tidal pools of early mentation into the full light of what the fuck: how remarkable it is that a president acting as an America-first authoritarian nationalist is indistinguishable from a deranged egomaniac power-tripping his way through his first days in office. What we’ve seen so far is an injudicious, destabilizing, self-aggrandizing assertion of power, whether it’s on the part of the presidency or on behalf of the United States operating as a global power. So although this may be the mode of governing to which Trump’s personality takes him, it’s also a fundamentally knowable one — an authoritarian, demagoguing, self-serving approach to power. I’m hoping that some of the things that make Trump so dangerous — his lack of restraint and discipline, his need to assert himself against all threats — will ultimately weaken him through overextension and making enemies of too many people in our country.