Make America narcissistic again
We are all narcissists at one point or another in our lives. It’s the final part of this last sentence that is key. Most people overcome this inherent narcissism, this grandiose and solipsistic focus on themselves, the voice saying the world revolves around me, somewhere around the time they are getting out of diapers.
Can cultures and entire nations be narcissistic? Certainly, they can be overly focused on themselves. America is like this. In some ways, it is justified in thinking highly of itself and its history. In other ways, it is not (think: slavery).
The symbolic ideal of America—the famous “shining city on the hill”— remains its strength and gift to the world, though such a gift can also be the giver’s curse. A culture used to being on top is paranoid about signs of downfall. That paranoia then makes it vulnerable to hucksters promising to renew its faith in itself.
About five and a half years ago, one such huckster rode down his golden escalator and into American infamy forever.
The current American president is a just reflection of his nation’s uglier side, the Mr. Hyde facet of its split personality. Donald Trump is bigoted, amoral, and notoriously self-centered. He needs to be told, at every turn, how he is the best at everything. America views itself as the great exception of history, just as Mr. Trump does, but at least America has some reason to see itself that way.
Trump’s narcissism was perfectly distilled in his recent brush with the coronavirus. Many will recall that after Trump’s win in 2016, there was real hope that he would magically transform into something like a normal president—that the weight of the moment would efface all his profound and manifest character flaws.
Fat chance. Likewise, when the world heard the news that he had contracted coronavirus, there was real hope that he would be sobered by the experience, that he would start to feel genuine empathy for the 200,000+ Americans who had already succumbed to the disease.
Fat chance of that too. Trump received the best medical care available in the country (possibly the world), overcame the virus, then concluded from this experience that COVID-19 is not worth worrying about.
Of course, it is not surprising that he reacted this way. For a narcissist like Trump, the personal equals the universal. His experience of reality is the only possible one. At its heart, narcissism seems to be a profound failure of the imagination. Whatever it is, it has rendered the American president incapable of learning or changing, and that makes him especially dangerous.
What’s worse, Trump also demands that his followers—no, his entire nation—constantly reinforce and parrot his highly esoteric views. He doesn’t just want support or votes: he wants Americans to see the world exclusively through his eyes.
It’s a bit like that 1999 movie “Being John Malkovich,” except in 2020 it’s “Being Donald Trump.” And that means regressing to a simpler and rosier time, when everything outside your personal experience simply does not exist; when the entire universe centres around fulfilling your needs and soothing your emotions; and when you still get to walk around in diapers. How fun!
Recently, the president participated in a Town Hall on NBC news where he, again, tried to foist his child-like conception of the world on his fellow Americans. Masks, he claimed, are not effective public health tools because of a few anecdotes he happened to read on Twitter. Qanon, a truly bonkers group of conspiracy theorists, is not a threat to truth and democracy because they say nice things about him. Death, in the form of a highly transmissible virus, does not stalk the world because he, personally, managed to overcome it just fine.
Up here in Canada, we can’t do much to prevent Trump from dragging his nation deeper into infantile fantasy. We can only hope that enough Americans— and those in the battleground states especially—remember a time when their country was still run by grownups. And also that they remember to vote.