16 ingredients of Trump
“I play to people’s fantasies … People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.” Donald J. Trump, the Art of the Deal.
1. TV. (Trump is the TV-addicted Chauncey Gardiner (Chance) in Jerzy Kosinski’s “Being There” — played to perfection by Peter Sellers in the movie version of the novel.)
2. Booklessness. (Name the last book Donald read. Was it “Oh, the Places You’ll Go” by Dr. Seuss?)
3. Breitbart. Fox News. The Dark Web. Twitter. (A tweet is a form of touch.)
4. World Wrestling Entertainment. (Spectacle is all.)
5. The National Enquirer. (“Alternative facts” are more interesting than facts; fake news is more interesting than real news.) 6. Playboy. ( Just the pictures!) 7. Circus. (As the Romans knew, circuses are more important than bread. When the natives get restless, throw in a few crucifixions or Tomahawks or the Mother of All Bombs, and everybody is happy.)
8. Shock Doctrine. (Things are bad, very bad; they’re getting worse; drastic, radical action is necessary. Translation: blacks, Mexicans, immigrants, Muslims, drugs, rape, crime, etc. are getting out of control and only Trump can control them.)
9. Repetition. (The more you repeat a lie the truer it gets.) 10. Ads. (Style beats substance.) 11. Brands. (Shtick sells — orange hair, beautiful babes, private jet, gold-plated everything.) 12. Fantasy. (Fantasy swallows reality.) 13. No interior — hence, no self-doubt, selfquestioning, or self-criticism.
14. Conspiracy theories. (More colourful than any other kind of theory.)
15. Grievance. Resentment. Victimhood. (The conviction that everyone is against him.) 16. Theatre. (The showman is the show.) Of all the items on my list, the one that interests me most is Trump being bookless. He may have read a few things other than Dr. Seuss, but not many. He may read bullets, headlines, summaries and memos, but how much else? His head, I suspect, is more empty of books than any other president in recent memory. I assume he has read Norman Vincent Peale’s “The Power of Positive Thinking”; he certainly lives by it. The Bible? I doubt it. I suspect he opened a Bible for the first time in a long time when he ran for the Republican Party leadership.
Trump stands in sharp contrast with his predecessor, Barack Obama, a man who reads books and writes them. Books were instrumental in the formation of Obama’s mind; he reads broadly and deeply in history, biography, fiction and poetry. He has read the Bible, probably the Qur’an and Buddhist scriptures as well, along with Joseph Campbell’s four volumes of “The Masks of God.” He corresponds with writers — Marilynne Robinson, for instance, with whom he has conducted dialogues on American life, history and religious beliefs.
He has written (not ghostwritten) two superb volumes: “The Audacity of Hope” and “Dreams from My Father” in addition to his letter to his children entitled “Of Thee I Sing,” among others. His prose is rhythmic and compelling; it has the charm and warmth of his speeches.
The prose reflects the quality of his mind: thoughtful, balanced, connective, open to nuance and complexity. He weighs one thought against another, he examines details, he draws analogies, he questions, he makes connections, he takes an historical perspective. With Barack Obama you see what a book-built mind can offer the public: honesty. Life is complex, problems aren’t easy to solve, solutions are temporary.
With Donald J. Trump you see what a television-built mind (perhaps now a Twitterbuilt mind) offers the public: impulsiveness, inability to focus on any one thing for any length of time, disdain for detail, ignorance of history and so on. Trump speaks in sound bites and slogans. His tweets may be the single most memorable prose he has constructed. His speeches (when he is off script and teleprompter) are entertaining theatre, but lack ideas, substantive thought and even coherence. What comes across is his own neediness, his need for adoration and praise, and anger at anyone who has a different point of view than his.
There appears to be no capacity for selfreflection or self-criticism in Donald J. Trump because his mind has no context or historical perspective to place whatever new impulse jumps into his consciousness. More man-child than adult man, he has no ideas, no bedrock convictions, other than the willto-power, the will to attain it and to hold it.