Biden may be ‘messy,’ but Trump is dangerous
my front-page New York Times story back in 1987. Biden, as he did on other occasions, got swept away with puffing himself up and sprinted over the factual line. He overidentified with aspects of Kinnock’s life in Wales — fusing their backgrounds — and borrowed some Celtic lyricism.
I wrote another story at the same time about Biden lifting chunks of Robert Kennedy speeches. But that was the fault of his speechwriter Pat Caddell, who sprinkled in Kennedy passages without Biden knowing.
Biden’s gaffes, logorrhea, puffery and handsiness are part of the messy package that is Uncle Joe. So are his empathy, sentimentality and loyalty.
Biden’s fabulist flights were an effort to make himself look better. Trump’s are more audacious — and dangerous. It’s the difference between fibs and whoppers, white lies and white supremacy.
Every day, Trump wakes up and constructs an alternative universe where his crowds are bigger, his poll results are better, the virus is evaporating, the testing is fantastic, it’s totally safe for kids to go back to school, and he’s doing the greatest job of any president in history.
“Toxic positivity,” the president’s niece Mary Trump calls it in her new family memoir, “Too Much and Never Enough,” which exposes the gruesome underbelly of the president’s gilded facade.
Mary Trump is the daughter of the president’s older brother, Fred Trump Jr., who died an alcoholic after a lifetime of his father’s abuse. With a doctorate in clinical psychology, she diagnoses her uncle as a narcissist, of course, but also quite possibly having “antisocial personality disorder.”
“The country is now suffering from the same toxic positivity that my grandfather deployed specifically to drown out his ailing wife, torment his dying son, and damage past healing the psyche of his favorite child, Donald J. Trump,” she concludes. The inability of the “court jester from Queens,” as Mary calls him, to succeed without being heavily subsidized by his father created a tension where he knew he was inadequate but could never admit it.
“At a very deep level,” Mary wrote, “his bragging and false bravado are not directed at the audience in front of him but at his audience of one: his longdead father.”
A Washington Post story a few days ago underscored her point that he is the same “desperate” little boy. The story recounted that Trump sees himself as a victim of the pandemic, and his mood is so “woe is me” that advisers tried to cheer him up with special events — “bringing 18-wheelers onto the White House South Lawn in mid-april or creating social media videos that feature throngs of his adoring fans.”
His father’s racism infected him, and the patriarch promoted a warped idea of manliness. The president’s cracks about “ugly women” and his disrespectful behavior in business were meant to make him look tough.
Fred Trump Jr. was destroyed by it. But the president is trying to destroy us with it, with his absurd philosophy that masks are unmanly.
Biden, who assiduously stays masked, has never been a divider. Indeed, there were times, as with the Anita Hill hearings and the Iraq War vote, that he leaned too far into comity.
But Trump divides with feral pleasure. “The atmosphere of division my grandfather created in the Trump family is the water in which Donald has always swum,” Mary Trump wrote, “and division continues to benefit him at the expense of everybody else.”
Maureen Dowd writes for The New York Times. newsservice@ nytimes.com