The death cult around Trump
There’s a ghastly sense — I’ll try not to sound too Gothic but I’ll fail — of death around Donald Trump’s presidency: it’s a proto-death cult.
It began early. “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” he said at a 2016 rally.
He defended the racist marchers in Charlottesville, N.C., one of whom ran down and killed Heather Heyer. He reflexively supported the most recent string of police executions that began with Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, then seemed to escalate. He identifies with official killers. “We sent in the U.S. Marshals,” he said about the death of an alleged shooter from antifa. “They knew who he was; they didn’t want to arrest him, and in 15 minutes that ended.”
He recently reinstated executions for federal crimes — six during summer and early fall. There’d been none for 17 years. He executed more people than other presidents had in the previous 57. It wasn’t obviously political: support for the death penalty is falling in the U.S. and the White House didn’t play the executions up. It felt like something he wanted to do.
(Of course deathliness doesn’t attach only to Trump. When Bill Clinton ran in 1992, he flew home to Arkansas for the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a Black man who’d been lobotomized and said he wanted to save dessert at his last meal “for later.” Clinton wanted to rebut his image as a squishy liberal. And Barack Obama launched far more drone strikes than George W. Bush — in my opinion, to offset his failure to start new wars, like earlier presidents. He said he found out he was “really good at killing.” But Trump’s deathliness is his lifeline.)
Then came COVID-19. We don’t know why Trump refused to make war on it. He treated it more like an honoured guest or old friend. He couldn’t deny the deaths but wouldn’t vilify them; they could’ve been worse, he said, and would vanish soon — as if they were the prison sentences of trusted retainers like Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, who he pardoned.
He caught it and called it a blessing from God.
But the overriding mystery is: why does he gather his devout followers in vulnerable crowds and expose them to potential death? To himself! They catch it and may die, like Herman Cain. It’s as though the true sign of their devotion isn’t just that they’re willing to die for him. That’s the bare minimum; it’s taken for granted. It’s that they must be willing to be killed by him.
That’s crazy but it’s not irrational. It’s the logic of extreme narcissism. A narcissism as great as Trump’s — and there’s none greater — can’t be satisfied. It seeks more incessantly. Mere adoration and votes won’t ever suffice. His self-doubt and anxiety about his worth always drill deeper. As his biographer said, “If you’re a human being, be glad you’re not Donald Trump.”
I’ve no idea if the sacrificial cults in old Hollywood films are historically valid. But at least in them, a human sacrifice is made by a priest to a god for a community. In Trump’s case, that’s excluded. A greater being would obliterate his fragile sense of worth. It must be he who’s supreme and sacrifices others.
I feel strangely comfortable writing in this wildly theoretical way about Trump.
Only he could make such arrant speculation seem unavoidable.
Finally, a thought about why they — the devout — accept it from him: reckless endangerment of their health and survival. When he says, as he did last week, that “people are tired of hearing from Fauci and all these idiots”; I think what they — the unshakable followers, not those who took a chance on him last time and are now reconsidering — hear is: “People are tired of hearing from Fauci and all these (snotty experts who think that YOU are) idiots.”
He’s responding not to their sense of dignity, but their sense of humiliation; at least he gives them that. Any recognition is better than none. And of course, it must come not from their own dubious stratum but from a loftier level. He stoops to conquer and, if it comes to that, annihilate.
A narcissism as great as Donald Trump’s can’t be satisfied. It seeks more incessantly. Mere adoration and votes won’t ever suffice