ALL THE PRESIDENT’S NARCISSISM
As The Wall dominated the week’s news, a pitiful juxtaposition of two realities — one the hard truth, the other a lie — emerged to clarify the destructiveness of the American president’s toxic narcissism.
Federal workers facing their first payday without a check were selling their possessions on social media so they could pay their bills. Donald Trump told NBC News correspondent Kelly O’Donnell that he can “relate” to the unpaid workers.
The president added: “And I’m sure that the people that are on the receiving end will make adjustments. They always do... Many of those people that won’t be receiving a paycheck, many of those people agree 100 percent with what I’m doing.”
No, no, no and no.
That is, no, billionaires can’t relate to people dependent on their next paycheck, unless perhaps they became billionaires after first serving time in the middle class. Obviously, this isn’t Trump’s resume. Though he says he made a fortune, it surely helped to begin with a multimillion-dollar starter loan from dear ol’ dad.
And, no, people won’t make adjustments when they can’t. For the four out of five American workers who live paycheck to paycheck, there aren’t many ways to adjust.
Thirdly, no, they don’t understand what you’re doing because it makes no sense. Trump’s purely extortionist maneuver — hand over $5.7 billion for a wall or I’ll furlough everybody — doesn’t actually make the U.S.-Mexico border a “national emergency” as Trump has considered declaring.
Finally, though some off-payroll folks may agree that border security needs tightening and may even support some sort of new barrier, the pertinent question hasn’t been
properly posed: Would you still support the wall if it meant that you’d indefinitely be unemployed or
continue working for no pay ?DoI hear a You betcha? Didn’t think so.
Trump’s imperviousness to others’ misfortunes is by now legendary. What other president would toss rolls of paper towels to hurricane victims? But then, narcissists see only their own suffering, always someone else’s fault — empathy is for schmucks.
The wall, meanwhile, is subterfuge for his personal fulfillment. Once envisioned as a massive concrete wall with a “big, beautiful door,” it lately has morphed into a hodgepodge of found objects: metal slats here, some cyclone fencing there, here a bit of steel — and over there, maybe, a bit of Papier-mache.
The specter of the hyped-up, Central American caravan that kept hysterics busy with images of terrorists, rapists and body snatchers seemed to vaporize after the midterm elections.
Trump supporters do deserve our sympathies. Though many disavow his behavior yet remain committed to a conservative Supreme Court, they’re stuck defying logic and defending the untenable. The man they must pretend to love seems to loathe them. Evidence is abundant and clear in his coldhearted shutdown. And we’ve seen that Trump will throw anyone under the bus to get his way.
Meanwhile, facts rarely furrow the president’s brow. Fact: The number of illegal immigrants from Mexico has decreased over the past decade by 1.5 million, says the Pew Research Center. Fact: The number of illegal immigrants entering the U.S. via Canada, nearly half of them Mexican, has increased by 142 percent since 2017, according to CBS News. For about $300, Mexican citizens can fly to Toronto or Montreal without need of a visa and then relatively easily sashay into the U.S.
Would Trump shut down the government for a northern wall?
Of course not. This is because the wall was a campaign slogan created by a guy who never expected to become president. Now that he faces possible rejection, it has become a metaphor for his identity. To fail would be to suffer narcissistic injury, which, given Trump’s immaturity and predilection to punch back, could lead to a real national crisis.