Trump I Shat My Pants and Id Do It Again

Source: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain, free image

There's something of an industry devoted to the psyche of President Trump. He's an executive-in-chief like no other. He doesn't read, appears to be ignorant of history (American, European, Middle-Eastern, Asian, whatever) and cannot control his Twitter finger. Add to this, his lack of concern for consistency (which CNN gleefully exposes through side-by-side video clips of his self-contradictions), his sensitivity to criticism, bullying and foul language, and obsession with media coverage, and it's no wonder that we seek answers.

Is he narcissistic—meaning obsessed with his personal image and reputation? Surely, yes. Does he suffer from ADD? Considering the way he speaks and what some have described as his short attention span, maybe. Is he sociopathic—given his apparent lack of concern for others and how they might perceive his (unwanted) attention? In view of the Access Hollywood tapes, I'd say there is definitely a problem in this area. Could he be suffering from early-stage Alzheimer's? Only a brain autopsy will tell.

To date, no psychological or neurological category seems to explain or contain him.

Here's a different hypothesis: what if Trump simply lacks depth, including the capacity for inwardness or self-reflection?

I began to entertain this idea after seeing the movie "The Circle" (2017) and reading the novel (2013) by Dave Eggers on which it is based. In the film, which I viewed before reading the book, the heroine Mae Holland (played by Emma Watson of "Harry Potter" fame) finds her dream job at a high-tech firm called "The Circle." Think Apple/Google. She is easily seduced by the atmosphere of the campus, which provides for her every need: personal, social, medical, political. She hardly maintains her apartment off-campus, as life at The Circle is so encompassing. Gradually, she buys into its ethos of "transparency," which is a form of surveillance, in which she surrenders every aspect of her life to the scrutiny of millions of viewers who subscribe to her personal site. The attention she receives is intoxicating, to the point that she betrays a former boyfriend to an audience of global viewers by tracking him down in real-time and hounding him to his death.

As viewers, we know that there is something wrong with Mae's uncritical exposure of her personal life, but she does not. Eventually, a mole in the organization informs her of the global ambitions of the founders of The Circle and the corruption of their organization. Mae exposes them, as we want her to do, but the outcome is unclear. Surveillance, she learns, is a hair's breadth away from world domination, but the film ends ambiguously. While Mae exposes her immediate supervisors, she does not abandon the organization. In the final scenes, we see her waving from her kayak to the drone that continues to spy on her from the cloudless sky above.

"The Circle" poses questions about how much we want our personal information to be available to anyone and everyone via the Internet and the agreements we sign without thinking that enable access to them. It also asks questions about our involvement in social media and what kinds of gratification they serve. How important is it for us to be "liked?" And what price do we pay for this?

Eggers' novel is even more dystopian than the movie. In it, Mae hears the message from the mole in the organization about its totalitarian aims but ignores him. She also suppresses her unease about the life she has chosen. These are represented by moments of profound disorientation—a dark night of the soul—which she manages to dismiss through a kind of manic immersion in social media activity.

I can't say that the movie, which disappeared from the mainstream theaters in Minneapolis after a week or so, is all that great. But it bothered me and continues to nag at me as I read, watch and listen to the daily news.

Eggers put his finger on something we don't want to think about, in the same way that his character Mae wants to avoid the implications of her immersion in the "transparency" movement of the organization she embraces. Here, in Eggers' words, is the awareness she struggles to repress:

It was 1:11 when the blackness swept through her. She closed her eyes and saw the tear, now filled with light. She opened her eyes again. She took a swallow of water but it only seemed to heighten her panic….What was the sound she was hearing? It was a scream muffled by fathomless waters, that high-pitched scream of a million drowned voices. (378)

Only a renewed frenzy of social media activity restores her equilibrium.

I participate in social media as much as anyone my age—and I'm only a few years older than President Trump. But here is what I see as a crucial difference between us. I've always been a reader—of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, history, biography. Early in my life, this practice introduced me to the idea of inwardness, that is to say, an awareness of the complexity of human consciousness, motivations, and behavior — my own and others'.

Our president gleans information about the world and his fellow human beings from "the shows," meaning the flat screen of his TV. As a consequence, he appears to have developed a reactive personality style—meaning that he responds naively to what he sees or hears without thinking before he speaks or acts. In this sense, he resembles Mae, who flattens her experience to fit the norms and expectations of her social media environment.

There are ways to describe such a personality structure in contemporary psychoanalytic theory. They involve a failure to achieve the stage of development in which we come to an awareness that the "good" and "bad" elements that we project into our environment live within ourselves. Lacking this, we tend to spew our anxieties into the world around us, dividing it into those who love us and those who hate us. Another developmental model attributes the inability to understand the mental state of oneself or others to repeated failures of attunement between an infant and its caregivers.

Theory aside, "The Circle" as novel and film eerily presages the phenomenon of President Trump. He, like Mae, seems to need constant approval in order to maintain his inner equilibrium—which might also help to explain his need to hold campaign rallies long after his election.

Yet we might also infer from this compulsion that he does have an inner life, one in which he experiences both self-love and self-hate.

In the dark before dawn, alone with his iPhone, does he (also like Mae) succumb to inner demons? If so, his early morning Twitter rants may represent a desperate plea to be seen, heard, and responded to—hence stabilized and affirmed.

Then again, maybe he's just shallow.

What do you think?

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Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/minding-memory/201707/what-is-wrong-donald-trump

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