Seeing Trump govern is like watching a house fire

Donald J. Trump is a simple man. His attitudes are an open book and his appetites are easy to read. All he wants is everything: all the money, all the power, all the adulation the world can shower on him.

The result is a presidency like no other in American history, one that is by turns impetuous, improvised, and at times almost whimsical, depending on the state of his voracious ego. The president’s new ballroom will reportedly be open and airy, but it may as well be a house of mirrors, because Trump is constitutionally unable to see anything but his own reflection.

It’s been barely a year since Trump’s election. For his detractors, outrage fatigue

Donald Trump has run a presidency like no other in American history. ILLUSTRATION BY KRISTA VOLENSKI WILCOX, AND GETTY IMAGES

set in early, but the destruction of the East Wing is clearly emblematic of broader damage. We are witnessing in real time the demolition of traditions and institutions as old as the Republic. Trump insults old friends, embraces old enemies, rejects settled scientific facts, deports thousands of valued workers, and terrifies millions of others.

He has normalized traits once considered at least unseemly in a world leader, among them greed, revenge, lust, and hate. He has managed, by dint of constant repetition, to create an alternate reality that his backers find compelling, a world in which great cities are cesspools, immigrants are rapists and murderers, and America was until recently a loser on the global stage — assertions that bear no tangible connection to reality.

The question is why a slim majority of voters gave this mendacious, selfdealing, patently amoral egomaniac the most powerful job in the world. Explanations abound. Many cradle Republicans, including some in my family, couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a Democrat, especially a woman of color. Other voters simply wanted “change,” the details be damned.

Still others responded to Trump’s well-burnished image as an outsider, even an outlaw. I saw a T-shirt last summer printed with portraits of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance over the legend “It’s going to take a convicted felon and a hillbilly to clean up this mess.”

Trump is the symptom of a troubling dynamic in America

All plausible explanations, but there are deeper, darker reasons for the MAGA ticket’s success, and they suggest that Donald Trump, for all his toxic bluster and blather, is not the real problem. He is better understood as the symptom of a troubling dynamic at work in our nation, one with deep roots and enormous staying power. It would be comforting to think that Trumpism will end with Trump, but that is hopelessly wishful thinking.

Earlier this year, partly in preparation for a trip to India, I read Isabel Wilkerson’s book “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” a study of structural inequality in the United States that includes comparisons with modern India and Nazi Germany. One section stopped me in my tracks. Wilkerson was citing the work of Erich Fromm, a German-Jewish social psychologist who fled the Third Reich and found a successful career as an author and professor in America. Since he died in 1980, Fromm presumably knew little or nothing about Donald Trump, but he seems to have anticipated our current president in detail. Fromm dwells on the concept of narcissism, which he explains as an egotism so intense that it creates “a lack of genuine interest in the outside world.” Narcissists, he writes, are “preoccupied with themselves and pay little attention to others, except as echoes of themselves.” They judge everything in terms of whether it feeds or starves their egos, and they often identify with some specific trait they find worthy of special admiration: their eloquence, their athletic prowess, or even, Fromm writes, their hair. The flip side of their self-absorption is a hypersensitivity to criticism and a need to denigrate and demonize people and groups who are “not me.” Narcissists gain elevation by placing others on the rungs below them.

The individual malady has obvious parallels to what Erich Fromm calls “social narcissism.” It’s natural to take pride in your homeland, but patriotism all too often curdles into nationalism. Anyone who seriously believes in “my country right or wrong” is likely to overvalue his own nation and devalue the rest of the world, just as the narcissistic individual can’t see anything beyond the walls of his own ego.

The narcissist’s need to elevate his own status at the expense of others can also produce savage inequalities. In America, Fromm maintains, white narcissism hardened long ago into a caste system that put people of color securely at the bottom — the same position occupied by the lowest caste in India and Jews in Nazi Germany.

Millions have lost faith in the American dream

With those concepts as context, consider what has happened in America over the last few decades. The sad fact is that millions of people have lost their faith in the American Dream. Expectations have shrunk dramatically for working-class Americans. The economy has shifted from hand work to head work, wages have been stagnant for a generation or more, and higher education has become the province of those who can afford it.

There have been dislocations of equal import in the social order. After decades in the closet, gay Americans have stepped into the sunlight, gender identity has acquired a novel fluidity, and a Black man spent eight years in the White House, sparking visions of a diverse, equitable, and inclusive future for all.

For hidebound traditionalists, it was all too much. Preying on their fears of being left behind or left out altogether, Donald Trump, his own wealth notwithstanding, crafted a message of populist resentment that attracted a legion of disaffected followers. Race is a key component of that message.

Why has Trump declared holy war on DEI initiatives? Because he is responding, even pandering, to the need of his base to harden the shell of whiteness that secures their status as the dominant caste, whatever their actual circumstances. That status is threatened when people of color rise too high or too fast. Even though Black Americans have been forced to swim upstream for centuries, the idea of special measures to accelerate their progress is anathema. Many whites ask, often unconsciously, “If I can’t feel superior to the old scapegoats, then who am I?” Eliminating DEI programs is a blatant attempt to soothe those narcissistic fears.

Narcissism on the right, superiority on the left

It was the historical moment that made Trumpism possible, not the other way around. In a period of pervasive uncertainty and rapid social change, it’s understandable that anyone out of step with the times would turn instinctively to a leader who promised a return to the old order — the same mistake too many Germans made nearly a century ago.

“The leader,” Erich Fromm writes, “is then admired by the group which projects its narcissism onto him…. The greater the leader, the greater the follower. Personalities who as individuals are particularly narcissistic are the most qualified to fill this function. The narcissism of the leader who is convinced of his greatness, and who has no doubts, is precisely what attracts the narcissism of those who submit to him.”

A chilling analysis, I would say, and one that Erich Fromm offered in 1964, when “The Heart of Man” was published. (Donald Trump was still in military school.) Fromm didn’t live to see it in America, but he posits an entire movement based on the need of bruised egos to reassert their presumed supremacy. The rabid support of MAGA Republicans keeps Trump’s ego inflated, leaving the rest of us to cope with what is basically a personality disorder. Trump Derangement Syndrome? Absolutely.

And so we live with the tragedy that a majority of voters in 2024 thought so little of their own government that they elected someone sworn to cut it to ribbons, and he hasn’t even finished his first year in office. Is there a way out of this morass? Certainly it won’t be by explaining to the MAGA faithful the error of their ways and expecting them to change. That would only harden their resentment and expose the narcissism of America’s liberals, many of whom relish their superiority to voters Hillary Clinton once dismissed as a “basket of deplorables.”

Democrats must focus on bread-and-butter concerns

One possible way forward is for Democrats — currently the only viable alternative — to acknowledge the fear and trepidation underlying Trumpism and to offer programs that respond to the bread-and-butter concerns of “average” Americans. Those might include more affordable college tuition and more robust support for technical education. Taking the country from merely woke to genuinely awake will require more imagination and bolder thinking than the left has shown to date, and it must be done under the barrage of misinformation launched from the White House every day.

In the meantime, watching Donald Trump govern is like watching a house fire. We stand by in horrified fascination as he lights match after match and sets every room in the place ablaze. The usual firefighters, the ones in black robes, have largely ignored the alarm, and the better angels of both parties in Congress seem just as impassive. That leaves the loyal opposition with no choice but to resist, resist, and resist some more, knowing that the house on fire is our house, the one that belongs to all of us, the only one we have.

Reach Milwaukee writer and historian John Gurda at mail@johngurda.com