In a new interview, Mary Trump lays bare
our national nightmare: Her uncle
Opinion by
Columnist
July 17, 2020 at 9:12 a.m. CDT
Let’s
call them President Trump’s twin pathologies: The absolute refusal to admit to
any sort of fallibility no matter what, and the unshakable faith in lying as an
instrument of power that can be wielded with impunity. In her
much-anticipated interview with Rachel Maddow, Mary Trump explained how each of
these functions for her uncle with unsettling clarity.
The
ways in which these tendencies poisoned our response to one of the most
monumental domestic crises of modern times, when understood in the terms
offered by the president’s niece, help explain and expose how we ended up in
the current catastrophe.
With
coronavirus cases hitting a record high of more than 70,000
new cases on Thursday, Mary Trump bluntly diagnosed the
president’s role in the worsening crisis, insisting that he is simply
“incapable of succeeding” at taming the virus, She said this:
It would have required
taking responsibility, which in his mind would have meant admitting a mistake,
which in his mind would be admitting weakness, which in my family was
essentially punished with the death penalty.
Mary
Trump also endeavored to explain all the president’s lies. She
recounted that her uncle once randomly lied about her, which prompted Maddow to
note that he seemed to “take pleasure in you being helpless” about it.
“It
really is a power play,” the president’s niece declared, adding: “Most of the
time people don’t correct him, which completely plays into his hands. Because
then he can do it with impunity.”
Countless
journalists and armchair psychologists have ventured similar interpretations.
But when someone with such unique qualifications — a clinical psychologist who
had a front-row view of the forces that shaped the president — offers such a
startling reading of the most powerful head case on the planet, we should
probably take notice.
What’s
notable is that the known facts very much comport with these explanations. In
turn, those known facts become more intelligible when we’re armed with this
understanding.
We still haven’t explained what’s happening
In
retrospect, it’s clear that again and again, those tendencies have infected the
response with a kind of toxicity that we still struggle to explain in plain
language — but that clearly pulled us toward the current catastrophe.
In
January, when Trump’s advisers alerted him to the pandemic, he raged that
public warnings would rattle the markets (and his reelection hopes). Trump’s
faith in his ability to warp reality with impunity irresistibly tugged him
toward another way: He denied the existence of the threat for many weeks, letting it rampage out of control.
Mary
Trump helps us understand why: Faith in these powers of deception were built up
over years of wielding them with little consequence, and this became an
exercise of power in and of itself, a kind of default setting he can always
fall back upon.
It’s also
clear in retrospect that when Trump declared in
March that “I don’t take responsibility at all” for the epic failure to
mobilize testing, it was a seminal moment, a declaration that he would
not do this at any point henceforth, no matter what.
Mary
Trump helps us understand why: Taking responsibility — undergoing a major
course correction — would have constituted an unthinkable admission of failure.
The nightmare continues
We’re
still trapped in this very dynamic. Even as the coronavirus surges in many states — in part due to hasty
reopenings demanded by Trump himself — the president continues to urge a rapid
reopening of businesses and schools. Once again, we see Trump’s unshakable
faith in his ability to dictate how real-world conditions are received by
voters — through sheer force of lying.
And
Trump continues to do so even as there is no serious
national plan for testing or for reopening schools, both of which
would facilitate what Trump himself is demanding far more
safely. Mary Trump helps us understand why: Such plans would constitute an
unthinkable admission of previous fallibility.
In her
new book, Trump’s niece reportedly
explains all this in depth, narrating a tortured process by which
Trump learned to earn the approval of his father. This “destroyed” the future
president and fried his “ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum
of human emotion.”
Whatever
the truth of that, we’re seeing Trump’s lack of basic
humanity (to put it in layperson’s terms) in far starker relief
than ever before as the misery and devastation mount. The refusal to admit to
error or change course — and the unabated lying as a means of enabling it — are
surely tangled up in that.
The lies are failing
And
yet, a new Post/ABC
News poll finds that only 38 percent of Americans approve of
his handling of the coronavirus, while 60 percent disapprove, a dramatic slide
over the past few months. Meanwhile, 63 percent say it’s more important to take
steps to control the spread of the virus even if it hurts the economy, and 64
percent no longer trust what Trump is telling them about it.
Yet
Trump appears utterly undiminished in his faith in his ability to steamroll the
former sentiment with the force of his lies, even though barely anybody
believes him anymore.
In
short, the nation is tiring of being trapped in this echoing fun house of Trump
pathologies. But if Mary Trump’s diagnosis is right, we’re stuck in it with no
exit in sight — or at least (hopefully) not until January.
