The
Most Illuminating Moment of the Debate
Donald
Trump sees everything—even his own children—as a reflection of himself.
OCTOBER 1, 2020
Staff writer at The Atlantic
The
moments after your first child is born are humbling and overwhelming, the
emotional equivalent of staring directly into the sun. You realize that you are
suddenly responsible for a human life that you helped create, a sliver of two
souls smuggled into another body, a person you will love and protect
desperately for the rest of your life.
Shortly
after Donald and Ivana Trump’s son was born, however, the future president had
an unusual concern for a parent: What if this kid grows up and
embarasses me?
“What
should we name him?” Donald asked, according to Ivana’s memoir, Raising
Trump. When Ivana suggested Donald Jr., the real-estate heir responded, “What
if he is a loser?”
That
anecdote helps explain one of the more memorable exchanges in Tuesday night’s
presidential debate, as well as Trump’s approach to governance. The president’s
Democratic rival, Joe Biden, sought to criticize Trump’s remarks about U.S.
service members being “losers,” as first reported by The Atlantic. In
doing so, Biden brought up his late son, Beau, who died of a brain tumor after
earning a Bronze Star in the Army National Guard.
“My son
was in Iraq and spent a year there,” Biden said to Trump, raising his voice.
“He got the Bronze Star. He got a medal. He was not a loser. He was a patriot.
And the people left behind there were heroes.”
In an
attempt to neutralize the attack, Trump changed the subject—to Biden’s other
son, Hunter. “Hunter got thrown out of the military; he was thrown out,
dishonorably discharged for cocaine use,” he spat out.
To a
person who feared sharing his name with his son at the moment of his birth,
because the child might turn out to be a “loser,” that attack must have seemed
devastating. But normal parents don’t stop loving their children because they
do bad things. They love them anyway. That’s what being a parent is.
Biden
responded by reaffirming his love for his surviving son. “My son, like a lot of
people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem,” Biden
responded. “He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it. And I’m proud
of him. I’m proud of my son.”
Biden is
a mediocre politician. His two prior presidential runs were failures. He has a
tendency toward exaggeration to the point of dishonesty, whether overstating his role in the mid-century
civil-rights movement or the struggle against South African apartheid. Before becoming
vice president to Barack Obama, Biden backed some of the worst policy decisions
of the past 30 years—including the 2005 bankruptcy bill, the 1994 crime bill, and the invasion of Iraq.
But when
Biden speaks of loss and pain—of Beau, or of the car accident that killed his
wife and daughter—he becomes deeply compelling; as Fintan O’Toole wrote, Biden’s grief is “real
and rooted and fundamentally decent.” After eight months of funerals, for
hundreds of thousands of American families, the kind of grief that Biden speaks
of, the kind that accompanies the loss of a loved one, is no longer distant.
The president stood in front of that grieving nation, and taunted a father
while he was speaking of his lost son. Before the eyes of a nation struggling
with an opioid epidemic, he mocked a dad for having a kid with a drug problem.
More than
any other moment of the debate, Trump’s response to Biden’s invocation of his
dead son—attempting to make him ashamed of his surviving one—threw the
dispositions of the two men into sharp relief. I wondered how Hunter must have
felt to see his father speak of his pride in his brother, only for his own name
to be brandished as a weapon to inflict shame on his father. And I thought
about Biden’s response, which was to reaffirm his pride in Hunter, the troubled
son living in the indelible shadow of a departed war hero. In the midst of
being attacked by a president trying to wield his own family against him,
Biden’s instinct was to reassure Hunter that he is also loved, that nothing
could make his father see him as a loser.
Biden acted like a father,
doing what almost any parent would have done. And yet because Trump is the kind
of man who wonders at the moment of his child’s birth whether the child will
someday mortify him, he did not anticipate that response. He did not expect
that, instead of embarrassing Biden, he would merely advertise the callousness
that has made him unable to govern the country with any sense of duty or
responsibility, the narcissism that makes him see those concepts as foolish and
naive.
All
things in Trump’s world revolve around him, and are a reflection of him. The
president evaluates everything—even his own children, even at the time they
enter this world—by how they might make him look, and he is incapable of imagining
that anyone else would do differently. When he was a reality-show celebrity,
this trait was minimally damaging to society; now that he is a president, it
has proved catastrophic.
Because
Trump is a con artist whose inflated reputation as a businessman is built on an enormous inheritance and tax fraud, he is less concerned with fixing
problems than with convincing others they do not exist. The economy remains in
a crippling recession, but rather than urge his party to do what is necessary
to recover, Trump seethes in private about the pandemic
destroying the “greatest economy.” The more than 200,000 deaths from the
coronavirus are distressing to Trump not because of the sheer scale of
preventable death, but because they make him look bad, which is why he baselessly questions the coronavirus
death count, and insists that his response is somehow better
if you don’t count “the blue states,” as though the people who live in them are
not also his constituents. When Trump briefly wore a mask publicly in July, his
advisers flocked to social media to offer outsize praise of his appearance,
understanding that simply modeling responsible leadership that could save
American lives—particularly those of his own supporters—was not enough of a
motivation for the president. He whines to confidants not about the injustices
that Black Lives Matter activists are protesting, but that “some stupid cop in Minneapolis
kneels on someone’s neck and now everyone is protesting.”
As The Washington Post reported in July, when speaking with
advisers, the president talks about himself as a “blameless victim—of a deadly
pandemic, of a stalled economy, of deep-seated racial unrest, all of which
happened to him rather than the country.”
This
perilous narcissism also explains Trump’s worst moments in the debate. Trump
cannot bring himself to condemn his white-supremacist supporters not only
because of his ideological sympathies, but because he sees such
condemnations as apologies for his own conduct, which he
cannot countenance. Trump refuses to commit to a peaceful transfer of
power, because he fears the narcissistic injury of an election loss. So he not
only baselessly undermines confidence in the process to
save face should he lose, but urges his supporters to flock to the polls to intimidate other voters, and openly hopes that the
conservative-dominated Supreme Court will reverse the electorate’s decision if
given the opportunity.
There is
nothing that the president treasures more than his own ego—not defeating the
pandemic, not lifting the country out of the recession that followed, and not
American democracy. If all of those things must be sacrificed to shield the
president’s pride, then that is a price he is willing to make Americans pay.
ADAM SERWER is
a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers politics.
