Hot head, cold heart

Although it seems like a century since he took office, Donald Trump has been president for less than 15 months. Yet, I have seen enough to feel confident to write about who Donald Trump is as a person and a president—two deeply intertwined sides of a single historical subject.

I started by listing the most important things about Trump person/president—attitudes, actions, words—and I quickly discovered a couple of things. I couldn’t stop adding items until I had 51. There wasn’t a single positive one among them. I knew I had to boil it down to three or four essentials.

HOT HEAD, COLD HEART

A teacher must have a cool head and a warm heart, my old graduate school professor told our class. That’s a good combination in any human being, regardless of anything else.

Donald Trump is the antithesis, a hothead with a cold heart. White hot head, heart temperature near absolute zero.

Donald Trump suffers from Empathy Deficit Disorder (EDD). Don’t look it up in the Bible of psychiatry, the DSM manual, edition who knows. I just made the term EDD up, but it is a good one and it applies to the president so well you could just call it Trump’s syndrome.

Examples abound. Trump calls the widow of a U.S. serviceman recently killed in Niger and ends adding to the Miami woman’s distress rather than comforting her. Trump could not even fake empathy, and the widow saw right through it to his cold heart.

Trump is a bad actor in more ways than one. His idea of reaching out to the people of hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico is throwing rolls of paper towels at them, calling Hurricane Maria “not a real disaster,” sending too little aid too late, and accusing Puerto Ricans of not wanting to do anything for themselves but to have everything given to them. Diagnosis: terminal EDD.

Trump’s policies reflect the same condition. You can take away health insurance for millions of people of modest means to throw billions of dollars at the very rich only if your heart is as cold as Antarctica.

MASTER OF MENDACITY

Trump lies about everything, about everyone, all the time, without shame, guilt or remorse. Promised the average American a tax cut but the average American got at best the scraps and the 1 percenters the richest morsels. Lauded workers and pushed policies to worsen their health and safety on the job. Equated immigrants who pick our crops, take care of our children and elders, and clean our hotel rooms and offices, with rapists and drug dealers. The Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, the only person who could trump Trump in a lying competition, advised liars to focus on the Big Lie and to beat it into people’s heads by repeating it endlessly.

But Trump is too much of a hothead and too incoherent to be able to follow even this strategy. He lies about the big things and the petty ones. He can’t keep his lies straight, so he supersedes a past lie with a new lie. Trump did try, over and over again, to tell a Really Big Lie: Barack Obama is not an American. It didn’t work. No one in his right mind believed him.

STOKER OF HATE, PARAGON OF PREJUDICE

This category is almost infinite. What hasn’t he done? Kicked off his campaign trashing Mexicans. Responded to the racist rally in Virginia by equating the bigots who loudly spouted their hatred of Jews, blacks, and all “others” and that left a young woman dead in their wake with those protesting the haters. Reduced a huge continent, Africa, the birthplace of the human species, plus two countries in this hemisphere, El Salvador and Haiti, to “shitholes.” Then, in case anybody missed the obvious racist implications, he contrasted these shitholes with Norway. Trump’s is not the old Republican dog-whistle racism. This is racism for dummies.

Race prejudice and discrimination goes a long way back with Trump. It is not just political opportunism, although it is that too. Decades ago, Trump’s father initiated his son in racial discrimination in real estate, and his son has carried the underlying prejudice ever since.

DESTROYER OF WORLDS

After seeing the effect of atom bombs, Robert J. Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the Manhattan Project that created the Bomb, wrote to his brother: “Now I am become Death (Shiva), destroyer of worlds.”

By trying to sabotage the Paris climate agreement, through leading the world’s biggest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases, the United States, in walking away from it, Trump is effectively waging war on the Earth and all the worlds it contains: low lying island nations; endangered species; fragile ecosystems; starving people; thirsty land; and more.

Trump has also brought the world closer to disaster by playing nuclear chicken with North Korea. The human and environmental consequences of nuclear war would be huge.

Then, too, Trump is waging war on the earth, the water and the air—right here in the United States. Undoing environmental rules that have brought us cleaner water and air. Unleashing all the worst polluters, the fossil fuel and chemical industry chief among them, to do whatever they wish.

Trump’s presidency has been toxic in every way. A president with a famously cool head and a warm heart was succeeded by a president with the opposite traits. All hell has been breaking loose in Washington ever since. Trump’s tenure in the nation’s capital reminds me of the melodramatic title of a true-crime series: “Evil Comes to Town.”