The cruelty of Donald Trump
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a handful of traits that describe Donald Trump as president and person. The first two—the president’s combination of hot headedness and cold heartedness and his mastery of mendacity or lying—are the core qualities, while the others, such as his frequent provocation and manifestation of prejudice and hate are, to a significant extent, a reflection of the first two.
For example, dehumanizing people (Mexican immigrants) by depicting them all as rapists and drug dealers or by describing their birthplaces as shitholes (Africans, Haitians, Salvadorans) involves both core character traits. The person who sees people in this way has a cold heart and a mean spirit. It takes a hot head to voice these sentiments publicly and a cold heart to disregard the damage comments like that inflict on their human targets. Words do hurt, and they hurt more when they are accompanied by sticks and stones, like mass deportation or cuts in foreign aid. Mendacity, too, is required because the vast majority of Mexicans are hard workers rather than criminals and because Africa is no shithole; it is a huge, beautiful continent which provided the ideal conditions for the evolution of the human species.
Does the reality of the last two weeks support the hypotheses that Trump’s core character traits determine what the president says and does? It does.
Let’s start with the lying, which is easier to demonstrate. A few days ago, Trump told a gathering that in his meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau he pressed the point hard that Canada had a big trade surplus vis-à-vis the United States—even though he didn’t know whether it was true! The president’s own account makes him out to be a subspecies of the species liar, namely the bull shitter. The bull artist asserts about things he knows nothing about.
But here is the beauty of the story. The president was almost surely lying when he said he didn’t know about the U.S.-Canada trade balance. Even the kind of “lite” briefings Trump receives before a foreign trip would have included this item: the U.S. has a significant trade surplus with Canada. While the trade in goods like lumber favors Canada, the trade in services like tourism favors the United States more. The overall trade balance is positive for this country, so Trump lied. And he very probably lied about whether he knew that he was lying to Trudeau’s face. That’s a tour de force for a master liar: lying to the second power.
Then we found out last week that the president had been lying for a long time when he expressed confidence in Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and denied he was going to fire him. Well, last week, Trump fired Tillerson and, to add insult to injury, he did it on Twitter. A normal person, a person not gravely afflicted which what I have called Trump’s syndrome, or Empathy Deficiency Disorder, any half-decent employer, would not do that to a pizza delivery worker.
Which gets me to my second case, Trump’s firing last week of Andrew McCabe, the deputy FBI director who served the bureau for more than 20 years and was scheduled to retire in less than 48 hours.
Trump applied supreme pressure to get McCabe fired before he would qualify to receive his full pension. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom Trump has repeatedly and publicly humiliated, did the dirty deed. Sessions has learned nothing from his experience with Trump about the obligation of a boss to respect the dignity of a subordinate.
When you add a cold heart to a hot head, you get vindictiveness. Trump has been angry with McCabe for a long time and had attacked him repeatedly on Twitter. The pretexts trotted out to justify McCabe’s firing have about as much credibility as Trump. The reason that Trump persecuted and punished McCabe is that, like James Comey, the FBI director Trump fired last year, McCabe was prepared to sacrifice Trump’s head on the altar of the Constitution. McCabe understood he worked for the people and not for a person. Trump could not tolerate that.
Trump took out his hot head about Tillerson and McCabe by firing them in the most cold-hearted way possible. When cold-heartedness gets this close to absolute zero, we recognize it as cruelty. Trump is a cruel man.
The last two weeks have given clear support to the thesis that a hot head, a cold heart, and a stunning capacity for lying is at the core of Donald Trump, (awful) president and (worse) person.
