WHY TRUMP IS SO HARD TO COMPREHEND

Regarding the steady flow of revelations pertaining to Trump’s efforts to overthrow the election and retain power, Jeffrey Engel, the director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University, observed in the New York Times that voters had become desensitized, if not numb, to Trump’s attacks on democracy: “I actually think the American public is dramatically underplaying how significant and dangerous this is because we cannot process the basic truth of what we are learning about President Trump’s efforts—which is we’ve never had a president before who fundamentally placed his own personal interests above the nation’s.”

Actually, there have been others. Richard Nixon conspired with the government of South Vietnam to sabotage the Vietnam War peace talks in the fall of 1968, when there was a possibility of a breakthrough that would end the war - so he could prevent that since it would harm his electoral prospects in 1968. This act likely caused the deaths of thousands of American soldiers, and millions of Southeast Asians, since the majority of casualties came after 1968.

But the larger point is intriguing, something to try and understand.

Is Trump’s wickedness too immense for us to absorb?

Wicked. That is a word that has never - to my knowledge - been applied to any American president before Trump. Not even Richard Nixon qualifies as wicked. Wicked is evil that is beyond normal evil. Despite every bad thing I can think of about Nixon - and there’s a lot! - he was a guy who, when faced with the consequences of his actions, accepted the judgement of the system. He turned over the tapes when the Supreme Court ruled he had to. When he was caught having underpaid his taxes, he paid the difference and didn’t quibble. Ultimately, Richard Nixon believed in the system, and believed the rules did apply to him.

Can you imagine Donald Trump paying the difference on his underpaid taxes? I think we have seen the answer to that, so don’t bother coming up with a reply. Does anyone think Trump would have turned over the “smoking gun” tape? We’re watching the answer to that every day; again, no need to bother coming up with a reply. Do we believe Donald Trump would conspire with a foreign power to do damage to U.S. policy for personal gain? Again, no need to bother coming up with a reply. We have the answer. At least Nixon had the excuse of really believing that the policies he would carry out were good for the nation - whether you agree or disagree - but with Trump, we know that the reason he conspired with Putin was strictly to obtain power, that he could use for personal benefit.

The truth is, Donald Trump was always this guy. When he was six and a teacher questioned his behavior, he hit her. Imagine being her, and a six year old hits you! Are you going to tell people, your fellow teachers, this happened? Are you going to admit you couldn’t control a six year old kid? And then, when he was 10, he disliked all the attention a toddler next door was getting, attention he wasn’t getting. What did he do? He took out his frustration by throwing rocks at the kid while the kid was in his playpen! Have you ever heard of a child doing such a thing? Normal people cannot comprehend facing a monster.

That’s the truth of Donald Trump. He is a monster. He is unlike anyone else who has ever been involved in American politics. There may have been others who were on this spectrum, but they were better at hiding it.

I wouldn’t want to even try and surmise about the forces inside his family that turned him into this monster, the neglect he had to get every day to be that needy of attention from anyone else. I’ll hazard a guess that he was created by his father, Fred Trump, since there is plenty of information out there about what a monster he was. His mother is practically never mentioned, not in any “active” sense; she was likely bludgeoned into complete passivity by Fred.

I have dealt with people who were like Trump - not exactly alike, but close enough to provide some insight. These people were all in Hollywood. I once asked a friend, a writer with a lot of insight, who had been in “Duh Bizness” for 50-odd years, whether only “damaged people” could make it in Hollywood, because it was my experience that everyone I had dealt with was in some way “damaged.” (I include myself on the list) I also said that it appeared to me that the greater the damage, the higher these people aspired and often achieved.

My friend replied that he thought “damaged” would have to be on the top of any list of qualifiecations for success in Hollywood. He pointed to the original Founders, all shtetl Jews who had experienced a lot of the bad the world has to offer, who had seen the opportunity presented by the “nickleodeons” as the way out of that, as the road to prosperity, social power, social acceptance, all the things they and everyone they’d grown up with and knew had been denied for longer than they could remember. It takes a lot of desperation born of damage to do that.

I’m not here now to tell Hollywood Tales, but every high achiever I ever met here came from a background that could be explained in similar words. Think of it : what kind of hole do you have to have in yourself to think that “movie star” will fill it, that such an unobtainable thing is a viable goal?

But all those people, including the ones I would put at the top of a Worst List, would never have the word “wicked” in their descriptor. They might have been crooks, thieves, backstabbers, liars, and cheats - none of which are good things - but none of them in my experience was Wicked.

Wicked takes delight in being bad, it’s insatiable. To the point that the only thing that comes close to filling that hole in the middle is out-and-out evil. While I have seen some people do some pretty bad things, I have never seen one revel in it - perhaps if anyone did, they were smart enough to do it in private.

Donald Trump is the kind of wicked, evil monster that only appears in fairy tales or their modern equivalent, comic books. But that’s not real. That’s something that is the product of a vivid imagination. He’s something like the Joker, only not in a movie (though he does wear makeup). How can the Joker be real?

His very audacity - the way he always says the quiet part out loud, the way he does what he does in front of us, make his crimes against the republic might too much for at least a large minority to absorb. The MAGA base doesn’t want to concede that their cult leader could be such a villain, even when he runs cons on them in front of their eyes. For others, Republican office holders and those who aspire to do so, comprehending and confronting such an unprecedented crime would compel involvement and action - and the risk of one’s personal fortunes and desires

Then there is the fact that things like the Trump-Russia scandal, with Trump publicly aiding and abetting Vladimir Putin’s attack on the 2016 elections was too outlandish for many to believe, to conclude that our democracy was vulnerable, that we were not the exceptional country of “It can’t happen here.”

Up til now, this whole story has emerged in bits and pieces, not in a coherent account. There’s news that he muscled the Justice Department, there’s news he called people and flat out asked them to commit crimes, there’s his public admission he will pardon the seditionists, there’s the story of him tearing up important documents, drafting executive orders to seize voting machines. It all comes out an item at a time, and not necessarily in order. Even for those of us who obsess on the news, it’s hard to make sense of this. For the average American who only pays intermittent heed to the news, it makes even less sense and is even more incomprehensible.

This is why the public hearings that are to happen in April are so important. This will not be the time for speechifying as happened in the two impeachments. Bring witnesses, question then, and let the country hear their answers. Line up the ducks, from beginning to end. Make it clear enough for anyone to comprehend. His sabotage of something - this republic - that the overwhelming majority of people revere, must be shown clearly. Unmistakably. No drip, drip, no splatter. The effective public telling of this story must be the 1/6 committee’s overriding goal.

In the end, Engel’s point resonates: The audacity of Trump’s crime against the republic might be too great for many to absorb. We need a full accounting, even if we can’t handle it.

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