Opinion: Trump’s erratic actions put US at risk
Trump’s statement, which sent the stock market plunging, was just the latest in a series of abrupt and cavalier moves made in a 24-hour period that began Monday afternoon when the President revealed he would depart the Walter Reed medical center following three days of hospitalization for Covid-19 treatment. After disembarking from the Marine One presidential helicopter, he lumbered up exterior stairs so that he could pose on the White House balcony and salute for the cameras, looking like the stereotype of a military dictator. He did this twice, presumably so the video of his return would be to his satisfaction.
Early Tuesday morning, Trump used Twitter to advise the nation to learn “to live with Covid” as if it’s like the seasonal flu, and not a deadly new pathogen that has killed more than 210,000 Americans — and more than one million in the rest of the world — in less than eight months. Both Facebook and Twitter blocked the post for containing false information. The reality is that the Covid-19 virus is much more deadly than the seasonal flu, where the highest annual estimated US death toll in the last decade was 61,000.
Trump is prone to making surprise announcements out of the blue and often looks for ways to stir public reaction with extreme actions, but his behavior could also be influenced by the mental side effects — aggression, agitation and mood changes — common with steroids, like the dexamethasone he’s currently taking. In fact, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi reportedly was so stunned by the President’s behavior she told Democratic colleagues that the president’s sudden change in position on the stimulus talks might be connected to the steroids he’s taking.
As the author of a biography of Donald Trump, I learned that from an early age he exhibited a kind of unruliness that could veer toward self-destruction. In grade school, this behavior led his cruelly demanding father to pack him off to a military academy, where he was subjected to harsh and even violent treatment while his siblings remained at home attended by servants. As a young man, Trump exhibited a fatalistic streak, predicting his own death by age 40. Later he showed signs of self-sabotage in the public destruction of his first two marriages and in the spectacular bankruptcies that came after apparent business successes.
Time and again, as Donald Trump insisted that he was strong and capable and powerful, he also caused trouble for himself. Instead of cultivating productive relationships, he battled with City authorities like New York City Mayor Ed Koch and feuded with celebrities.
Although he would say that bad publicity is better than none, much of what Trump became famous for was stuff that would cause anyone pain. This tendency toward self-sabotage was noticed by Tony Schwartz, who was the ghostwriter on Trump’s first and most famous book, The Art of the Deal.
“What’s clear is that he has spent his life seeking to dominate others, whatever that requires and whatever collateral damage it creates along the way,” wrote Schwartz in 2017.
“The more he feels at the mercy of forces he cannot control — and he is surely feeling that now — the more resentful, desperate and impulsive he becomes.” Like many of us who have written about Trump have observed, Schwartz was taken aback by the way Trump regarded life as a constant struggle for survival against vicious competitors.
Trump’s perspective was instilled by his father Fred, who taught him to be a “killer” and “king” and demanded continual victories. In her book about her family, the President’s psychologist niece described his father as a “high functioning sociopath.” As Mary Trump sees it, Fred was so intolerant of his son’s vulnerabilities that Donald associated basic human needs with the threat of humiliation. His response seems to have been to persuade himself and others that he was so gifted, talented and wise as to be infallible.
One needn’t hold a degree in psychology to observe that anyone who created for himself an image of superhuman perfection also creates the conditions for his own destruction. The Greeks gave the name hubris to this fault and placed it in many myths and legends. In more recent literature, William Shakespeare’s Othello and Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab are classics because they ring true to common experience.
Trump’s response to the pandemic shows an astounding tolerance for the disproportionately high death toll that came after his refusal to mandate the kind of national containment strategies that could have saved lives. In June, writing in the health and medicine journal Stat, Isaac and James Sebenius estimated that a more assertive Trump response would have prevented most of the American deaths due to Covid-19.
Whatever the root cause of Trump’s terrifying behavior, it seems obvious that as he feels more threatened, he is inclined to double down. Tuesday’s CNN poll showed the President is falling even further behind challenger Joe Biden. This news comes on the heels of his Covid-19 diagnosis, a disastrous performance in his first debate with Biden and, before that, a New York Times report that revealed a pattern of losses that cast doubt on his longstanding claim to brilliance in business.
Whatever the root cause of Trump’s terrifying behavior, it seems obvious that as he feels more threatened, he is inclined to double down. Tuesday’s CNN poll showed the President is falling even further behind challenger Joe Biden. This news comes on the heels of his Covid-19 diagnosis, a disastrous performance in his first debate with Biden and, before that, a New York Times report that revealed a pattern of losses that cast doubt on his longstanding claim to brilliance in business.
Add the illness, the pandemic failure, proof of his business failures and the specter of defeat at the polls, and Trump now faces the kind of ego-obliterating humiliation that his father taught him to dread. Is it really any wonder that his self-destructiveness and his danger to the country appear to be getting worse?
