Opinion | Donald Trump Is Starving
But there’s a personal psychodrama going on as well. It will determine the answers to those questions, and it’s a spectacle all its own. Just as Trump’s presidency was like none before it, his ex-presidency is a singular production.
Other presidents left the White House and, for a short or long while, savored the disappearance of the press corps and the dimming of the spotlight. Maybe right away, maybe later, they burnished their legacies with philanthropic deeds. Meanwhile, they issued pro forma statements of support for their successors or, in accordance with longstanding etiquette, zipped their lips. They behaved.
Trump hasn’t. And — let’s be honest — he won’t. His response to his altered reality is to insist even more than before on an alternative reality, one in which he’ll be reinstated as president, and his sycophants are willing to support his delusions of omnipotence by establishing a zone of affirmation around him. From Green’s article:
When Trump ventured south, a stream of family members (literal and figurative) followed. Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner bought a $32 million waterfront lot in Miami from the Latin crooner Julio Iglesias and enrolled their kids at a nearby Jewish day school. Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, bought a $9.7 million mansion in Jupiter, Fla. In December, Sean Hannity sold his penthouse not far from former House speaker — and Trump critic — John Boehner’s place along the Gulf of Mexico and bought a $5.3 million seaside home two miles from Mar-a-Lago, symbolically swapping the Boehner Coast for the Trump Coast. Hannity’s Fox News colleague Neil Cavuto joined him, buying a $7.5 million place nearby. “Think about how utterly bizarre that is,” says Eddie Vale, a Democratic strategist. “It’s like if Rachel Maddow and the ‘Pod Save America’ guys all bought condos in Chicago because they wanted to be close to Barack Obama.”
The only one missing is MyPillow’s Mike Lindell, the bedding magnate turned Trump comforter.
And Trump is not comforted enough.
That was obvious in both his commencement of a blog (“From the Desk of Donald J. Trump”) in May and his termination of it less than a month later, after it failed to attract any readership remotely commensurate with the audience for his past tweets. Trump, onetime monarch of social media, had to grovel for clicks. What an astonishing reversal of fortune. But it’s consistent with other glimmers of desperation.
According to an article in The Times by Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman, he has taken to announcing the states he plans to visit before the actual venues and dates have been arranged. In his head he can probably already hear that magic MAGA applause. It’s stuck there like the chorus of a Top 40 song, but he wants it performed live, in an arena as mammoth as his neediness.
The substitute for that applause? Deference. He demands it every bit as much as he ever did and arguably grows more furious than before when he’s denied it. That’s where the personal and political narratives intersect. His demonization of Liz Cheney for crossing him, his denunciation of Paul Ryan for dissing him and his savaging of any Republican who challenges the Big Lie reflect a ruinous petulance that is bound to wax, not wane, as his exile grinds on. As Jennifer Senior wrote in a column in The Times in January about repudiated narcissists, they “lurch between the role of victim and tormentor,” “howl on and on about betrayal” and “lash out with a mighty vindictiveness.”
Trump is lurching and howling and lashing, to a point where Jeb Bush’s son George P. Bush has been terrified into abject genuflection. The props for George P.’s campaign for Texas attorney general include beer koozies with an image of him and Trump shaking hands and a quote from Trump saying that George P. “is the only Bush that likes me! This is the Bush that got it right. I like him.” I’m sure “low energy” Jeb, as Trump mockingly dismissed him, is suffused with paternal pride.
