Yes indeed, it would appear President Trump will do anything to be perceived as a winner, even if it’s done at somebody else’s expense. Being president of our beloved country may possibly represent the epitome of what he believes winning is all about, and in his thinking, “It doesn’t get any better than that.” He can’t seem to do anything other than reaching for the gold medal and winning at all costs. Being president of the most powerful nation in the world certainly complies. Even better would be winning the presidency for two terms in a row. He’s already betting his political dollar that’s going to happen. Let’s hope it’s not counterfeit. Like he is. Maybe he’s got an even bigger win in his sights, a platinum medal. That would be CEO of the world for life. With his hunger, I wouldn’t put it past him.
Lisa Belkin of Yahoo News, wrote an interesting blog on October 21 of last year entitled “Donald Trump’s Fine Art of Losing” addressing the question “How does Donald Trump lose?” According to Belkin, “The answer, apparently, is that he never does. At least not in his own mind. To review his life and talk to people who have watched him for decades is to realize that he has never once seen himself as anything but the victor.” In his mind, he can do no wrong.
Belkin cites a number of biographies that repeatedly describe Trump as a narcissist. She quotes Dr. Jamie Howard, a clinical psychologist in the anxiety and mood disorders Center of the Child mind Institute in Manhattan, as saying, “Indeed, a pathological fear of losing is one symptom of narcissistic personality disorder.” Dr. Howard also states that “grandiosity, an inflated perception of one’s own achievements, and a big need for admiration from other people,” are other symptoms of a narcissist. “Narcissists have a very fragile sense of self. Any small mistake would shatter that, so they can’t really acknowledge that it ever happens.… Self-reflection and introspection are similar threats, so narcissists tend to avoid such things. Their refusal to apologize comes from an inability to see that they’ve done anything wrong,” writes Belkin.
The examples are plentiful in his lack of appreciation for any points of view different from his own. His firing of Sally Yates, acting attorney general, for intervening in what she believed to be an illegal order suddenly banning already vetted and accepted travelers from certain countries, shows how he responds to disagreement. Even Bill Clinton never fired Janet Reno, who was compelled by House Republicans to set the Justice Department against him. But it’s his lack of empathy that makes him not even recognize the existence of differing points of view that is most telling. Look at his response to the Standing Rock Sioux Nation, which continues to protest the Dakota Access Pipe Line construction route through and adjacent to their property and across the Missouri River upstream from their water source. Keep in mind, this route was picked to avoid the original route near Bismarck due to protests by white residents there. In both cases, it is believed that the pipeline would adversely affect the environmental and economic well-being of anyone in its vicinity. In the case of the pipeline crossing land under treaty to the Sioux, its construction and use would also damage and destroy sites of great historic, religious, and cultural significance to the tribe. President Trump’s indifference to any concerns of Indigenous rights was shown over a year before the election when he tweeted on November 6, 2015, “so sad that Obama rejected Keystone Pipeline. Thousands of jobs, good for the environment, no downside!”
In other words, downsides and upsides are only measured by how it benefits him and his cronies. Harm to land, water, ranchers or Indians is not a factor in his assessment of up or downside. The fact that our energy-industry efforts should be spent getting off fossil fuels not increasing their availability also presents no downside to him. He simply denies the reality of fossil fuel harm.
Our president appears to believe that any kind of relating, whether it’s social or political intercourse, represents a competitive situation where there is a winner and a loser, and in order to maintain his egocentric position of being the best—better than even the experts—he needs to have his ego massaged by everyone around him reinforcing through verbal and nonverbal messaging that he is indeed the greatest.
Currently, it would appear gold medalist Trump is in competition with our former president Barack Obama in the kind of adulation and admiration our fellow Americans feel toward our beloved past president compared to how they feel toward our current one. President Trump can surely sense that many more citizens adore our former president than they do him.
Those feelings are in part supported by the Keystone and Dakota pipelines controversies. President Obama, you’ll remember, signed an executive order rejecting the Keystone project after seven years of debate. The Dakota Access project is completed except for a contested portion under Lake Oahe (oh-WAH’-hee) in North Dakota, half a mile upstream from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe’s reservation. When the Sioux realized what physical and spiritual harm the pipeline construction was going to do to the property, they quickly sued the Army Corps of Engineers, which had prematurely approved the project without consulting the tribes, as the law requires, based on their objections outlined above. Obama stayed that completion due to the will of the people, directing the Army Corps of Engineers to revisit Sioux objections.
Trump has long made it clear these projects would go ahead with his blessings rather than seek an alternative route. True to his word, on Tuesday, January 24, 2017, President Trump signed executive actions to advance both pipelines.
In their January 24, 2017, New York Times essay “Trump Revives Keystone Pipeline Rejected by Obama,” Peter Baker and Coral Davenport wrote, “In his latest moves to dismantle the legacy of his predecessor, Mr. Trump resurrected the Keystone XL pipeline that had stirred years of debate, and expedited another pipeline in the Dakotas that had become a major flash point for Native Americans. He also signed a directive ordering an end to protracted environmental reviews,” [italics mine].
His need for adulation might also be why he wants to have a special commission formed to investigate election fraud, since he believes that three to five million more votes would have swung his way if the “elections weren’t rigged.” That said, even though thoroughly investigations of that possibility have unequivocally determined that voter fraud did not happen. One can only surmise that President Trump can’t let it go and accept those findings because he wants to feel like he’s a winner in every challenge he participates in and won’t settle for anything less. That explains why, even after winning the election, he feels so insecure and impotent that he instead claims to be the superhero champion not only through having more electoral votes than did Secretary Hillary Clinton, but also that he had almost three million more popular votes and not she who did. So by his logic that would make him the “winningest” (my word) president ever! What I’m suggesting is that President Trump has not only conscious but also unconscious reasons for making political judgments, which will undoubtedly affect the future lives of Americans seriously. Whether that’s for good or ill might be debatable, but it’s inarguable that politicians should not let unresolved personal conflicts interfere with making such weighty decisions.
For any of us, the only way we can ensure that our important decisions are not made unconsciously is by being reflective and introspective, to engage in self-analysis. Many of us put some type of analytical therapy to good use to assist us in that process. I can’t see Donald Trump doing any of that, so we can also expect to see more and more of his decisions, as the stress of the job builds, being made with unconscious motives at their core.
At that point, his dream to be the greatest president ever will disappear and the people will discover he was only serving himself rather than the American people all along.