Early in the life of this substack, back in June of 2022, when the J6 hearings had just gotten under way, I wrote a post about how to understand Trump. Below is an excerpt, specifically about whether Trump can distinguish fact from fiction, since that has and will continue to be a focus of the discussion and analysis of the new indictment against Trump for his attempt to subvert the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral college victory.
I was riffing off an excellent analysis of Trump by the historian Gary Gerstle, which the first paragraph below refers to. The subsequent paragraphs are my attempt to understand Trump’s relationship to the world around him more broadly.
Enjoy!!
Trump, by contrast, according to Gerstle, “regarded…GOP moralizing as both boring and out of touch with the real world….[Trump] was more interested in thrills and power than in integrity and discipline.” Trump supported deregulation, but not because he thought that free markets were virtuous institutions capable of instilling [in participants] ethical behavior." Instead, for Trump, markets were “built for manipulation, contracts were made to be broken,” and deregulation made that easier.
[T]he above provides a roadmap for understanding Trumpism generally, and for making sense specifically of Trump’s motives and behavior as he insisted that a coup be carried out on his behalf. Some have wondered whether Trump “knew” what he insisted on was wrong, or whether he was deluded into really believing that the election had been stolen out from under him. But such questions presume that Trump possesses a normal mind as well as a set of life experiences that ordinary people could even conceivably relate to.
In fact, however, Trump has lived in a cocoon of astonishing privilege and insularity and has never experienced accountability for any of his endless ethical and criminal transgressions. That life experience has reinforced the lack of conscience that is surely a family inheritance. For Trump, there’s no reason to differentiate fact from fiction. All that matters is what serves his purposes at any given moment. Neither circumstantially nor characterologically has Trump ever been compelled to think otherwise. That includes having any moral compunction about inciting mobs to kill people. The only sensations he would likely have felt about his actions on January 6 were the titillation he surely derives from having such power and the fury he experiences whenever he doesn’t get his way.
Of course, we’re not just talking about any old ruthless monster. We’re talking about a once and perhaps future president who, the next time around, may be subject to less constraint than he was the last go-round….But regardless of his personal political future, Trump’s distinctive talents and pathologies have exacerbated all of our extant weaknesses and vulnerabilities and brought us to the cusp of existential political peril.