It is hard to believe that we are now governed by a president who goes out of his way to provoke other nations. The bizarre contretemps with the president of Mexico is pointlessly destructive of one of America’s most important relationships. What kind of president wakes up determined to insult the president of a friendly country — a country whose cooperation we need? It beggars belief.
.. Who benefits from this? Is it really to America’s advantage to have the nation on our southern border hating us? Is it really to America’s advantage to set the stage for the Mexicans to elect a president who promises to spite the United States at every turn? If we crash the Mexican economy, does it help us to have a poorer and more chaotic neighbor on our Southern border? The Mexican state is already feeble versus the drug cartels. Do we want to make it worse?
.. This is diplomacy by humiliation, which is no diplomacy at all. It’s starting to become clear that whoever follows Trump in office is going to have his or her hands full rebuilding things that Trump smashed for no reason other than it felt good to push others around.
What Drives Donald Trump? Fear of Losing Status, Tapes Show
Why such a harsh judgment? Because in Mr. Trump’s eyes, Mr. Hall had suffered the most grievous form of public humiliation: His celebrity had waned. His star had dimmed.
.. The recordings reveal a man who is fixated on his own celebrity, anxious about losing his status and contemptuous of those who fall from grace. They capture the visceral pleasure he derives from fighting, his willful lack of interest in history, his reluctance to reflect on his life and his belief that most people do not deserve his respect.
In the interviews, Mr. Trump makes clear just how difficult it is for him to imagine — let alone accept — defeat.
“I never had a failure,” Mr. Trump said in one of the interviews, despite his repeated corporate bankruptcies and business setbacks, “because I always turned a failure into a success.”
.. “No, I don’t want to think about it,” he said when Mr. D’Antonio asked him to contemplate the meaning of his life. “I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see.”
.. Who does he look up to? “I don’t have heroes,” Mr. Trump said.
Does he examine history to better understand the present? “I don’t like talking about the past,” he said, later adding, “It’s all about the present and the future.”
.. Who earns his respect? “For the most part,” he said, “you can’t respect people because most people aren’t worthy of respect.”
.. But he always seems to return, in one form or another, to the theme of humiliation.
.. He reserves special scorn for people who embarrass themselves in front of their peers.
.. When people lose face, Mr. Trump’s reaction is swift and unforgiving.
And when Mr. Trump feels he has been made a fool of, his response can be volcanic. Ivana Trump told Mr. D’Antonio about a Colorado ski vacation she took with Mr. Trump soon after they began dating. The future Mrs. Trump had not told her boyfriend that she was an accomplished skier. As she recalls it, Mr. Trump went down the hill first and waited for her at the bottom:
IVANA TRUMP: So he goes and stops, and he says, “Come on, baby. Come on, baby.” I went up. I went two flips up in the air, two flips in front of him. I disappeared. Donald was so angry, he took off his skis, his ski boots, and walked up to the restaurant. … He could not take it. He could not take it.
.. But it was not enough for Mr. Trump to become an object of media fascination. He took pleasure in knowing that such coverage was denied to almost everybody else.
.. By the time he was an established businessman, Mr. Trump hired a service to compile the swelling number of references to him in the media, which he then reviewed. “There are thousands of them a day,” he told Mr. D’Antonio. “Thousands, thousands a day.”
.. Ultimately, Mr. Trump fears — more than anything else — being ignored, overlooked or irrelevant.
That’s how he saw Arsenio Hall in the 2000s, as forgotten and ungrateful for his time on “The Celebrity Apprentice,” Mr. Trump’s reality television competition, which Mr. Hall won in 2012.
.. But he quickly retreats from the moment, declining Mr. D’Antonio’s invitation to further explain how the song makes him feel about himself, saying he might not like what he discovers.
Trump can’t just be defeated. He must be humiliated.
Donald Trump is running against democracy itself.
.. “We are fortunate to live in a country where the voters decide our elections,” the first lady said. “The voters decide who wins and loses. Period. End of story. And when a presidential candidate threatens to ignore our voices and reject the outcome of this election, he is threatening the very idea of America itself, and we cannot stand for that. We do not keep American democracy ‘in suspense.’ ”
.. As a matter of math, Arizona is irrelevant: If Clinton is doing well enough to win here, she will already have locked up the election elsewhere. But if Trump is to be denied in his bid to subvert democratic institutions by claiming a rigged election, he needs to be defeated resoundingly, removing all doubt. Clinton needs to run up the score.
.. The need to deal Trump a humiliating defeat has a sociological basis in the “degradation ceremony,” in which the perpetrator (Trump) is held by denouncers (officeholders and others in positions of influence) to be morally unacceptable, and witnesses (the public) agree that the perpetrator is no longer held in good standing... Psychologist Wynn Schwartz, who teaches at Harvard Medical School, explained to me that what’s needed to have a successful degradation of Trump is an epic defeat...Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the anti-immigrant icon and Trump backer, is trailing his Democratic opponent by 15 points inpolling by the Republic. The newspaper endorsed Clinton, its first embrace of a Democrat for president in its 126-year history.
Why didn’t Tom Riddle kill Harry in Chamber of Secrets?
Riddle wants to humilate Harry first, to show him that his powers are no match to his. As he says:
So this is what Dumbledore sends his great defender. A songbird and an old hat. Let’s match the power of Lord Voldemort, Heir of Salazar Slytherin, against the famous Harry Potter.
…Voldemort is the very epitome of a supervillain, and as such, is prone to gloating, monologuing, explaining his evil plan to the hero and then putting him in some death trap that always fails to work. When you simply kill the hero, you are just a killer… But when you mock him first and plan his demise in some fiendishly clever way, you’re truly a villain. 😉