Four bankruptcies, three wives, two parties, one big problem for America. That six-second tagline to an ad sums up why, when the chips are down, the Donald’s getting fired. This mantra will take Trump down because his appeal rests on trust. Voters angry with elites for various reasons trust that Trump will have their backs in office. But the 4-3-2-1 line of attack shows why exactly the opposite is true.
.. Most of Trump’s backers believe that the biggest thing wrong about America is that no one in government is working for them. But Trump isn’t the elite guy who’s switched sides, he’s the elite guy par excellence whose pursuit of his own wealth and fame leaves everyone else in the dust. He’s not only not the solution to America’s problems, he’s the biggest embodiment of those problems.
Why People Are Drawn to Narcissists Like Donald Trump
Trump has a personality type that’s common to the charismatic leaders who emerge in times of turmoil and uncertainty, when people are ready to follow a strong leader who promises to lead them to greatness. Sigmund Freud called people with this personality type “normal narcissists” and he described them as independent and not vulnerable to intimidation, also noting that they have a large amount of aggressive energy and a bias for action. Freud included himself in this group and saw these narcissists as driven to lead and to change the world. Such narcissists can be very charming, and indeed, research has shown most of us like to follow narcissists.
.. I wrote that productive narcissists like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison were exploiting new technologies to create great companies, just as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford did over a century ago. However, I also illustrated that people with this personality type, however brilliant, have potential weaknesses that can do them in.
.. But to sustain their success, he said, they should learn how to pretend to be humble.
.. Do the leaders in question have trusted advisers to keep them from taking rash actions?
.. Narcissistic leaders can create companies like Apple or those like Enron. Like Lincoln and Nelson Mandela they can change the world for the better, or like Napoleon and Hitler they can lead their followers to disaster. In the final accounting, a large part of the credit for their successes, or blame for their failures, belongs to the people who followed them.
Trump’s appeal to a declining middle class
Israel told me that most voters see their own position as fragile, vulnerable to collapse in hard times. People who in the past blamed structural forces for their difficulties, including globalization and trade, now “blame politicians.”
.. Members of the middle class are living paycheck to paycheck, they are anxious about terrorism coming to their own backyard, and they believe that the rule of ‘if you work hard and play by the rules, you can get ahead’ is in danger of disappearing from the American ethos. Most important, the middle class believes that the rich play by a different set of rules and just get richer, but they also believe that the poor get all the programs and benefits, and all they get is the bill.
.. The American dream used to mean something – that you could count on good American wages and benefits for a hard day’s work. But that’s changing as big corporation have been shipping our jobs overseas and lobbyists have been rewriting all the rules. In just the last eight years, the average white family has lost about one-eighth of its wealth and seen its income drop for the first time in 80 years. If you were African-American or Latino just starting to catch up through hard work and determination, you’ve lost more than half of everything you put away. Ordinary people, whether white, black or brown, shouldn’t be paying for a crash they didn’t cause. We can’t afford to be a nation of haves and have-nots, where young people can’t find their first job and middle-aged construction workers may have seen their last. We can’t afford to be a nation where white kids are living in their parents’ basements, where too many young men color are living on the streets. It’s time to return to America where everyone willing to work and play by the rules can count on a fair shot. Opportunity should knock on every door no matter how humble the home, or who lives in it. That’s what I promised my children, that’s the American dream.
.. The 2014 real median income number is 6.5 percent below its 2007, pre-crisis level. It is 7.2 percent below the number in 1999. A middle-income American family, in other words, makes substantially less money in inflation-adjusted terms than it did 15 years ago.
Politicians Seeing Evil, Hearing Evil, Speaking Evil
“My goal wasn’t to create a personality cult around Rabin,” Gitai told A.F.P. “My focus was on the incitement campaign that led to his murder.” Sure, the official investigating commission focused on the breakdowns in Rabin’s security detail, but, Gitai added, “They didn’t investigate what were the underlying forces that wanted to kill Rabin. His murder came at the end of a hate campaign led by hallucinating rabbis, settlers who were against the withdrawal from territories and the parliamentary right, led by the Likud (party), already then headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, who wanted to destabilize Rabin’s Labor government.”
.. And then Trump insulted John McCain, saying he was only a war hero because he got captured, adding, “I like people that weren’t captured, O.K.?” McCain spent five and a half years as a P.O.W. in Vietnam and was repeatedly tortured and had his bones broken. As CNN reported, “Trump, meanwhile, received four student deferments and one medical deferment to avoid serving in the Vietnam War.”
What does it mean to impugn a man who has sacrificed so much for his country? It means you can smear anyone.