Saturday, October 15, 2016

Trump's Real Problem Isn't Stupidity or Bigotry. It's Fallibility.

With just weeks to go before Election Day, this election has quickly devolved into one of the nastiest and most brutal in decades.  Both sides are hurling insults all over the place, and, even more disturbing, most of them are fairly accurate.  Clinton and her supporters claim that Trump is a racist, sexist, xenophobic buffoon who cannot be trusted to be president; at least three of those claims are proven true by his own rhetoric.  Trump responds by blasting Clinton for being untrustworthy and for being mired in numerous scandals throughout her career, some of them illegal.  Again, these claims are largely true.  But, beyond all the rhetoric and insults and childish behavior, there lurks something far more insidious, something that makes Trump far more dangerous than Hillary ever could be.
One of the common themes present in this election is that Trump often seems to live in his own world.  Most rich people and politicians are guilty of this, but Trump has taken this to an extreme.  The bigger problem is that the rules in his perverted form of reality are the inverse of those in the real world, particularly when it comes to responsibility and accountability.  These are things that just don’t seem to apply to him, things that are to be avoided like the plague.  Most people, even most politicians, no matter how hard they fight against these things, will eventually give in.  Not Trump.  He fights it tooth and nail, outright attacking anyone who points out his failures or says something that paints in even the slightest amount of negative light.

Take, for example, the way he performed in the first debate against Clinton.  The overwhelming consensus is that he clearly lost.  It isn’t that Clinton necessarily outperformed him, but that he stood there acting like a petulant child for 90 minutes, which, in these scenarios, is akin to shooting yourself in the foot multiple times.  But instead of accepting that he screwed up, he began making excuses about defective equipment (one of his microphones did turn out to be defective, but it was the one that broadcast within the hall; the one that broadcast to the television audience was perfectly fine) and attacking the debate moderator for “treating him unfairly.”  He even went so far as to deny reality by insisting that the constant sniffling that everyone noticed never happened, despite the fact that tens of millions of people saw him do it for 90 straight minutes (Note: I don’t actually care much about his sniffling as it is probably just seasonal allergies, but the fact that he would deny what we have clear video evidence of is just bizarre.  What is the logic in denying that you have a case of the sniffles anyway?)  This was hardly new behavior, as Trump has spent most of his campaign claiming that the entire election is rigged against him, from the news media to the actual voting.  While there is certainly evidence of tampering with some elections, there is no evidence to support his specific claims.  Nonetheless, he has continued echoing these claims for months.  The question is why?

The answer, really, is quite simple.  Throughout his entire life, Trump has been a man incapable of accepting or admitting failure.  Every time he failed, he blamed it on someone else and found a way to weasel out of it.  This is no doubt largely from being the son of an extremely wealthy man; statistics and studies going back decades very clearly show that people raised by very affluent families are more likely to exhibit such behavior (some, such as the infamous Affluenza kid, have even used this as a legal defense).  But being raised in such an environment doesn’t guarantee such behavior; countless people were raised in environments very similar to Trump’s, and they have no problem admitting and accepting failure.  As such, this is in no way, shape, or form an excuse for Trump’s behavior.  The problem is that he has continued this behavior for decades, both personally and professionally.

A quick look at his business career shows dozens of failures, including at least six bankruptcies.  The only reason he was able to continue his business ventures is because his father bailed him out numerous times by giving him loans amounting to tens of millions of dollars.  In almost all of his failures, he blamed other people or economic problems.  Regardless of the circumstances or veracity of his claims, the theme was always the same: it wasn’t his fault.  He worked tirelessly to distance himself from every failure because he didn’t want it to taint him.

This refusal to accept responsibility for failure extended to his personal life as well.  The best example is the disintegration of his first marriage to Ivanka Trump.  The marriage largely fell apart due to his affair with Marla Maples, who he later married after divorcing Ivanka.  But he never accepted any responsibility for what he did (especially prudent is the fact that the reason cited for their divorce was his “cruel and inhumane treatment”, which he refused to ever speak of, and certainly does not seem to have ever even apologized for).  Moreover, when Ivanka published a book about their marriage, he successfully sued her for violating a gag order in their divorce agreement.  The fact that he would even have such a clause in a divorce agreement is already proof positive that he is far too thin-skinned to be president, but that he would use it to sue the woman he cheated on is simply vile.

The fact that he glories in successes (even when they aren’t his) and refuses to accept responsibility for failure makes him dangerous, but there’s another facet to this.  Many of his supporters actually buy his rampant rationalizations.  They have concluded that the establishment is so corrupted that everything is rigged against him.  As such, any time someone says something against him or brings up evidence of his multitudinous flaws, they are attacked with claims that they are simply trying to discredit him.  Every time he screws up, they refuse to blame him, instead following his logic of blaming everyone and everything else.

To illustrate this, let’s look at his performance in the first debate again.  Both Trump and his supporters claim that Hillary won the debate for a myriad of reasons, none of which are Trump’s fault.  The most commonly repeated claim is that Lester Holt, the moderator, was simply treating him unfairly by interrupting him over 40 times and attempting to fact check things on the fly.  I would argue that it is the moderator’s job to try to ensure that candidates are being truthful, or, at the very least clear, especially when discussing points that others have spent a great deal of time researching and fact-checking.  On the surface, it might seem rude that Holt so frequently interrupted Trump, but isn’t it possible that he only did so because more of Trump’s statements and claims were in some way wrong than Hillary’s were?  A quick look at any reputable, objective fact-checking site shows this to be the truth.  Most of what Trump said that night was not only false, but had been disproven multiple times before he stepped onto the stage.  That isn’t to say that Hillary didn’t lie, but, again, the statistics are in her favor on this one because most of her statements were rated as being fairly accurate.  But his supporters insist that Holt’s interruptions are evidence of some kind of bias against him, despite the fact that he interrupted Hillary more than Holt interrupted him (a total of 51 times, as opposed to her mere 17).  Moreover, most of his interruptions were to insist that Hillary was wrong about him, despite the fact that, again, fact-checking shows most of her claims about Trump and his policies (or lack thereof) to be, on the balance, correct.

While the above claims of bias are already disturbing in what they show of Trump and his supporters, they really are only the tip of the iceberg.  A particularly bizarre example of this lies in a conspiracy theory that started spreading only hours after the debate.  Using clips from the debate, several of his supporters have suggested that Hillary was signaling Holt by scratching her nose so that she could get a barb in.  Is it possible?  Theoretically, yes, but their argument falls apart due to the fact that the shortest time between a scratch and her speaking is nearly a minute.  That doesn’t disprove their theory, but there is also no evidence to substantiate it.  Regardless of the lack of anything even resembling evidence, this too caught on amongst Trump’s supporters.

This kind of behavior should scare anyone, regardless of their political affiliation or beliefs, because it shows such blatant disregard for personal responsibility.  It’s even more dangerous because it has spread beyond Trump into his supporters.  Instead of accepting that he could have screwed up a debate, they started searching for wild conspiracy theories to explain it away.  Instead of accepting his fallibility, both he and his supporters cling to the belief that the entire election is rigged against him.  I do grant that the major news media is on a pretty blatant and shameless crusade against him, but that doesn’t inherently mean the election is rigged.  The news media in this country is controlled by the two big political parties, meaning they only have as much influence over elections as the parties want them to have.  This is why we haven’t seen a third party candidate in a debate in over twenty years; they use their influence to quash competition.  I do find it a bit suspicious that so many media outlets have outright endorsed Clinton, but that still doesn’t prove a rigged election.

Ahem.  I’m getting off-topic here.  Back to the discussion at hand.

There is a rather sordid kind of irony in all this, and that is that most of Trump’s supporters are opposed to Hillary because they see in her the exact same problems that I see in Trump.  They seem someone who eschews accountability like the plague, a person who has spent her career weaseling her way out of sticky spots.  But that is true of nearly any politician, especially a career one.  The key difference between Hillary and Trump is that she has been willing in at least a few instances to say “You know what?  I screwed up, and I take full responsibility.”  Trump has never uttered those words with any degree of sincerity because he doesn’t believe he’s capable of screwing up.  Sadly, many of his followers seem to have bought this.

I know that most of Trump’s followers are good, intelligent people (despite the horrid comment Clinton made about them), and that most of them really only support him because they detest Clinton.  As I also detest her, I certainly understand their logic.  But they are making all the same mistakes that Clinton and her supporters do.  They are never even willing to entertain the idea that Trump could have screwed up or lost legitimately because they have become convinced that everything is rigged against him (yet they frequently opine that Hillary’s supporters do the exact same thing; regardless of the truth in this, it is the definition of hypocrisy).  But even if that is true, it isn’t an excuse.  It doesn’t mean that he is infallible.  All it means is that he must work harder to win.
Trump has certainly been treated unfairly by the media in some instances, as well as by politicians on both sides of the aisle.  But this is irrelevant because most of the claims made about him are completely true.  The real problem is that he truly believes himself to be infallible.  He honestly does not believe that he is even capable of making a mistake.  That is the real danger of Donald Trump.  How can a man that is egotistical and narcissistic to the point of being blind to his own fallibility possibly lead this country?

The answer is that he can’t.  His supporters must open their eyes to this fact because they otherwise risk becoming exactly what they hate.  If this country is ever to recover and be the land of freedom and opportunity it was supposed to be, we need a leader who doesn’t just make excuses for himself because that shows the people that such behavior is acceptable when it isn’t.  In a prime example of irony, most of Trump’s supporters are the same people who voice legitimate concern over the fact that younger generations aren’t being allowed to fail, instead being shielded and coddled.  I agree with this assessment because I have always considered failure to be one of the most powerful teachers we can have.  Failure teaches us how to pick ourselves up and keep going.  It teaches us how to avoid repeating the same mistakes over and over.  Most importantly, it teaches us about responsibility and accountability; if we can’t admit we screwed up, we can’t prevent it from happening again.  Trump, being human, is flawed.  He fails and makes mistakes just as much as anyone else.  But the difference is that he runs from his failures instead of learning from them.  He avoids accountability like the plague.  This is exactly what his supporters fear will happen to our children because we refuse to let them fail, yet they seem to be blind to it in their chosen candidate, choosing instead to make excuses for him.

Simply put, if Trump cannot accept his own fallibility, he is not capable of leading this country.  I’m not saying we should all just vote for Hillary (frankly, I can’t stand her either, and, as of this writing, am officially undecided on how I am voting), but we must see candidates for any office for exactly who they are.  Just as Trump is a xenophobic, misogynistic, egomaniac that believes himself infallible, Hillary is cold-hearted, power-hungry, and has the blood of countless innocent people on her hands.  Trump supporters frequently complain that Hillary supporters don’t see her for who she is, yet they make excuses for Trump every time he fails and every time a new allegation surfaces.  As the adage goes, the sword cuts both ways; Hillary supporters may indeed try to explain away her scandals, but Trump supporters are guilty of the same charge.



Christ once said “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”  Trump and his supporters have no right to cast a stone when they do everything possible but accept that he could have screwed up.

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