I’m revising some of my beliefs about Donald Trump, based on what’s been happening in the weeks since the election. I realize I may be sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but why should they have all the fun?
I no longer believe he’s in the early stages of dementia or cognitive decline. I think he knows exactly what he’s doing, and he’s having the time of his life playing us all like violins (including his own people).
Take the rapid-fire announcements of some completely inappropriate choices for very important jobs, like US Attorney General, Secretary of Defense and director of national intelligence. Even Republicans were aghast at the thought of felon-in-waiting Matt Gaetz as our nation’s Attorney General.
Then Gaetz announced his withdrawal, saying he didn’t want to be a “distraction” from the important process of filling the new Cabinet. I noticed myself breathing a little easier at first, and that’s when it dawned on me that Trump has planned every step of this psychodrama, even the “distractions,” with great satisfaction and glee.
Trump’s life is every narcissist’s dream. He can literally do anything he wants, and nobody will stop him. Remember his boast that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and people would still vote for him? He’s now gone beyond that, escaping consequences for crimes even when he had already been tried and convicted. Pesky laws, penalties, deadlines, even the Constitution itself will bend to his whims, just because he says so.
What I used to think was ignorance I now see as a carefully cultivated persona, designed to entertain, provoke, and disrupt. He loved his rallies because he could do a stream of consciousness for hours and his fans ate it up. He wasn’t incapable of talking about policies, he simply had no interest in doing that. He’s not intelligent, by my definition, but he’s crazy like a fox. He’s smart like a man unencumbered by concern for future generations, or even present ones.
He doesn’t need to know the outcome to be able to capitalize on whatever happens. So, in the case of Gaetz for instance, he ignored the vetting that his staff was doing on AG nominees and threw Gaetz in the middle of everything just to see what would happen. Then, when the predictable uproar occurred, and it seemed unlikely that his minions in the Senate could deliver an approval, he pulled Gaetz out and dropped in Pam Bondi, one of his impeachment lawyers. (She was AG of Florida, so at least she has some relevant experience on her resume.) But what a week of wonderful drama! Trump’s name was on everyone’s lips.
Trump has nothing to lose because, in a sense, he doesn’t really care. He’s got plenty of money and will make a ton more while he’s in the White House. True, the Constitution doesn’t allow the President to receive extra profit or compensation from either domestic or foreign entities, but Trump can let the Supreme Court decide…oops, never mind. He fixed that minor problem during his first term.
He’s got a lifetime lock on attention, which is the thing he most enjoys. I had hoped he’d shrivel up and blow away after his loss in 2020, like a huge balloon stuck by a pin, but he found his perfect match in the MAGA crowd, whom he can always count on for adoration when the snobby “elites” look down on him.
And now the Senate is populated by men and women with little taste for political courage. Trump silences them with an angry tweet, and they turn somersaults trying to fix whatever they did that he didn’t like. Remember their spontaneous reactions to the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021? That’s not even ancient history now, it’s been revised out of existence.
Did you know that turning incumbents out of office was a global phenomenon this year? Conservative, liberal, it didn’t really matter, the voters wanted something different. Our nation had a strange kind of tunnel vision, in which the very real accomplishments of the Biden administration got lost in the general dissatisfaction with higher prices, even though inflation itself had been handled very well by Biden’s monetary wizards. It was a genuine unhappiness, but the mistake lay in thinking that Trump’s ill-conceived economic proposals would change things for the better. Of course, that remains to be seen.
The pendulum between conservative and liberal presidencies has swung throughout our history and will continue to do so. Trump’s election is not a mandate for some of the destructive (and non-conservative) things he plans to do. Unless he pulls some pretty impressive rabbits out of his hat over the next four years, the GOP will be the incumbents who are booted out in 2028. It could even happen in 2026, as today’s hopeful voters begin to realize that they’ve been played out like a bankrupt casino.
Susan Hull is a retired clinical psychologist, a horse trainer, and an Independent voter. Now that she knows we’ve all been tricked, she simply smiles and waits for the other shoes to drop, one by one by one. And then she heads back out to the pasture.
