Jeffrey Goldberg’s recent piece in The Atlantic has certainly caused a stir since its publication. He tells us that anonymous sources, mainly former Trump administration officials, claimed that Donald Trump lied when he said he couldn’t visit the Aisne-Marne American Military Cemetery when he was in France in 2018, blaming rain in which “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and “that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there.” The real reason was that he didn’t want to muss-up his hair just to pay his respects for “losers” and “suckers.”
Trump clearly has no sense of “patriotism.” He pardons soldiers who killed unarmed, wounded or captured enemy fighters; to him, they were his “great warfighters,” just like those vigilantes he defends who go around shooting unarmed protesters. Soldiers who just do their duty are “suckers” because serving their country bears them “no direct personal gain…There’s no money in serving the nation.” Trump is the kind of “patriot” who thinks unbridled capitalism defines “freedom,” and being a “patriot” means doing whatever is necessary to make the rich richer, whether it is by cutting taxes for the benefit of his “kind,” or gutting environmental regulations. Goldberg notes that those who know Trump say that he “finds the notion of military service difficult to understand, and the idea of volunteering to serve especially incomprehensible.”
Trump has always been a selfish, self-serving hypocrite, and he has provided much evidence these past four years that there is no reason to disbelieve he would say such things. Yet there are still the Trump true believers living his fantasy world, The AP quoted a woman named Katie Constandse, married to a Fort Bragg soldier, who didn’t care if the story was true or not. “If you twist his words or just take one thing out of context, you'll always find a way to hate him. He's a human being. He takes a lot of stuff. I don't see how he has survived for almost four years — the constant barrage of anger toward him.”
The problem with that statement is that it is hard to consider someone who totally lacks empathy for other human beings as being completely “human,” someone who is easy to hate, for, as Goldberg noted, “When lashing out at critics, Trump often reaches for illogical and corrosive insults.” Trump’s behavior suggests that of the bully, for which he has been shielded from penalty because he has always had money and privilege from the day he was born. He could use that money and privilege to bully those who didn’t have the resources (such as paying for crooked lawyers) to fight him.
When most of us were young, the typical “bully” was a “big” kid who always picked on smaller kids, or those who telegraphed they not “aggressive” physically or verbally, especially if they were not “popular.” Psychology Today defines bullying as “a distinctive pattern of repeatedly and deliberately harming and humiliating others, specifically those who are smaller, weaker, younger or in any way more vulnerable than the bully. The deliberate targeting of those of lesser power is what distinguishes bullying from garden-variety aggression. Bullying can involve verbal attacks (name-calling and making fun of others) as well as physical ones, threats of harm, other forms of intimidation, and deliberate exclusion from activities.”
Bullies lack the social skills to get what they want “without harming others…and a way of establishing social dominance,” and as children grow older, it becomes “increasingly dysfunctional way. “Bullies are made, not born…if the normal aggression of 2-year-olds is not handled with consistency, children fail to acquire internal restraints against such behavior. Bullying remains a very durable behavioral style, largely because bullies get what they want—at least at first.”
Bullies also “lack prosocial behavior, are untroubled by anxiety and do not understand others' feelings. They exhibit a distinctive cognitive feature, a kind of paranoia: They misread the intentions of others, often imputing hostility in neutral situations. Others may not like them, but they typically see themselves quite positively. Those who chronically bully tend to have strained relationships with parents and peers…Bullies like victims who become visibly upset when they are picked on and who do not have friends or allies.”
Bullies also “frequently carry out their aggression before an audience of peers, and the presence of an audience can boost a bully’s sense of power. But bystanders seldom stop the aggression, they may in fact enjoy the spectacle. Even if they don’t approve of the situation, they may dislike the victim or fear retaliation by the bully.”
We can see all of that in Trump. He was bullied by his father, and because he never had to learn how to work with others, be bullied others in turn. Unlike most children, he never outgrew this habit. Trump’s insistence on exaggerating his wealth, his alleged “greatness,” his lack of empathy, his failing to “understand” another person’s point of view, his paranoia, his “misreading of intentions,” denying the genuine concerns of others as merely being evidence of “hostility” toward him personally--suggesting not just an overgrown bully, but one with a high degree of paranoia.
Trump does have “friends,” but they themselves love to bully others if they have the power to do so, which of course Trump allows them--especially against immigrants, the kind that “everyone” hates and have few “friends.” At his rallies, Trump’s base only revels at the more outrageous his slandering and bullying of those who oppose his vision of the country. And then of course there are those, especially Republicans in the U.S. Senate, who choose to aide and abet him despite their better judgment because they fear “retaliation” from his slandering. The few Fox News reporters who have the audacity to report the facts find themselves subject to Trump’s smear campaigns, although even the few facts provided are quickly forgotten by the Fox News audience by prime time.
The truth, of course, is that like all bullies, Trump is a coward, He dishes out the lies and slanders non-stop, but he can’t take one word of “heat.” His contempt for those who gave their lives during wartime--especially against those who fought against his “kin” in Germany--suggests another kind of bullying to mask his cowardice in facing “enemies” who don’t fight on terms or rules he thinks he can “win.”
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