‘Whether they want it or not,’ a closing threat to the women he loves to hate…
This one gets personal. We all focus on the obvious disqualifying qualities that should preclude Donald Trump from serving in the Oval Office again. He is hateful and promotes violence. He is power-mad and his first term in office ended in disastrous results. His MAGA movement has targeted women and immigrants for punishment, blacks and gays are among the American citizens his agenda has chosen to harass. Each group is fodder for his hateful rhetoric and his plans to oppress. Here at the end of the campaign when all the words have been written and shouting turns to voting, I wonder about those demons that have ravaged his soul. The hate he carries around in plain sight leaves little room for love as his niece has written in her latest “Trump family therapy” account. Her uncle’s psychoses began way before the onset of his more recent mental decline.
Some human experiences are universal. We all, for example, suffer loss at some time in our lives. Maybe, someone we dearly love- a parent, a spouse, a child, or a friend. When something is lost it generates grief and retrospection within us. Grief is measured in stages, and the final one is acceptance, the realization that some holes will never be filled. Were things left unsaid? Regrets? Could we have done more for them? As our doubts and grief subside, their memory remains, and the focus shifts from what we have lost. Instead, we begin to appreciate what a gift knowing them has been to us. The best of relationships change us- acceptance.
Trump seems to be stuck in the first stages of grief. He bathes himself in grievance and self-pity. He plays the victim well. Have we ever seen him smile? Laugh? Wonder when he has ever been happy? Donald’s relationships with others, especially the women in his life, give us some insight. It is difficult to describe any of them as “loving relationships.” His behavior toward women in general has been fodder for New York gossip columns. None are consistent with the tenor of his recent statement proclaiming to be their “protector.” The condition he places on his claim of protection oddly sounds like a threat:
“I said, ‘Well, I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not,’” Trump said. “I’m going to protect them.”
Who speaks of women that way? Who threatens to protect you against your will?
Trump bears the scars of an illness that has plagued him throughout his life. He is unaware that, far from being exceptional, he is a well-established archetype in the American narrative, which goes back to our founding. Trump imposes his will without consent because he is a bully. He gets away with it for many reasons, but in the political context, he has formed a cult-like “base” of willing followers to act on his behalf. His war on women’s rights — pretending to know what was best for them- suggests a deep-seated need to control them so that he can use them for his purposes. Trump was not in power when Roe was overturned, but the men and women in power who have led the charge were his followers.
Slaveowners were likewise patronizing of the men, women, and children they bought and sold with impunity. They were dismissiveness of the enslaved women and men reducing them to fractional beings. They were wealthy white men and they knew better. The rest would serve their needs in their fields, in their homes, and their land. They were “protecting” as well- their own wealth and privilege.
Washington, Jefferson, et.al. didn’t trust those who were not in their class to participate in governance. In retrospect, it marked them as racists and misogynists. To acquit them for being “men of their times”- for their provincialism- neglects the fact that there were others among them at the Constitutional Convention who begged to differ. Trump has tapped into the weakest strands of our national DNA. A closer look at his life reveals he cannot show love, nor has he allowed himself to be loved by another.
The loss of a relative- a mother, father, wife, husband, sister, brother- usually evokes both public and private grieving. These are feelings most of us share as humans. Joe Biden is an obvious example when he speaks about the loss of his first wife, and daughter in a tragic accident fifty years ago, and his more recent loss of son Beau to cancer. There is hardly a distinction in depth or expression of the losses even though they occurred nearly 50 years apart. Biden still talks about the tear that comes to your eye that gradually is displaced by a smile of remembrance. Biden’s retelling of his experience with grief rings true for those of us who have walked down the same path. Grief is a process that helps ease the loss.
Donald Trump has suffered the loss of his parents, siblings, and his first wife, his reaction is not like that of most of us. There is a callousness that those close to him have noticed. He rarely if ever acknowledges his grief. Narcissism somehow doesn’t fully explain a cold, cold heart. Before she died, Maryanne Trump Barry, the ex-president’s sister was recorded by his niece Mary Trump complaining about Donald:
“Donald was the only one who didn’t speak about Dad,” she said.
“I don’t want any of my siblings to speak at my funeral,” Judge Barry continued. “And that’s all about Donald and what he did at Dad’s funeral. I don’t know. It was all about him.”
- NYT, “Trump Attends His Sister’s Funeral, but Does Not Speak,” byJacob Bernstein
When Ivana Trump died, Trump “eulogized” his first wife and mother of three of his children with a tweet, “A very sad day, but at the same time a celebration of a wonderful and beautiful life…” He then, unsettlingly, buried her on an isolated spot on the grounds of his Bedminster golf course:
Many found the decision to bury Ivana at Trump National Golf Club Bedminster puzzling. She is the first person to be buried at the former president’s New Jersey property, and the ground had to be consecrated so she could have a traditional Catholic burial.
A New York Post photographer scoped out the site shortly after
Ivana was laid to rest and found that while her grave isn’t literally on the golf course, the whole vibe is surprisingly understated…
Photos taken by The Post Thursday show Trump’s grave alone against a bucolic scenery of trees and shrubbery. The grave looks upon a sprawling green space upon the country club’s vast estate. The plot where Ivana was… in a place where golfers would not see it as they tee off for a round of golf. The small section of the club is below the backside of the first tee.
Trump’s relationship with his mother has been described as “detached”. Like two of Donald’s wives, Mary MacLeod Trump was an immigrant who married Fred Trump in 1936 after emigrating from Scotland. She was the youngest of 10 children born to a poor fisherman and his wife. Mary would attend school up to the 8th grade. At 18, she followed two of her sisters to America to work as a domestic.
Her marriage to the upstart businessman from Queens yielded 5 children in 12 years. When giving birth to Robert, her last child, Mary Trump suffered severe hemorrhaging which required an emergency hysterectomy. According to a taped conversation between Mary Trump, Robert’s daughter, and Maryanne Trump, Donald’s coldness toward others, his anger targeted at women is familial and inherited from the most important relationship in his life- Dad Fred Trump:
…”Four in something like two weeks,” Maryanne Trump Barry would tell Trump biographer Gwenda Blair. It was uncertain whether Mary Trump would survive. “My father came home and told me she wasn’t expected to live,” Barry said, “but I should go to school and he’d call me if anything changed. That’s right-go to school as usual!”
It is hard to dismiss the impact his mother’s ordeal had on Donald who was two and a half years old at the time or the relationship it may have had to his later treatment of women and his callous disregard for women’s reproductive health. His mother’s life-threatening experience giving birth and his father’s reaction stands out as a childhood spent under the tutelage of a toxic father and an inattentive mother.
In the same article, a boyhood neighbor remarked that while Donald was “in awe” of his father, the relationship with his mother, he observed, was distant. For her part, Mary MacLeod Trump years later suggested Donald, who was sent off to military school at 13 due to bad behavior, was an enigma:
Now, in the twilight of her life, beset with debilitating bone loss, she was being sucked into his tawdry, nonstop soap opera, rendered a bit player in a media frenzy, captured by paparazzi while sitting in the rear of her chauffeured car, looking steely and peeved.
That year, according to Vanity Fair, Mary Trump asked Ivana Trump, her soon-to-be-ex-daughter-in-law, a pointed question. “What kind of son have I created?”
Trump’s niece Mary titled her latest book “Who Could Ever Love You” as a memoir of her dysfunctional family. The title seems particularly fitting to describe the relationships Donald Trump has had as an adult with women, his base, and the rest of us. He often uses “love” in his rant-filled speeches in contexts that seem oddly perverse. He tells us that he and Kim Jong Un exchanged “love letters,” Vladimir Putin is on his speed dial. He now boasts that he loves women despite his telling them they should be punished if they seek an abortion.
Yet, in all the descriptions of his mother, Trump hardly uses the word. In his article for Politico, Michael Kruse noted Trump’s description of his mother is artfully lacking in warmth,
…[H]e would invoke Mary Trump at rallies. “Nobody respects women more than me,” he said in one speech, in Miami in late 2015. “Greatest person ever was my mother. Believe me, the greatest.” Trump told the country about his mother in the middle of his dark speech at the Republican National Convention, calling her “fair-minded,” “one of the most honest and charitable people I have ever known” and “a great judge of character… She was a-she was a terrific woman-he said. “She was born in Scotland, came here … met my father …
hardly the stuff for Hallmark Mother’s Day cards.
After a comedian at his rally at Madison Square Garden called Puerto Rico “floating garbage” Trump countered this week, insisting “Hispanics love Trump” as he tried to dismiss the comic’s slight by pretending it never happened. Then, unable to help himself, Trump blurted out the truth about his relationships to every group, every wife, every parent, everyone else- they matter only for their value to his depleted ego:
“So I’m here for one simple reason,” Trump said. “I like you very much, and it’s good for my credentials with the Hispanic or Latino community.” (emphasis mine)
- Trump at his New Mexico rally October 31
Trump has spent a lifetime searching for something. All the money, fame, and success he has had seem not to have made him happy. This is a man who is incapable of love perhaps because he never experienced it from others closest to him. Or maybe, he simply doesn’t deserve it.
So when he tells women he will protect them whether they want his protection or not, he is speaking to women like his first wife who accused him of rape within their marriage, or Stormy Daniels whose “affection” he thought he could buy. He sees E. Jean Carroll who resisted his advances and then brought him to trial for the rape for which she needed protection and never got- from him. Women, in his eyes, are ungrateful for his self-absorbed protections not for them but for his fragile ego. Liz Cheney whose strength and clarity expose him as weak and cowardly is the ultimate threat because her advocacy on behalf of democracy threatens his freedom.
His self-loathing is so profound that it poisons all around him. The question ‘Who will ever love me?’ haunts him and threatens us all.
On Tuesday we can give him all the free time he needs to work on his issues. The therapy would do him good. It would make one helluva reality show.
Originally published at https://vincerizzo.substack.com.
