Are We There Yet?

The road to decompensation

For a while yesterday, it seemed that the Kennedy Center's new name was simply "THE DONALD", like an Upper West Side co-op dedicated by the board to somebody named Donald who lived and died there, as my building briefly contemplated naming itself "The Virginia" after Virginia in the apartment above me passed away (Eileen the board president and I had to break into her place through the fire escape to find her body in the bathroom, so it's intensely memorable)—the rest was just subtitle. But there's also a tradition of referring to our emperor as "The Donald", going back, if I remember right, to Ivana, who had an English learner's confusion over the mysteries of when English uses an article. Photo by Heather Diehl/Getty Images via MS-NOW.

Later, it was revealed that that grammatical weirdness had been was really part of the plan, sitting atop the old name:

THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND
THE JOHN F. KENNEDY MEMORIAL CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS

That is, it now has two names, “The Donald J. Trump”, and the other one, also starting with “The”. Unlike the Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace, on an independently owned building illegally seized and depopulated last March by DOGE as a squat for themselves, for which workers couldn’t find an approximately appropriate font. The State Department suggested that in ordinary usage it would be best to just omit the name of the country, though they didn’t take it off the edifice:

Steve had a fine commentary the other day on Trump’s increasing preoccupation with monumentalizing himself, with these renamings and the astonishing Trumpese-language plaques in the White House’s new “Presidential Walk of Fame”, and the paved-over Rose Garden and destroyed East Wing and gigantic “ballroom” under construction and proposed triumphal arch across the water from the Lincoln Memorial, which I like to call the Arc du Trumphe (the Arc of the Trump bends slowly, but it will bend all the way over sooner or later), the projects he and his munchkins sometimes refer to as his “top policy priorities“, even as 20 million or more Americans face the imminent loss of their health insurance, and the negotiations ove Russia’s attempted conquest of Ukraine have been taken away from the State Department and taken over by billionaires with unconcealed financial interest in the outcome (including the president’s son-in-law).

Steve sees it as an attempt on Trump’s part to reconfigure the little world to which he is now largely restricted (the White House and a couple of his own commercial properties) into a bubble in which he is a success, and none of the bad news is real, the way his father before him, another psychopath, commanded his family: “Do what I want. It’ll be better for you.”

But I think it’s also compensatory, connected to a growing awareness that he is a failure, as even Fox News reports the bad economic news and the increasing belief that he’s not innocent in relation to Jeffrey Epstein and the strife within the Republican party. He doesn’t have time for those matters, he’s busy marking Washington forever with the labors of what he regards as his real skills, being “a builder” and interior decorator. He doesn’t feel guilty about not knowing anything about health policy or fiscal policy or foreign policy, he simply doesn’t accept that he has any responsibility for them, and as far as he’s concerned, whoever is responsible (generally a cabinet secretary) is doing fine, and the reporters who suggest he’s missing something are bad and stupid.

Of course he’s never had any interest in any policy anyway, other than hurting the defenseless, and shouting the slogans that have worked for him, on immigration and tariffs. (I connect these with his father too; it’s Charles Lindbergh’s America Firstism, which was to Fred Trump’s generation of reactionaries what Pat Buchanan has been to the current one, now for the moment triumphant over the bloody-minded neoconservatives.)

But also de-compensatory, if you know what I mean. I know I’ve said it before, but this time I think it’s real, he’s decompensating under his personality disorder, from the pressure of his many terrible mistakes, fruits of his abuse of the near absolute power the Supreme Court has given him and his complete incapacity for productive action. First he can’t hide his indifference to everyone who isn’t him, then he goes wild:

In rare moments of self-awareness, the narcissist realises that without his input - even in the form of feigned emotions - people will abandon him. He then swings from cruel aloofness to maudlin and grandiose gestures intended to demonstrate the “larger than life” nature of his sentiments. This bizarre pendulum only proves the narcissist’s inadequacy at maintaining adult relationships. It convinces no one and repels many.

The narcissist’s guarded detachment is a sad reaction to his unfortunate formative years. Pathological narcissism is thought to be the result of a prolonged period of severe abuse by primary caregivers, peers, or authority figures. In this sense, pathological narcissism is, therefore, a reaction to trauma. Narcissism IS a form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder that got ossified and fixated and mutated into a personality disorder.

Quod erat diagnosatandum.