"Quiet, quiet, piggy"

A slightly psychoanalytic approach

So Trump responded to Bloomberg’s Catherine Lucey aboard Air Force I last week after she asked him why, if there is nothing that incriminates him in the Epstein files, he is acting as if there was.

There was a good deal of talk about how disrespectful and misogynous he was then, and later during his Oval Office photo session for the state visit of the Saudi prime minister and crown prince (who should not be referred to, for the last time, as “bin Salman”, that’s a patronymic, not a surname, like calling Putin “Mr. Vladimirovich”—if your house style demands that he be given a family name, he has one of those too, “Āl Saud”, House of Saud, the lineage founded by his ancestor the Emir of Diriyah, with the assistance of a clerical ally, Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, founder of the Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam and his son’s father-in-law, in the 1740s), when ABC News’s Mary Bruce asked the prince a question about his role in the murder of Washington Post’s Jamal Kashoggi:

“You’re mentioning somebody that was extremely controversial,” Trump said, referring to Khashoggi. “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen, but he knew nothing about it. And would you leave it at that? You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question.”

Which raises a series of uncomfortable questions in its own right, when you think about it, like what is the purpose of asking such a question anyway. It’s not as if the prince is going to give you a scoop by answering honestly—in this case he used it skillfully to look sad and respectful about the murder without acknowledging any involvement, in general to give a much more favorable personal impression (at least to people who haven’t heard much of anything about the Kashoggi case) than Trump himself—but what, other than embarrassing him, could the question have accomplished for the reporter? If they wanted to make a journalistic point, surely it would have been better to boycott the whole event, as something that wouldn’t be producing any real news in the surface the press would be permitted to see. They should have stayed home. But that’ll be the day.

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The thing that gets to me about “Piggy” is in the first place sociolinguistic, and pretty simple: that the word isn’t adult language—toddler language, specifically, for toddlers and toddler-adult interaction (as in playing the toe game), like animal sounds (”moo”, “oink”), baby-talk nouns like “kitty” and “nana” for grandma or banana), special names for the bottle or diaper or pacifier, verbs like “go bye-bye” or “beddy-bye”, and so on.

When Trump says, “Quiet, piggy!” he doesn’t sound like a grown man complaining to a reporter for violating some unwritten rule of journalistic manners, he sounds like a very spoiled toddler yelling at the nanny for mussing his hair or slicing his sandwich laterally instead of on the diagonal.

Which is qualitatively different, I think, from the record we’re familiar with of Trump acting like a toddler, probably best represented in Daniel Drezner’s 2020 The Toddler in Chief: What Donald Trump Teaches Us About the Modern Presidency, compiling cases from Trump’s first presidential term in which Trump was compared to a toddler, for characteristics shared by some adults we’ve all known in our lives, his pig-headedness, forgetfulness, laziness and television addiction reluctance to learn anything, and the like, including many of his own henchmen and advisors, undisciplined and unmanageable, only occasionally too weird to digest, as in his demand for special treatment denied to his guests

or his uncontrollable tantrum when told he can’t have Greenland (not this year’s instances; this example from Drezner was in 2019)

(unlike Princess Lenore in James Thurber’s lovely fairy tale Many Moons, who merely weakens worryingly when she can’t have the moon).

I don’t think he’s normal, is the thing. I’ve long argued that he suffers from some untreated neurodiversity issues, like his specific reading comprehension deficit (RCD-S), which prevents him from understanding the meaning of what he reads, and ADHD, and from narcissistic personality disorder, an interpersonal problem which interacts with the neurodiversity in problematic ways:

ADHD vs. Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD)

Comparing ADHD with NPD and ASPD reveals stark differences in core symptoms, emotional regulation, and interpersonal dynamics. ADHD’s symptoms are primarily attentional and impulsive, not inherently linked to the ego or moral values. NPD and ASPD, however, are characterized by deep-seated patterns of grandiosity, lack of empathy, and in the case of ASPD, a disregard for the rights of others. These personality disorders reflect more than just behavioral issues; they embody a fundamental difference in how individuals perceive themselves and relate to others.

Another bridge between neurodiversity and personality disorder is the experience of early childhood trauma, which may be more likely to lead to NPD in ADHD children than other children. I’m wondering if Trump’s weird reversion to a toddler vocabulary might be a resurfacing under stress (the stress of being questioned about Epstein) of whatever it was that made him this way. I’ll get back to it presently.