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Gerald Fnord's avatar

It seems to me that a fundamental problem with someone primarily interested in demonstrating their high status is that nothing demonstrates it so well as its _irrational_ and _evil_ use. Successfully ordering (non-horrible) people to do the absurd or malign demonstrates your power-of-command much more definitely than telling (or 'worse', asking) them to do the reasonable and the good or inoffensive.

See: the demonstration of status by impunately injuring someone lower-down.

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gromet's avatar

What Yas says here: "In point of fact, that's what he believes classification is about: him, and his rights and prestige."

My take on Trump is that this is what he believes of the whole universe. Everything he perceives is an extension of him. The world did not truly exist before him and won't after him, and while he's alive it's a plastic thing that is either doing what he wants it to (which is what he deserves) or it is obnoxiously refusing to (and must be brought to heel).

I think there is overlap here with Hitler. I don't mean to play the Hitler card in the usual way, aka "he's a fascist," but instead, "he's a failed artist." Artists spend a long apprenticeship trying to see the world so they can put their personal stamp upon it. And almost all of them understand that any influence they achieve is a fragile effect of thought-provoking craft, the opposite of brute force. I suspect Trump, like Hitler, really wanted to be a first-rate artist but never had the taste, skill, or temperament. Hitler with lousy painting, Trump with charmless interior design.

Do I sound crazy? Maybe, but I think of a late 2016 or January '17 article I read about Trump deciding how his Oval Office would look, and how he showed a book of swatches to the reporter and explained the differences in fabric. He obviously knew something! And it was touching, it felt human, it felt like he was in his element in a way that he has never other times felt, because almost everything he does is carried off with bluster that I read as nonstop panic. Always trying to muscle the world into a big response. But in that anecdote he had a human size and looked comfortable in it. (Sorry, this is way off track from national security.)

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