To Donald Trump, the world is made up of only two sorts of people, or nations: strong winners whom others respect and fear, and weak losers whom others exploit and laugh at. There is no other alternative.
“At what point does America get demeaned? At what point do they start laughing at us, as a country?” Trump asked Thursday during his major announcement from the White House Rose Garden that the US would be withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement. “We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore. And they won’t be. They won’t be.“
For Trump, there is no such thing as collaboration for mutual gain. Cooperation is a sham.
Similarly, social insurance is a con. Billionaires can be trusted because they’ve already made their money—presumably by out-exploiting others.
Dictators are admirable because they’re respected and feared. But democratically-elected prime ministers and presidents need to be shown who’s boss—their hands grabbed in white-knuckled contests of dominance, their bodies shoved aside if they get out in front. And treaties and compacts need to be renegotiated so America wins.
It’s the same at home: Political opponents must be humiliated, White House staffers demeaned (even the Vice President shown his place), the press degraded, recalcitrant judges debased, others intimidated.
Everything is a giant zero-sum game in which either you win and they lose, or they win and you lose. And if they dare put up a fight, you get even.
This is the personality of a sociopath.
Trump is now the single most powerful person on the planet, with the ability to order the destruction of the world in just over four minutes. It is necessary to get him out of the White House, peacefully and legally, as quickly as possible.
This post originally appeared at RobertReich.org.
Robert B. Reich is the chancellor’s professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley and former secretary of labor under the Clinton administration. Time Magazine named him one of the 10 most effective Cabinet secretaries of the 20th century. He is also a founding editor of The American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause. His film, Inequality for All, was released in 2013. Follow him on Twitter: @RBReich.
And, can you imagine that there are still people who think of him as “Their Man?” Their blindness just makes me think of Socrates’ Allegory of the Cave. People like my two cousins like to live in the darkness of the Cave. Congressman Chris Collins does too. And what should we say of Kellyanne Fitzpatrick? The Trump geyser throws up mud at the truth … no such thing as truth penetrating the swamp, the cave, or the geyser. We are not just living in a dangerously divided nation. We are living in a schizophrenic one..thanks due all to Donald J. Trump… and the people who think of him as their “Man in the Whitehouse.”