Friday, October 14, 2016

Donald Trump's Achilles' Heel? He's Donald Trump.

Trump grew up into the man he is. He makes a good demagogue, but he makes a lousy human being.

Here he looks pensive, almost contemplative. What if all he's doing is
plotting revenge? Apparently that's his go-to move.

There are two countervailing movements driving Donald Trump these days. One is the steady flow of news that paints Trump in a very negative light, almost terminally so. The other is his overpowering need to strike back. For a powerful man, he seems utterly powerless to resist his instinct for revenge.

It's not difficult to figure out why this is happening. He's been Donald Trump all these years. He really does do all those despicable things in business like use -- and lose -- other people's money, stiff his contractors, sue the bejesus out of people as a business tactic, and, well, you know the litany. In his personal life, he's acted the indecent part of the alpha male, acted it in spades. Even the smallest remark -- he gives permission to Howard Stern to call daughter Ivanka "a piece of ass" -- demonstrates that women are ONLY OBJECTS TO HIM.

(Aside: For alpha males it doesn't have to be that way. Paul Newman built an oeuvre of film to drool over, a hugely successful non-profit food industry for charity, a summer-camp program for children suffering from illness, and was married to the same woman all his life.)

In the end, there's so much to not like -- that's if you're not a poorly-educated white man who'd admire the Donald for his sexual conquests, no matter how vile -- about Trump that his central disqualifier isn't his odious character. It's that, in foreign policy, we fear that if roused by a foreign power he might instinctively decide "l'll fucking fuck you up!" We don't need that in a leader.

I don't need to go into all the other reasons -- like how he's riled up a portion of the country to despise and distrust institutions that we need to function -- why he's bad for the country. Hell, he's bad for the neighborhood.

Most of us, apparently, get that. Hopefully that's enough for us to get past November 8th with our country's dignity more or less intact. Still, we'll be left with some serious work to do.

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