From the magic box
Richard Wolffe at the Graun points out another cognitive deficit that hinders Trump.
Donald Trump has a problem with reality. To be specific, he has a problem distinguishing reality television from reality. With each passing news cycle, it’s alarmingly clear that he believes in his own character from the fantasy show known as The Apprentice.
Now, most viewers above the age of four have already figured out there’s a certain artifice to the world of TV. There’s the dramatic music and the heavy editing, the make-up and the lights, and of course the word “show”, which gives away the whole game.
But our commander-in-chief sees something else when he stares into the screen during his many daily hours of executive time inside the White House. He sees a window on the world in which he can utter his catchphrase and people just disappear, along with all their problems.
“You’re fired!” worked so well on The Apprentice. Why shouldn’t it work so well with the multiple investigations into all these allegations of collusion with the Russian government, money laundering through his real estate business, obstruction of justice and his chaotic management of the executive branch of government?
Remember that time he got to say the magic words when he was raging about the kneeling football players?
“He’s fired. HE’S FIRED.”
There is a precedent for this kind of presidential delusion: Ronald Reagan. The now-beloved conservative hawk served in the second world war at a motion picture unit in Los Angeles. But he watched the footage of the liberation of the concentration camps, and later told several people that he personally had filmed at Buchenwald.
One of Reagan’s favorite stories, retold multiple times, was about a heroically doomed tail gunner. It was almost certainly ripped from a wartime movie he loved.
Both Reagan and Trump are figures from show biz, not politics or law or government or human rights or any other line of work that involves laboring for the greater good as opposed to self.
I think this ties into your other post earlier, where you said something about him not having the theory of mind to be able to comprehend that someone being nice/polite to you doesn’t mean they like you. This may also why he lacks empathy – other people don’t really exist to him, other than as things to use or discard as he chooses, so it’s not possible for him to conceive of them thinking differently from him.
He seems to exist entirely in his own head. He actually creates a narrative in his mind, a bizarre fractured reality where anything he wants to be true is true and anything he dislikes he can designate as fake and it becomes so. So when he recalls an event, it’s altered through this perception and becomes his truth. I think this might be part of why everything he says is lies – he’s constantly reinventing and revising inside his head until those memories bear no resemblance to actual events.
This could also account for the disconnect between who he thinks and projects himself to be and how he actually behaves. The ‘you’re fired’ thing is a case in point – he talks this big talk about firing people on the spot but when faced with having to fire someone for real, he bullies other people into doing it or makes life so intolerable that the subject of his ire quits. But in his head, he strides up to that person and does his whole Apprentice spiel and the firee slinks away, bested. And he then adopts this to be what really happened, even in the face of objective evidence to the contrary.
The actual horror may be that he is in fact just a cardboard cutout. Doesn’t Jewish folklore have a name for that — krav maga or something? Yeah, Golem, what I said right?
Claire, yep – that’s what I meant by “another cognitive deficit”…in addition to the one I’d just posted about.
It’s morbidly fascinating to see how impervious he is, how everything just bounces off him…how immovably pleased with himself he is. Fascinating but utterly disgusting.