Sometimes, I sit back in breathtaking wonder struggling to consider what more could possibly be written about Donald John Trump that hasn’t already been said a million times and in a million different ways.
And then, he does something else that leaves me – and any thinking human being – gasping for adjectives to explain the actions of the worst person America has ever produced by a margin so vast it defies calculation.
This was the case last Friday when word filtered out that Joe Biden’s cancer had spread, metastasizing into his bones and causing him horrendous pain. His son Hunter publicly described the debilitating progression and how devastating it is to witness someone he so loves fighting such an unbearable final battle.
News of the former president’s advancing malignancy left anyone with the slightest modicum of empathy feeling immense compassion for a gentleman who has sacrificed so much to serve his country and suffered such significant personal loss along the way.
Anyone, that is, except for Trump.
This smallest and most pitiful of men saw the news of Biden’s pain as an opportunity to pile on. He decided that was the day to humiliate Biden by posting to Truth Social a photo of his longtime rival golfing, hunched over mid-swing with a massive chunk of turf ripping out of the ground. It featured above the picture the message, “Biden isn’t even a 100 Handicap.”
What kind of a heartless SOB posts something like that simultaneous to news filtering out that the guy is in the fight of his life against a metastatic cancer that is slowly taking him? A slimeball without equal, that’s who.
Yes, the people who support him will naturally defend it with gusto. They’ll say, “That’s just Trump being Trump,” as if it’s somehow a defense rather than the definition of a person imbued with not a sliver of humanity. Being predictably cruel doesn’t somehow diminish the viciousness, the callousness, the utter remorselessness and inhumanity of a person who lacks the most basic human decency or decorum.
The best thing Trump could have said on a day when this news about Biden filtered out was nothing. The second-best thing would have been a few empty but respectable words that acknowledged another man’s distress and misery.
But no. That sort of even modest integrity isn’t in Trump’s wheelhouse. A man whose emotional development and maturity halted at age 12 is capable only of dispensing degradation that intensifies the torment of those he perceives as his enemies. He has but a single gear, and it’s marinated in sadism.
It’s not just despicable; it’s flat-out monstrous.
You can’t legislate kindness. But too many people have come to normalize cruelty as just part of the deal now in human relations. Trump has made grotesque behavior acceptable and transformed the sadistic into the everyday.
In psychology, sadism refers to the derivation of pleasure, gratification, excitement or a sense of power from another’s suffering, humiliation, fear or helplessness. It need not be physical or sexual. Researchers also study ordinary sadism involving interpersonal cruelty and the enjoyment of others’ distress.
This is, quite simply, Trump in a nutshell. He is a commonplace sadist. All of his actions and words drive home this point. To him, winning isn’t winning unless his opponent is simultaneously degraded, diminished, shamed, ridiculed.
The supporters of this man believe it is perfectly acceptable conduct for a president of the United States – and by supporters, I also mean the Republican members of Congress who continue not merely to tolerate his merciless impulses but enable and applaud it publicly.
There once was a time back before Trump’s still implausible ascension when presidents took seriously their responsibility to be role models, to rise above petty politics and enlighten when the situation called for it. To unite. In the face of tragedy, political opponents became human beings.
At the very least, illness and death were off-limits for small-minded attacks. The unmistakable message was that underneath it all, we’re delicate mammals on earth for but a short time.
But that’s all gone now. Understanding and compassion are exploited as weakness by a party that follows its leader in victimizing and mocking the concept of morality, one who seizes on defenselessness as a focus of attack and dominance. This is also called kick-’em-when-their-down, which precisely defines the decision to taunt Biden for the crime of permitting his disease to progress.
The flip side of this is equally telling when it comes to Trump. He carries an obsession with turning humiliation into entertainment while at the same time having positively no tolerance when it comes to his own humiliation. He’s basically a snowflake when being targeted for any criticism.
Quite the paradox.
Crowd size, wealth, intelligence, physical vigor, losing an election, being laughed at, being called a loser – these are all unusually sensitive subjects that get way under Trump’s skin. Is his compulsion to humiliate others connected to his own intense aversion to being degraded? Perhaps that’s for greater mental health minds than mine to assess.
To be sure, however, few public figures in modern times have employed humiliation against others so relentlessly while simultaneously appearing so unwilling to accept/brush off ridicule, disrespect or diminishment directed at themselves. Methinks gross insecurity could be at its root.
What’s clear is that he seems especially attracted to status reversal, as in:
Someone important is revealed to be pathetic.
Someone respected to revealed to be stupid.
Someone powerful comes begging to him.
Someone who criticizes Trump is fired/defeated/disgraced.
Someone who humiliates Trump must be humiliated themselves.
And when it comes to Joe Biden, vulnerability is leapt upon to further reduce someone in the throes of what appears to be terminal illness. Not only is such comportment not presidential; it’s not human.
But it shouldn’t surprise us that this man is incapable of even faking benevolence. It’s just one more compelling reason to loathe him. That isn’t Trump Derangement Syndrome talking, as there is absolutely nothing deranged about seeing him for the worthless dirtbag he will always be.
(Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.)
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