Lots Of People Have Opinions About Donald Trump, But What Does He Think About Himself?
This is not satire or humor. After reading the transcript of the conversation between Donald Trump and Bob Woodward, I asked myself: “What does Donald Trump think about himself?”
By David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
Here is my OPINION about what Donald Trump thinks about himself:
DT Thinks He Is A Good Person
While lots of villains know they’re villains but don’t care, DT thinks he’s a good person. He believes that he’s intelligent, friendly, decent, and caring.
DT Views Himself As A King
The key to understanding how Donald Trump views himself is to realize that he thinks of himself as a King with the prerogatives of a King and, of course, as someone who deserves to be treated like a King.
If you defer to him, if you acknowledge his greatness, he will be your best friend, unless and until it’s in his interest not to.
When push comes to shove, the needs of the King always take precedence over the those of his subordinates. In the King’s mind, throwing his inconvenient former supporters under the bus doesn’t mean that he’s a bad person.
Henry the Eighth may have professed friendship for Cardinal Wolsey and love for Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, but when they became inconvenient he had the first arrested for treason and the other two beheaded.
The King Is Above Ordinary Concepts Of Morality
Henry didn’t think that he was a bad person for destroying Wolsey and killing his wives in the same way that a general doesn’t think he’s a bad person for ordering a thousand men to their deaths. Kings believe that ordinary concepts of morality simply don’t apply to them.
Attacking The King
People get really upset when they feel that they didn’t get something that they deserved. A key to understanding DT’s notorious thin skin is that Kings absolutely believe that they deserve deference and respect.
If you deny the King’s greatness or act in a way that appears to be contrary to the King’s interests, the King feels that he has every moral right to do or say anything to retaliate against you.
Ignore DT, or worse yet, disrespect his power and self-perceived greatness and he will feel fully justified in doing everything in his power to crush you. He will not consider disrespecting you, lying about you, slandering you, or doing anything else he can to hurt you as dishonest or morally wrong because, in his mind, he’s the King and he has a moral right to crush those who don’t give the King the respect he deserves.
So, the first major point in understanding how DT views himself is that at the forefront of his mind is the idea, “I’m the King and I deserve to be treated with the respect and deference due to a King. People who don’t do that deserve to be punished and I have the moral right to use any means possible to do so.”
In his own mind, nothing he does to crush an enemy can possibly be morally wrong or make him a bad person.
A License To Lie
Police detectives know that they are entitled to lie to a suspect. They don’t think that they’re bad people or that they’re being dishonest when they lie to a criminal. Their job exempts them from any such moral judgments.
The guards at the concentration camps didn’t think they were bad people when they herded the jews into the gas chambers. Like James Bond, they had a License To Kill. They were just doing their jobs and following orders which exempted them from any moral judgments that might otherwise attach to their actions.
When a businessperson is trying to make a deal, he/she may tell the other side, “I’m only going to pay one-million and not a penny more” when, in fact, he’s actually prepared to go as high as a million and a half. The negotiator doesn’t view his “not a penny more” statement as being dishonest. He thinks he has a License To Lie to the people on the other side of the negotiating table.
DT doesn’t think of himself as a liar or a dishonest person. In his mind, he’s the King and Kings have a perpetual License To Lie.
For him, it’s not dishonest to lie to voters, business competitors, political opponents, or anyone else, at least in the context of politics or business, and for him, everything is in the context of politics or business.
For him, everything he does is part of some cosmic negotiation in which saying things that are untrue is not and cannot be a moral failing or character flaw and speaking those untruths don’t make him a bad person. Like Tessio scheming to have Michael Corleone killed, it isn’t wrong. It’s just business.
On this topic, here’s an excerpt from my book, The Wrong Side Of A Gun, where the police detective, Virgil Quinn, has a meeting with the Mayor, Charles Grantham, and his chief media strategist, Jeremy Knowlton.
“You can’t cut somebody’s hair or fix their toilet without passing a test, but we let any senile moron who can stagger into a polling booth cast a vote,” Grantham complained as if Virgil hadn’t spoken. “And because of that I have to run a campaign designed to win the approval of idiot-stuffed focus groups. These people barely know how to tie their own shoes and they’re supposed to tell me how to run a city?”
“You never want to give people too many details,” Jeremy explained almost apologetically. “That just divides your supporters and gives the other side something specific to attack. You want to limit your proposals to vague generalities so that each voter who agrees with you can fill in the specifics in a way that pleases him.”
“Then you’re not going to advocate raising the minimum wage?” Virgil asked.
“That depends on how it plays in Jeremy’s focus groups.” Virgil followed Grantham’s gaze to his media advisor.
“What if your numbers and the focus-group positions conflict with the candidate’s own philosophy?” Virgil asked, the words slipping out before he could get a grip on his tongue.
“The first thing that every candidate learns,” Jeremy said sternly, “is that he not only has a license to lie. He has an obligation to lie. Every candidate’s first duty is to get elected. What he or she actually believes is irrelevant if he doesn’t get elected. That’s Job One. In order to get elected you have to receive a majority of the votes cast. To do that, you have to craft the right positions on the right issues. Once you win, then you can do what you want.”
“How often do candidates refuse to do that, to lie?”
“They almost all refuse to lie, at first. They’ve spent their lives being told that honesty is the best policy, so we have to beat that out of them. Think of it like army boot camp.
“You get a bunch of kids who’ve been told that it’s wrong to kill people and then you have to make them unlearn that and get them to a place where they can point a gun at some stranger and blow their head off and then march over the hill and do it again. Teaching someone the importance of lying is easy compared to training them to kill. Hell,” Knowlton said with a little laugh, “if a good Mormon like Mitt Romney can embrace the principal of exercising his License To Lie then pretty much anyone can.”
Intelligence
In poker you want to have the best hand, the one that wins, or the worst hand, the one that folds immediately while your ante is small.
The worst thing you can do is have the second best hand that keeps you in the game all the way to the disastrous end.
The most dangerous leader is someone who is only half as smart as he thinks he is, the boss who is smart enough to start something that he isn’t smart enough to know that he isn’t smart enough to finish.
DT has succeeded by inheriting millions coupled with multiple bankruptcies and questionable business practices (Trump University to name just one).
He thinks he’s Warren Buffett when he’s actually P.T. Barnum.
He isn’t smart enough to understand that anyone who proclaims that they are a stable genius is actually telling the world that they are neither stable nor a genius.
He’s convinced that he’s a very smart person, but he’s one of those dangerous people who are not smart enough to know how limited their intelligence really is.
–David Grace (www.DavidGraceAuthor.com)
