One morning, as he began to wake from a deep slumber, having ranted online well into the night, something felt different to Donald.
His first thought was typically something about being the victim of a witch hunt, or how he’s the best at everything, or a flashing worry about whether someone had betrayed him.
But not today. He didn’t have words for this feeling. It was a state he didn’t really know — hadn’t ever known — and finding the right adjectives would take some time.
All he knew was that he didn’t want to be alone that morning. Instead, he wanted to greet his wife with a kiss.
The news — the “fake” news that he railed against incessantly because he needed to believe it vilified him — didn’t hold any interest. He asked his staff to turn off the TV that would normally occupy him while he ate breakfast. He chose instead to have some coffee outside and feel the warmth of the sun on his face.
He suddenly felt this twinge in his chest: a desire to reach out to his children, to let them know how much he loved them and how proud he was of them.
Then came a wave of profound sadness.
He sat, staring at a picture of his father, Fred, and remembered all the times he had tried so hard to make him proud, when all Donald really wanted was for his father to tell him that he was loved.
As his eyes welled with tears, he saw clearly those moments from his childhood and adolescence, and then his later years until he took over the company, and how Fred really didn’t know how to love except by building, and it was his father’s way of telling him that he loved his son when he had turned to Donald to help continue to build the empire.
Donald realized then that all of those times he felt completely inadequate, that he never felt like his father believed in him or that Donald was worthy of taking over, and that his father had never said anything so treacly as “I love you,” he had been wrong. He had misunderstood everything. Fred loved him as best as he could, in the only way Fred knew how, however inadequate for Donald that was.
In that moment, he forgave his father and vowed to break the cycle he had repeated with his children. Over time, he picked up the phone and called them, to tell them that no matter what they did, he loved them.
For a moment he wondered if he perhaps he was meant to be a messiah, a Jesus-like figure, and then realized that was his ego talking. He had never really understood how that voice in his head was different from his real self, and now he did, even if the voice wasn’t entirely gone. He chuckled at his hubris (and noted with surprise that this was the first time he had ever lovingly laughed at himself), knowing how easily in the past he might have proclaimed this new status.
Many who awaken think they can be the next Jesus. But in that recognition, he discovered something that had long eluded him, a very strange quality, that didn’t demand to be acknowledged or praised, and didn’t need the word “greatest” to be applied to anything he had done.
It was only later that he would come to understand that feeling as humility.
He would wonder what he had done to deserve such grace. His life prior to his awakening had only ever been in service to his ego, to this wound of not feeling loved by his father. Not even his brush with death on the campaign trail had inspired deep change in him. What had he done to merit this sudden awareness of his true nature?
That question — for which there was no answer, because grace is never a question of merit but of divine will — would follow him for the rest of his life.
Somehow, even though he kept seeking an answer, he wrestled with the possibility that not having the answer was important. Getting something that wasn’t bought or negotiated, wasn’t a transaction or contract with terms of offer and acceptance, was foreign to him.
But not having an answer fueled his desire to make amends and repair what he had done, as if he might be able to repay the grace. Eventually he would learn to give without expectation of a return, just as his moment of awakening had given him something with no expectation of repayment.
Donald would later begin what became known to his biographers as his “Make America Generous Again” tour, and the generosity would take the form of many apologies.
He would apologize to the public for lying and acknowledge that he had lost several elections. It shocked him that he could say he lost in public, something that would normally have hurt him to the core.
He would apologize to every person for whom he had come up with some kind of nickname, realizing just how petty an act it was to do so. He would make amends to the many women he had denigrated.
To all those he had insulted as stupid or weak or losers — judges, former cabinet members, veterans, police officers, and more — Donald would acknowledge how much his own wounded ego had compelled his projection.
Much to the surprise of pundits, he would seek forgiveness with a sincerity many thought was beyond him.
In the last few years of his life, after he finished his prison sentence — first reduced by pleading guilty and assuming responsibility for his actions and then cut short by good behavior — Donald retreated from public life, preferring to quietly contemplate his place in the world and how close he had come to destroying something as precious and fragile as democracy.
It wasn’t all easy or seamless. As his biographers would later recount, he went through fits of depression — fueled by shame for his prior actions — and a sense of remorse for the damage he’d wrought. He grieved opportunities to be kind that he had missed when he was feeding his insatiable need for approval.
There were still moments when that need briefly flickered alive again, and he lashed out. Having spent a lifetime cultivating certain habits, those patterns do not always go gently into the night.
At some point, he would recognize that what he needed in those moments was to be held by his wife or hugged by one of his children or grandchildren, instead of turning to social media.
Mostly, though, he reflected with gratitude on his journey and admired with a sense of awe how on one morning everything had changed.
As he approached the end of his life, he thought briefly about penning a memoir to share the tale of his sudden transformation, but the impulse was little more than a final gasp of his ego. Instead, he altered his last will and testament and donated the vast majority of his empire to charity, with a sizable portion devoted to curing children’s cancer.
On his death bed, surrounded by loved ones, Donald felt nothing but peace, having learned that giving and receiving love was far more powerful than the fleeting relief he ever got from being told he was the best.
This is a fictional rendering of a spiritual awakening, and no one should rely on it for any claim of truth about the main character. If, as fiction, the story inspires reflection on the potential grace of awakening for each of us, including for those who seem least open to such an experience, it will have accomplished its task.
