As the election approaches, Donald Trump, a man many of us already thought was mercurial and impulsive, is unraveling before our eyes.
Under treatment for the same virus he allowed to ravage the nation — more than 212,000 dead and 7 million infected — he is acting in especially erratic and self-destructive ways. This could be the crack-up that has been expected by those who know him and by mental health experts with the courage to say that what troubles him endangers the nation.
The symbol of this moment, one that should appear in the history books, is the sight of the wobbly president, his face smeared with make-up to cover his sickbed pallor, saluting the Marine One helicopter as it whirled into the night. Thanks to the presence of news cameras set up to capture Trump’s return to the White House from his stay at Walter Reed Army medical center, the whole world got to see this pseudo-patriotic pantomime as it happened.
Trump’s salute was staged for a political campaign ad, so the president added to the spectacle by performing it twice, which meant that anyone nearby was doubly exposed to whatever deadly viruses may have emanated from the president’s nose and mouth. Never has an American president gone to such lengths to look so much like a little boy playing at tin-pot dictator.
Thanks to his addiction to media attention, Trump put his psychological collapse on display for all to see. In a rambling and sometimes babbling TV interview, he ranted about how the attorney general should prosecute Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. He flung nastiness at Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris and raised unsupported claims of rampant election fraud.
The meltdown included presidential hissy fits about conditions for another debate with Biden and Trump arguing with himself over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s proposal for another round of pandemic economic aid. This behavior led the speaker to begin talking about the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, which provides for the removal of a medically incompetent chief executive.
Trump has reached moment in which voters seem poised to reject him in resounding fashion because recent events have shaken the core of the myth the man has inhabited for decades. Comprised of lies about his wealth, his competence, and his patriotism, this false narrative was used to con others into electing him president in 2016. But though the country has been hurt by Trump’s fakery, the one most affected has been the man himself.
Having adopted his own lies as an identity, the man is now shaken to his core.
The breakdown began with The New York Times using Trump’s own records to prove he is a serial loser in business whose main skill seems to be in avoiding federal income taxes that in his first year as president, he paid $750. You read that right: $750. For someone who claims to be a billionaire, Trump’s failure to pay anything remotely like his fair share makes him an unpatriotic moocher.
More painful for Trump was the revelation of his failures as a business operator whose solvency depended on his earnings as a TV performer. Trump’s claim to great success as a big city builder was the foundation of the myth he sold to himself and the world. When I interviewed him for my 2015 biography, “Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success,” Trump took pains to stress this aspect of his identity.
“I don’t think of myself as a performer,” he told me. “Do you know what I think my biggest attribute is? I’m a great builder.”
The future president said he was “offended” by those who focus more “on my personality than my buildings.” It was as if the title “builder” added to his image of strength and “personality” indicated something soft and not-so-solid.
In truth, Trump hasn’t been much of a builder for many years, unless you count image-building as building. He has, instead, busied himself at promotion, turning himself into a celebrity and the name “Trump” into a brand that he has sold to partners who do the actual work of development and construction.
Unmasked by the truth of his failures, he performed like a raving lunatic in his debate with Vice President Joe Biden. It wasn’t just the belligerence that shocked but also the strangely generic quality of his attacks. On many occasions he veered away from his opponent’s policies and record, attacking him for the university he attended or his devotion to wearing the face masks that Trump’s own public health experts have repeatedly recommend for everyone.
“I wear a mask when needed,” said Trump. “I don’t wear masks like him. Every time you see him, he’s got a mask. He could be speaking 200 feet away, and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.” At another moment he blurted out, “By the way, I brought back Big Ten football.”
This was, it seems, an attempt at seizing credit for restoring something normal to American life amid the chaos of the pandemic. But it only served as a reminder — as if we need one — that we’re in the mess we are in Trump because he has failed so completely in his response to the coronavirus.
This is why the death toll in America is several times higher than it should be given our population and why, on the day of the debate, half the states were reporting their caseloads were on the upswing.
As I listened to the president brag as if he is as successful as he says he is, I was reminded of the way that his family and business associates talked to me about him before he became president. Back in 2015, I noted that they all seemed to tell the same anecdotes about him, even when those could be disproved with some simple fact-checking. Worse was the way that they talked about him as if he really was perhaps the greatest leader on earth.
When I asked Trump’s son Eric about his father, he replied, “He truly is a super genius. He’s a super genius in a very, very practical way.” Eric then reached for the greats as comparisons. “Look at Teddy Roosevelt,” he said. “What causes that? These guys were all larger than life. Look at Churchill. Some of these guys weren’t the most politically correct, but people loved them for some reason and they were interested by them.”
This kind of nonsense praise is nothing new for Donald Trump. As his psychologist niece Mary L. Trump describes in her bestselling book, her uncle’s ego has always been inflated by members of the family who were taught to affirm him no matter what he said or did. This was true even of his father, Fred Trump, who had created the family fortune that bankrolled his boy.
As she writes, “When Fred bragged about Donald’s brilliance and claimed that his son’s success had far outpaced his own, he must have known that not a word of it was true.”
Mary got her own close look at Donald’s fraudulence when she was retained to help him write a book. Despite her extra effort, she never could get him to give her a coherent narrative; when one of his assistants finally gave her a transcription of a tape he had recorded, it was 10 pages of useless ravings. By this time, however, Donald Trump had become so famous that his ego was permanently distorted.
Fame became Trump’s absorbing pursuit as his periodic bankruptcies put the lie to his claim that he was a great businessman. This record didn’t much matter to him because he believed that he deserved to be respected and obeyed as a leader, not because of his success but because of his genetic make-up.
“In my opinion, honestly in my opinion, that’s a genetic thing,” he said. Someone else might seek to match him through hard work and experience, but in the end they would fail because of their genes.
He added, “Given the choice between a person with great talent and great experience, I’ll always take the talent.”
It was talent and not experience or any exposure to critical information that Trump expected to see him through his presidency. When the coronavirus struck, he assumed, as he always did, that his instinct would prove more effective than all the learning of medical experts or the experiences of public officials like Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health, who has dealt with more viral outbreaks than anyone in government.
So it was that Trump foolishly advocated for unproven treatments and defied recommendations regarding mask-wearing and public gatherings even as the casualties mounted.
The third big defeat in Trump’s recent spate of humiliating losses came days after the debate when he was diagnosed with coronavirus and spirited off to the hospital. As this was happening others in his orbit — First Lady Melania Trump, press spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany, adviser Stephen Miller, etc. — were also felled. After receiving a combination of drugs no one else has ever gotten, including a powerful steroid, Trump managed to go home and make the climb up the staircase to perform his salutes.
Then came word that organizers would require that the next debate be held with the candidates separated and a temper tantrum that saw Trump refuse to participate.
If anything is clear after the president’s miserable last two weeks, it is that he seems to have reached his breaking point. A group of 100 prominent mental health experts warned that he poses a threat “well-predicted within the mental health community since the beginning” of his presidency. The New England Journal of Medicine reached a similar conclusion as it called for voters to deny Trump a second term as a matter of public health.
The experts are right, but their opinions only confirm what the world now sees. Donald Trump’s con has been so thoroughly revealed that even he doesn’t believe it anymore.
The con artist himself no longer buys the con. Will America’s voters?
D’Antonio is author of “The Truth About Trump” and the co-author with Peter Eisner of the upcoming “High Crimes, The Corruption, Impunity, and Impeachment of Donald Trump.”.
