Last evening I was sitting in my living room, dinner underway, my lovely wife and Peety at my side. (That precious little boy waves his tail so beautifully! ) We had just watched Air Force One approach its landing for Trump’s “festival” at Mt. Rushmore. Here my family is doing “lemming” again and watching this version of “The Trump Story” airing. But, I am not apologizing; we wanted to watch it! The pandemic, one expression of which is Trumpism, has challenged Trump’s ability to get the ego reward of huge throngs bowing at his feet. But last night a crowd of 7500 prostrated itself before him, feverishly giving him the validation for which his two year old soul hungers. That hunger is a gaping maw, sucking into its demonic depths, a crowd of “true believers” who have made him their avatar.

I am reminded of one of the 20th century’s greatest prophets . W. H. Auden, who told us, “We are afraid of pain, but more afraid of silence.” Early in Trump’s life his innocent heart hungered for the “noise” of a validation from his parents, especially his mother. It is in this gap, this “absence” from which we all emerge, that Donnie did not get mirrored., aka”loved.” His precious heart hungered desperately for an empathic response from his mother, the absence of which was related to his aloof and emotionally-tyrannical father. It was in that moment of vulnerability that young Donnie accepted the wooing of a nascent psychosis which 73 years later exploded into full “glory,” albeit a dark, demonic “glory.”

A “black-hole” sucks into its depths everything that tarries too long in the periphery of its orbit. Two people immediately come to my mind, Kelly-Anne Conway and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The toll on Conway is seen in the depleted, haggard, frightened visage that she proffers whenever she crawls out of the hole in which Trump has imprisoned her. Sanders was an “innocent,” a simple little Baptist girl from Arkansas with a powerful father who was genetically wired to “drink the kool-aid.” (The image of these two innocent little girls brings to my mind an image from T.S. Eliot, “Men and bits of paper whirled by the cold wind which blows before and after time.”) These two little girls deserved better; but genetically and socio-culturally they got “dumped on”. But that is no excuse as we humans share the same fate of an emotional/spiritual “baggage” that we acquire in our formative years. We can surmount that burden only with the courage that maturity offers, gracing our lives with a whiff of “self”-awareness. That “whiff” is usually squashed before it comes to our conscious mind. As Auden noted,”Truth met him (her) and held out her hand. But he (she) clung in panic to his (her) tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”