Trump’s Self-Hatred Will Destroy His Campaign
by JOHN ESKOW
CounterPunch, AUGUST 14, 2015
To paraphrase Bob Dylan, even Donald Trump must stand naked, and like everyone else sometimes he winces at what he sees. Consider Trump stepping out of the shower–forced to confront all that sun-lamped, over-fed, over-cologned flesh, and those hate-lines around his pout-shaped mouth, and, of course, that wildly asymmetric mass of orange-Kool-Aid-colored hair, still wet from the shower–on one side of his head, it hangs down past his shoulder in a huge ragged curtain; on the other side of his head, there is nothing but bald scalp and sadness. He begins every day by engineering that combover, the equivalent of The Great Wall of China. Then he Spanxes up, re-colognes himself, puts on a red Trump necktie, and goes out into the world to proclaim his own greatness.
You don’t have to be a psychotherapist to see that Donald Trump’s loathing for others is just an offshoot of his loathing for himself. Do you know any confident people in their 60s who need to compulsively remind you that they attended a good college–and got As? Do you know any truly-loved people who keep insisting, twenty times a day, that everyone loves them? Trump’s dirty secret is that he’s just smart enough to know that he’s a fraud, and not smart enough to forget it. He knows in his bones that if he wasn’t rich, not only would Hillary Clinton skip his wedding, but there would be no wedding to skip–at least not to another attractive young blonde. And this awareness is what fueled the single most important moment in the history of televised political debates.
As CounterPunch’s Mike Whitney wisely pointed out, Trump did America an enormous favor in that ten-second stretch of epic truth-telling at the Fox debate–when he breezily admitted that Hillary Clinton “had” to attend his wedding, not because she cares about him, but because he buys, sells, and trades the Hillary Clintons of the world like a twelve-year-old playing Fantasy Football. In a sane America, Trump’s forbidden truth would have upended the whole political dialogue–but CNN and MSNBC studiously ignored it and spent five whole days chasing updates on the Megan Kelly “bleeding” remark instead.
If Trump had real guts and vision–and if he was serious about winning–he would make that Forbidden Truth the core of his campaign, and keep expanding it: “Everyone’s angry that America is run by the 1%–well, I’m not just the 1%, I’m the 1% of the 1%, and I’m the only one who not only knows the tricks of the trade, but who’ll let you in on all our dirty little secrets, and change all the rules…The Tea Party and the leftists are both right: the whole game is rigged, and we’re going to blow it up and start fresh.”
But he blew the moment, because he didn’t realize what a profound insight he’d given the American people. Instead, in one hilarious tweet that went beyond speaking-of-one’s-self-in-the-third-person, he said that “Roger Ailes promises that ‘Trump’ will be treated fairly.” I mean–putting your own name in quotation marks? As the young people say–what’s that about?
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http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/08/14/trumps-self-hatred-will-destroy-his-campaign/
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