On the Party of Narcissistic Inequality

Something that's true of all the narcissists I've known and witnessed is that they're unhappy and they can't recognize that this is an entrenched condition. They think it's due to something someone just did, and if they punish, intimidate, coerce that person to change their ways then they'll be happy: they're one lashing-out away from the world they want and deserve. This is particularly impactful when a narcissist is also the most powerful man in the world. So Trump has his cabinet administering extreme unctuousness (and even they in their shameless groveling are outdone by that loopy press secretary harping on his right to a Nobel Prize).

But the fact that comedians and journalists are not joining in the praise-song will irk him until the fact that he's rotting on the hoof overwhelms him (mortality makes narcissists very unhappy too). Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel have been canned by groveling corporations seeking merger-favors from the administration, but there will never really be enough silence and obedience and flattery for the insatiable ego of the misery-in-chief. Which is to say that an old man, almost eighty, is still groveling and screaming for some kind of mommy-and-daddy approval he didn't get and never will and that's a major force in global politics. He's always publicly, as we say of toddlers, self-soothing and compensating, in his case by telling himself and everyone else how fabulous he is, which would be shameful and humiliating for anyone who possessed an ounce of self-awareness, but there are no molecules of that substance in him.

There's so much news swirling around us that I had to pause for a minute to sift through the censorious/repressive/Trumpian parts of it to remember, oh yeah, that peak narcissist lawsuit against the New York Times and the two journalists who turned their reporting into a book, a lawsuit filed Monday, which feels like a month ago. The book is on how Trump was never the self-made man or financial genius he insists he is; his daddy's money made him, bailed him out, and he never really managed it well. The lawsuit written by some low-end-for-hire lawyers doesn't just have a hissy fit that they dared to say such things; it sings his praises in grotesque terms. Hold your noses because here it comes:

"Specifically, on September 17, 2024, Penguin published a false,malicious, and defamatory book titled “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success” (the “Book”), authored by Craig and Buettner. To try and falsely and maliciously tear down President Trump’s worldwide reputation for success, the New York Times, Craig, Buettner, and Penguin decided to try and confront, head-on, what remains to this day one of the President’s most well-known successes—in addition to his decades of magnificent real estate achievements, winning the Presidency, and then winning the Presidency again—his remarkable performance as the star of “The Apprentice,” one of the top-rated shows of all time and a trailblazer in American television. Thanks solely to President Trump’s sui generis charisma and unique business acumen, “The Apprentice” generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and remained on television for over thirteen years, with nearly 200 episodes. “The Apprentice” represented the cultural magnitude of President Trump’s singular brilliance, which captured the zeitgeist of our time."

[Update: the judge rejected the complaint on the grounds that 85 pages of bloviating self-stimulation is unacceptable in his court and to dial it down to maybe 40 pages max.]

There's a fantastic essay just out (in the New York Times! wonders will never cease!) by Lydia Polgreen in which she writes: "The insistence that something President Trump and his supporters call “transgender ideology” was behind the killing lays bare another core belief of theirs: They are obsessed with contamination and contagion, seeing it as the site of despicable difference. Again and again they deploy metaphors of disease and disfigurement. Immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump declared on the campaign trail in 2023. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his health secretary, has claimed that vaccines “butchered” and “poisoned an entire generation of American children.” Americans have apparently been infected with the “woke mind virus,” a phrase popularized by Trump’s ally and rival, Ron DeSantis."

Another way to put it is they are obsessed with the idea that with enough repression and punishment, they can create their peaceable kingdom--on the corpses of their enemies, and in this version, the corpse of the US Constitution. Behind that is the fantasy that a wholly homogeneous USA can be created to purge these impurities (their version of diversities). But the USA is an exceptionally diverse nation when it comes to race, religion, and politics, and of course queer people have always been here and always will, and sex/gender were never two sealed boxes, even if almost everyone was coerced into pretending they were until about five minutes ago. Heterosexual norms vary immensely across time and cultures, a bunch of cultures historically recognized other genders, and we now have the science to know that one's biological sex is made up of a bunch of highly varying factors, including gonads, hormones, and so much more, even before we get into culture and gender. So, nope, can't put the genies of gender back in the sad old boxes.

Furthermore, this country is going to have a nonwhite majority in the near future, and there's no stopping that, and it never was the whitewash of a country they pretend. The thirteen colonies included a lot of indigenous and Black people, some Jews, Quakers, and other dissenters (while much of the rest of what is now the USA was indigenous and/or claimed by Spain and settled by Spanish speakers, and the first Muslim from Africa got here in 1528, here meaning what's now Florida-to-Texas and was all indigenous homeland then, so we can stop pretending Uganda-born NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is something new). The best I can figure is that they want some kind of apartheid-South-Africa future in which a white minority controls a nonwhite majority. In that context, it's worth saying that ICE in Los Angeles has terrorized and brutalized the Latino population there, but they have not stopped it from being a Latino-majority city in a minority-majority state.

The one part of that scheme they've secured is being a minority themselves (when I was young, the majority of voters belonged to one of the two main political parties; now the majority is unaffiliated, and so when you hear statistics about what percent of Republicans support something, remember that about 30% of the electorate is registered Republican, not 50%). And Trump, I believe, is killing the party in the long term because it's abandoned all principles to be whatever King Clueless desires, and taking positions that alienate and harm even more people than the old party did.

As I and others have often noted before, the Republican Party hit a crossroads decades ago: the party realized that in an increasingly nonwhite and progressive country they either had to retune their platform to appeal to a broader, shifting electorate or prevent a lot of those nonwhite and progressive people from voting and gerrymander their votes out of having impact. They chose the latter route. Which has won them a lot of elections, including the 2016 presidential election, a triumph of voter suppression (and in which the Democrat won, anyway, by almost three million votes, but the electoral college kicked in). And now we've witnessed the Republican Party, minus a very small dissident population (currently mostly Congressman Massie), who out of fear and opportunism fall in line with things they know are destructive and untrue. When Trump is gone, they'll find that they stand for nothing, and that for the most part they ceased to stand at all and mostly crawled on their bellies before the tinsel throne.

Polgreen also says something that is a reminder that all of MAGA is a narcissist in the sense I'm describing above: "for all of MAGA’s reverence for masculine self-determination, one of its central tenets is the blamelessness of its adherents. Whatever is going wrong in this country, it is not their fault." It is the fault of the electorate that so many of us don't like them, not their fault for failing to meet the needs, hopes, and desires of the public (but elitists don't believe that the people should be in charge this way). This is going to get very interesting as the economy tanks and other chaos is unloosed, thanks to the tariffs, attacks on public health, sabotage of a functioning government, public works and even the attack on renewable projects such as the huge Atlantic wind farm, almost completed, they just halted. An important part of the next several months is going to be insisting, again and again, as loudly as possible, that they did it, that this is on them, that if you break it you pay for it.

But Polgreen's point is striking in a larger sense: it goes back to where I began, that narcissists are always convinced that their perpetual unhappiness is a temporary condition that is someone else's fault, that if other people were just more obedient, more exactly what they ordered, everything would be fine. Except it won't. Which reminds me that one of the things that's striking about a related phenomenon: that pack of misogynists and charlatans and haters grouped under the term the Manosphere is also notable for its misery and for its stories that it's someone else's fault.

In their case, it's mostly women, and if it wasn't so malevolent and influential, their ideas would be laughable: that somehow women are an alien hateful untrustworthy species, and yet these manosphere men need something from them – sex, spouses, offspring – that they will attempt to coerce by sabotaging women's freedom and independence and maybe tricking them. Not by doing what one does in a society of equals, which is to negotiate on how your needs might be met if you're willing to meet theirs. They're not willing, because central to MAGA misogyny is that women's needs should not be met. Because its final principle, its last commitment is to inequality.

All this brings us back to the key axiom for understanding narcissists, elites, and empathy-impaired inequality generally, Frank Wilhoit's famous rule: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." Which is why it's wrong when we do it but not when they do it, why we've just spent ten days being told that everyone everywhere must mourn the dead demagogue but we can gloss over the deaths by gun violence of children, Democratic politicians, the policeman trying to protect the CDC from an attack by a murderous anti-vaxxer, the three policemen just killed in Pennsylvania trying to protect a woman and her mother from her homicidal stalker ex-boyfriend, and all the others who might not be dead if it weren't for the over-availability of guns and the culture all but worshipping them as emblems of masculinity. The message behind all this is that some lives matter more than others, which is the central ethos of narcissists, who are empathy-impaired.

But we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, and all of us are endowed with certain inalienable rights. We all know that while the founding fathers fell far short of an all-of-us vision, those of us who were excluded have fought to open up that definition to include everyone, and that struggle will never be abandoned, and we will not stop believing in our rights and equality. And while I don't know what the short-term future will bring beyond the obvious suffering and destruction, in the long term, I believe that we will win.

p.s. This started out as a social media post about 100 minutes ago and then wanted to be something more substantial and less beneficial to Meta, so here it is, freshly written. Off I go to write the stuff I was supposed to write today. I also never intended to do three pieces in a week, but, well, there's a lot going on. And provocation is, in its own way, inspiration. Oh and caught a couple of typos, corrected on the site but I can't correct them on the emails.