Splitsville DONALD TRUMP: FIEND OR FAUX?

The Vital, Energetic Newsletter for Fans of THE SPLIT

Let’s get this out of the way up top: America is totally Splitsville, if by that we mean, a single political entity consisting of two sharply disagreeing “nations.” One such nation loves and admires Donald Trump. The other consists of every-goddamn-body else.

The latter group is much larger than the former, and is getting bigger as we speak. Why? Because Trump demonstrates, every day in every way, that he is one of the worst people who ever lived, and most people don’t like badness in other people. His second term has proved much worse, much faster, than anyone expected. This has caused decent people everywhere to fear for the country, the world, and the future.

But here’s the thing: Whatever he’s trying to do, he will almost certainly fail. To understand why, ignore, for a moment, the chaos and damage and corruption and cruelty and lawlessness he’s wrought over the past three months. Instead, look at his entire history leading up to this past January 20. It reveals two central facts: First, all his life, Trump has strived for two things: obtaining wealth, and being considered heroic and brilliant by his elders and betters. Second, while he is very good at selling himself, he is utterly inept at everything else. He is good at getting the job, and terrible at doing the job. He is a walking—well, a waddling—embodiment of the Peter Principle.

Whatever ostentatious success he displayed result from relentless cheating, conning, grifting, and lying. He lent his name and endorsement to a variety of sketchy products and services that all went under. His “university” was fined 25 million dollars for fraud. He created a charity, and then stole from it. When he had chances to obtain wealth legitimately, he went bankrupt six times. (Going bankrupt owning a casino is like dying of dehydration while owning a water bottling plant.) Otherwise he has been, in the words of one New York businessman, “a clown living on credit.” (In recent years most of that credit has come from Russia.)

As for winning the admiration of others whose opinion he respects, he has continually failed. Everyone knows that, having grown up in Queens, he craved to be highly thought of by Manhattan society. Everyone—or at least everyone in Manhattan—knows that, in The City, he has always been a joke.

He is surrounded by sycophants driven by ambition and opportunism, whom he selected and whom he bullies into praising him with self-parodying effusiveness in meetings and in the media. The only people who do really admire him are idiots whose applause he likes at rallies but whom he wouldn’t let within a mile of his clubs. And they only admire him because of the one thing he was legitimately successful at: playing a curated, sanded-down, buffed-up, edited-in-post, cartoon version of himself on tv.

In his first term he was not only a failure, but a failure who caused fatalities on a mass scale. The only reason he wasn’t an even more spectacular failure is because he had a number of competent people around him to steer him away from the precipice or ignore his orders completely.

And that, unlike now, was when he had all, or most, or at least some of his marbles.

Now we come to today: The 100 Days of Shitshow. The grifting, the corruption, the lying go on apace, but everything he has attempted in terms of accomplishment has either failed or has been a crime. The on-again/off-again tariffs and the yo-yo-ing stock market. The illegal deportations, using ICE as his own, in the words of the noted historian Marjorie Taylor Green, “gazpacho police.” The embarrassing (not to say dangerous) incompetence of his Secretary of Defense. His serio-comic inability to lower food prices, to lower gas prices, to bring peace in Ukraine. The “two hundred deals” in the works (there are only 195 nations on earth). The imposition of tariffs on an island of penguins.

Of course, if you ask him, he’ll tell you what he told The Atlantic: “I run the country and the world.” Note, however, that the most “effective” acts of his administration—the wholesale wrecking of important agencies, the trashing of vital research, and the sheer ruining of people’s lives—were performed, not by him, but by Musk.

We can (and everyone with any sense does) ascribe these endless failures to his laziness, his ignorance, his brute stupidity, and his sociopathic malignant narcissism. But nobody’s perfect. Someone might say, “Yes, but what if, deep down, in the cesspool that is Donald Trump’s unconscious, he wants to fail? He makes himself fail.”

It’s more than plausible. What if, while being raised by his hideous father and out-of-it mother, he received the message, “You are a worthless piece of shit until you redeem yourself”? That—to him, not just to his father—is his definition. How can he ever defeat that? Who decides and informs him when he has finally redeemed himself? Fred Trump? As if. The older and more sociopathic Donald got, the more demented and nutzo Fred became. Redemption was never available from Dad. So Trump looks for it from Putin and the other godawful father figures he’s drawn to. And even if he got it—even if Putin himself called up and said, “Dunny, tovarich, you are contemptible ruthless tyrant like mih”—it wouldn’t work.

It can’t. Trump has a sickness that no outside source can touch.

Now, there is something that might work. But it’s as alien to Trump as yoga or kindness.

Until you delve into yourself, and reveal (to yourself) these unconscious definitional loops, they are destined to keep running. And that’s true about everyday, garden-variety neurosis.

It’s unclear if what we’re alluding to would even put a dent in Trump’s fundamentally fucked-up personality, but what we’re talking about is the science-fiction notion of Trump entering therapy. Stop laughing! Or, okay, carry on laughing. The sheer, massive improbability of such an idea is why The Sopranos was so audacious. A Mafia gangster in therapy! Imagine!

You (and we) can’t imagine Trump seeking therapy, because a) he’s a preening malignant narcissist who is oblivious of his own failures; b) to do so would be to admit that something is wrong, which he never does and never can; and c) the right-wing (or, in its modern-day version, fascist) mindset is hostile to self-inquiry and self-knowledge, which they regard as liberal, sissified self-indulgence. (Regardless of how much lip service conservatives give to “the classics,” when they quote Socrates saying “Know thyself,” they’re pretty sure he doesn’t mean it literally, or for them.)

So when people say, about his impulsiveness and stupidity and chronic lying and indifference to human suffering, “It’s Trump being Trump,” they’re more right than they know. But it’s even worse now, because he’s losing marbles at an accelerating rate.

He fell asleep at the Pope’s funeral.

Q: Who does that?

A.: People with dementia.

So what does it all add up to? Or, alt., up to what does it all add? This: It’s more than probable that Trump will fail. He’ll keep stealing and grifting, yes. But his klown-kar of a Kabinet will keep fucking up, and the damage he and Musk have done to agencies and institutions will start to have secondary consequences visible to and hurtful of the center-ish, non-MAGA part of the electorate that (barely) put him over the top in 2024. The more this happens, the more his polls will fall. The more his polls fall, the less Republicans in Congress will fear, not Trump, but their voters—and the more likely they will be to turn against him.

Yes, some damage is done, and Trump’s failing will hardly leave us back at the status quo ante. But his desire to be a Putinesque Man of History is farcical. His plan to “acquire” Greenland, in what he no doubt fancies would be the greatest real estate deal in American history (eclipsing the Louisiana Purchase, the purchase of Alaska, and even the purchase of the “Tiffany location” for Trump Tower), is operatically ludicrous and will go nowhere. His endless, caps-lock rants on Truth Social about making Canada the 51^st state have as much chance of bearing fruit as does the notion of opening a Trump casino on Mars.

As he thrashes and squirms trying to avoid acknowledging this, he’ll console himself by more grifting and theft. The final irony—or the final punchline—will be that he’ll be unable to spend any of his filthy lucre, having first either descended into the murk of dementia, or dropped stone cold dead. (Yes, we dream big around here.) And then we’ll have to deal with Vance, whom nobody can stand. That’ll be interesting, too. Alas.