Hating the Trump within
When people hate something with a fierce, burning passion, it’s often, if not always, because what they despise represents something that they hate in themselves. The object of their rage becomes a strange sort of shadow self, a version of themselves that they fear becoming or fear they already are.
As readers of my pieces here and elsewhere are undoubtedly aware, I hate Donald Trump with exactly this kind of deeply personal intensity. When I was a boy, my daddy always told me that hate was a strong word and a strong conceit that should be reserved for deplorables that earn it. You don’t hate the guy who cuts you off in traffic. You hate Hitler. You hate someone who rapes women and molests children. And you hate a man who is furiously whipping up hatred and bigotry and inflaming the worst instincts of his followers. You hate Trump.
I realize that I hate Trump in part because he embodies so many qualities that I abhor in myself. He personifies toxic self-absorption, and narcissism, and the endless, bottomless quest for validation, whether in the form of the roar of the crowd or thousands of retweets and likes for every insipid Tweet or Facebook post. Hell, he embodies social-media addiction and a pathological inability to modulate or regulate his compulsion to tweet.
I see in Trump’s rampaging narcissism a grotesque echo of my own need to be loved. Yet I take comfort in knowing that I possess qualities that distinguish me from the tiny little Trump that lives within my soul. I have empathy and compassion. I am self-absorbed and narcissistic but I am also aware that I have these faults and work against them. I understand just how flawed, dysfunctional, and vulnerable I am. I am infinitely aware of my shortcomings, and how I over-compensate for them whereas Trump’s defining feature may be his complete absence of self-awareness, his total denial that he has any flaws at all.
Trump has inflamed my worst qualities this election season but he’s also ignited some new ones. I like to think of myself as a pretty neutral, conflict-averse human being, Switzerland in the flesh when it comes to taking sides. Yet I’ve spent countless hours being aggressive on social media, tweeting angrily at Trump literally hundreds of times when before this election I did not angrily tweet at a single human being, let alone devote hundreds of tweets to attacking a single human being.
It went beyond that. My furious contempt for Trump exploded into dozens of similarly angry tweets attacking Paul Ryan and Reince Priebus for accommodating Trump despite Trump’s clear, public hatred of them and their equally clear public hatred of Trump. Reince Priebus! Why for the love of Christ did I have such strong feelings towards Reince Priebus of all people?
Trump is the ultimate social media candidate. Social media, Twitter in particular, thrives on extremes, on over-heated rhetoric, on outrage, on provocation, and Trump has thrived in this fetid swamp.
Some good things have come from this rage. I traveled to the Republican convention and Gathering of the Juggalos in the same week for an ebook, 7 Days In Ohio: Trump, the Gathering of the Juggalos and the Summer Everything Went Insane I’m proud of, and a number of articles I like to think expressed my rage in an entertaining fashion. But I also know that this election has been bad for my psyche and the psyche of an entire nation.
Trump brought out the worst in us. Clinton, for all of her flaws, at least has the potential to bring out some of the idealism that has been buried under all the ugliness and mud-slinging of a singularly ugly campaign. Trump has turned the country into the Incredible Hulk, an unpredictable rage monster. On November 9th, let’s just hope we turn back into Bruce Banner.
Nathan Rabin is a dad, columnist and the author of five books, most recently 7 Days In Ohio: Trump, the Gathering of the Juggalos and the Summer Everything Went Insane
