Governance by inferiority complex
Story one: As he left the White House this morning on his way to the golf club he owns in Scotland — the ones he owns in Bedminster, N.J. or Sterling, Va. apparently no longer cutting it — President Trump took questions from reporters.
One asked about the meeting between his former personal attorney (now deputy attorney general) Todd Blanche and Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted accomplice to Jeffrey Epstein’s predations. But Trump didn’t want to talk much about that.
“People should really focus on how well the country is doing,” he replied, “or they should focus on the fact that Barack Hussein Obama led a coup” or, he continued, people should focus on other people who were linked to Epstein.
Story two: At about the same time that Trump was leaving the executive mansion, his friend Maria Bartiromo was rising to his defense yet again on her ostensibly business-oriented cable-news show. In this case, it was about how unfair the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was to Trump.
“People were not going and taking jobs in his first administration,” Bartiromo said. “He wasn’t able to get talented and the right people in the right jobs. Remember, all those celebrities wouldn’t sing at his, you know, at big events, at his inauguration, Hollywood.”
These two stories are the same story.
Before I explain, I’m obligated to rebut the claims made by Trump and his advocate. Trump’s assertion that the country is doing well is subjective, certainly, though it’s objectively true that Obama didn’t “lead a coup.” The claim that Trump had trouble staffing his first administration is silly, given that he had a more broadly respected crew at hand then than he does now. It was true that he had trouble finding good staff for his 2016 campaign, which is how he ended up with Paul Manafort working for free, etc. But that had nothing to do with Russia. At least, not in the way Bartiromo means.
But dishonesty and spin are not the only commonality. More important is the common sense that Trump is aggrieved, that he’s a victim of forces outside of his control. It is unfair, in Trump’s eyes, that he is being pestered about his past associations with a man understood to be one of America’s most notorious sex offenders, despite all the good he’s doing for the country! It is unfair, in Bartiromo’s, that Hollywood was snookered into thinking Trump was bad because of a baseless Russia probe, so much so that he had to suffer the indignity of having third-tier performers celebrate his presidency (-ies).
Trump’s sense that everyone should be fawning over him was encapsulated succinctly (and not entirely intentionally) in an Axios report this week that Americans weren’t impressed “aren’t impressed” by Trump’s second term efforts. “In fact,” the report suggested, “they seem tired of all the winning.”
So do the Washington Generals.
The issue isn’t that Americans aren’t aware of what Trump’s doing. It’s that they don’t like it. New Gallup data shows Trump with dire approval ratings, particularly among independents. On no issue does at least half the country approve of what Trump’s doing, including on his purported strengths like immigration and the economy. On each of those, his approval is below 40 percent.
Trump is used to existing in a space where he’s enormously popular and can do no wrong, the bubble that he brought with him to D.C. in January. Within that bubble, the Russia probe was unfounded, as per Bartiromo and her peers. Within that bubble, Trump is popular and advocating for America — and any unpopularity or opposition is inexplicable.
Within that bubble, Trump’s approval ratings are skyrocketing.
Outside of that bubble, that CNN poll put Trump’s approval at 42 percent, not 90 percent. It was only close to 90 percent among Republicans, the primary denizens of that bubble.
Trump’s insecurity is legendary and long-standing. One way to look at his success in politics, in fact, is to understand that his insecurity allowed him to tap into the broader insecurity of American conservatives.
It’s a group that sees Whites and men and religious people as some of the groups facing the most discrimination in the U.S., not — as is often the case — as the beneficiaries of discriminatory actions.
Trump’s rise in the 2016 Republican primary was often attributed to “economic insecurity,” but what that meant in practice was often a bitterness at the idea that people in big cities were successful and admired in a way that Trump’s base often wasn’t. There was a desire to put “the elites” in their place and Trump, who spent decades fuming at the success he saw across the river in Manhattan, was willing to put his celebrity and wealth in play to help them achieve that goal.
What’s changed since then (beyond Trump’s inability to separate himself from the “elites” in the Epstein case) is that the right-wing bubble — a bubble of positive reinforcement and ego-stroking — has swelled and strengthened. One can live one’s entire life in a universe where Trump is hitting all the right marks and delivering a string of successes for America, in part because weak points are ignored. Trump has made a world in which that lingering insecurity can be pushed out of mind: They are winning and the elites are losing!
The eternal challenge with that bubble, though, is that it isn’t reality and lots of people still live in the real world. It’s a world where popular singers shy away from Trump not because they heard that the FBI was investigating Russia interference but because he’s sending people to foreign prisons for the crime of having brown skin and tattoos. It’s a world where people want to know how close he was to Jeffrey Epstein and know that the allegations about Obama are silly.
Trump’s trying to broaden the bubble, policing what universities teach and what artificial intelligence systems say. But reality is stubborn, stubborn enough that most Americans see what he’s doing and disapprove. Every so often, that reality pierces the bubble, generating the friction seen in the two stories this morning.