There's what Trump's consciousness wants, adulation at his brilliance, good looks and all other positive, assumed qualities.
Then, there's what his unconscious imposes on those who don't fawn in his presence at his projected self-image.
Trump anti-immigrant fervor and desire to show the world his perspective on trade economics is brilliant will indeed make the US a far poorer place than it was. He is the bringer of our return to normality, as just another nation. As this unfolds his anger will increase.
I fear a return to the America of 1930 - a place where faith of all kinds had been sucked out of us and all that was left was fear.
Personally, I find Melanie Klein's theories to provide a usefull picture of the psychopathology that drives his behaviour, especially if we think about what his niece Mary Trump has described of his relationships with his mother and father. Trump is trapped forever in what Klein calls the "paranoid-schizoid position," that period of psychological development that every child must go through (emphasis on through) between the ages of about 18-36 months. This phase is characterised by destructive, impulsive, enraged feelings (think of what we call the "terrible twos") which the child experiences in the face of increasing awareness of the limitations being placed on him/her by the demands of "civilisation" (toilet training, eating with utensils rather than fingers, boundaries and the word "no" etc) This phase lays the groundwork for the child being able to navigate its way into the challenges of the next phase (what Klein calls the "depressive position") where it learns to feel remorse, guilt, forgiveness, cooperation, an understanding that others have needs, respect for boundaries, etc. (Think of the development of social skills like cooperation that kids learn in the first year of two of school or daycare for example). Children who are building more complex psychological scaffolding will move back and forth between these phases of development as they negotiate their way through these early years -- it doesn't happen in a perfect, linear fashion, and all kinds of things can derail or block parts of the journey (illness, disruptions in family stability, loss, abuse, ineffective or unresponsive parenting, etc). Most kids work this through more or less, but some don't. We know from Mary Trump that Trump's father was cruel and humiliating, and that his mother was cold, distant and unavailable (and it is interesting to note how the adult Trump idealises and idolises both parents, rather than being able to negotiate holding both positive and negative feelings about them). Trump is stuck in the paranoid-schizoid phase (really, we could say he was abandoned there by both parents, who failed to support his psychological and social development), which expresses itself in his character pathology (malignant narcissism) and sociopathy. His internal world is filled with envy, rage, the need to exact revenge, and the need to destroy. This latter (I think) is the single most important thing we need to understand about Trump: anything "good" must be destroyed so that no one else can have it. The few people he can tolerate, he experiences only as narcissistic extensions of himself until they are of no further use to him. All this makes him (as we are seeing now in technicolour) an extremely dangerous man. As Steven says, Trump is all about breaking things. The need to destroy undergirds everything he does and says. And this is the person who has his finger on the nuclear button....
I find DeLong’s description not only insensitive to our “Elders,” but untrue as well. Anyone in actual Elder Care would not have access (or probably any interest ) to nuclear codes.
“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” - Eleanor Roosevelt
When losers are losing, that’s when there is a burst of increased danger. (Me, based on personal experience.)
Another loss for the losers. Tufts student ordered released immediately. “Her continued detention cannot stand.”
The Mayor of Newark was arrested or “detained” (?) at an ICE facility. He has been protesting & maintains the facility was not properly permitted. Members of Congress and others were not “detained”. There is supposed to be a HS statement that says he is till being held “in New Jersey.”
Ah, yes, the halcyon days of the 1930s when my grandfather, working in an auto plant during the depression, was laid off when his wife died, two months after the birth of my father, because he was now single, and they were prioritizing jobs for the married men, even though he had an infant son to support and hospital bills resulting from the birth and death which it took him years to pay.
My grandfather was an autoworker, and my dad's stepmother worked in a shoe factory. They could not afford college for the children. My father joined the navy, which sent him to college and graduate school for a career of over 25 years. That was the upward mobility in my family that gave me the chance for college and graduate school at a state university. Now the cost of study at that state university would be beyond my reach. With increasing automation, the factory jobs are not guaranteed for life. Do we need factories? Yes, but not the factories that make simple items but the more complex ones such as solar panels and semiconductor chips. And we have to be aware that those jobs will change as the future changes and retraining needs to be available for those workers who will lose jobs when the paradigm shifts.
We never hear about making education affordable. Indeed, Trump and company are doing their best to make it unaffordable and to destroy research. No, Trump and the others want to create a permanent underclass that they can exploit financially and politically, so for them, upward mobility is out of the question. It was not a question for Trump's cabinet, most of whom come from wealthy families. For them, it is about not just maintaining that privileged position but obtaining even more wealth or power.
Just a friendly reminder to all who have thought that progressives are "radical left crazies". Bernie has called for free education for all for decades. This is a slightly different stance than conservatives have had which includes burning books and firing librarians.
The fired Librarian of Congress was appointed during Obama's presidency. At that time, the term was changed from life to ten years. The fired librarian was a year away the end of her term. It appears that she committed the cardinal sins of being good at her job, being a woman, being black, and being appointed by Obama.
Thank you for the quotes from Been in the Storm So Long, that provide insight into the thoughts and experiences of former slaves as they reflected on their post-slavery lives. The engineered failure of Reconstruction, then the imposition of Jim Crow laws in the South, were intentional barriers to former slaves' efforts to realize lives as truly free people. This is what the Civil Rights movement was about, one hundred years after the end of the Civil War, and this is why the overt rampant racism of today is so disheartening.
The Donald pulls most of his "facts" out of his lower orifice. His sadistic derangement syndrome is poison; pure poison. Depraved and cruel, he WANTS the people to suffer. The torment he wants to impose on the masses must not be accepted or allowed. It puzzles me how and why any one person would want to create so much misery for so many people. It puzzles me all the more how many, in the millions, follow along.
As to Howard Lutnick, he should feel ashamed. His mother-in-law has no worries. Lutnick is worth over $2 BILLION. Mama-in-Law probably uses her Social Security as chump change. The rest of us don’t; and, can’t. Does Lutnick want to create his very own gulag right here in the United States? Workers assembling widgets in massive factories? Lutnick is shamefully dismissive of the everyday American, looking down his nose at the masses. That personality thrives well throughout the Trump cabal.
While we may become a bit poorer because of Trump's ill-fated and poorly-contrived "business savvy", we never are powerless in the authentic sense so long as we do not see ourselves as powerless. By all measure we must not be silent. Silence = complicity. To remain silent under these circumstances would make bargain with evil. Evil owns this White House. We cannot allow that evil to own us.
Howard Lutnick’s mother-in-law (according to reporting relying on public records) lives with Howard and her daughter. The woman is 94 y/o. Odds are very good she doesn’t manage her own finances and would never know the difference.
He is a small man no matter how important his title(s) now or in the past. Most recently he stood in the Oval Office with officials from the UK and US sycophants. trump once again did his political insult routine; once again it included calling Schumer a Palestinian. Unless Stephen Miller was lurking off camera, Lutnick was likely the only Jewish person there representing the administration. He felt it necessary to show how small he is; to laugh the most, more loudly, and longest at all the insults but especially at the slur.
(The day before, Wednesday, Schumer told Dems not to commit to voting for DJT’s crypto bill. It was voted down Thursday with Rand Paul & Hawley each voting against it for their own reasons. It may not be dead. Thune voted against bringing to the floor which allows him to request it be voted on again at some point.)
"He wants us to be like the vendors he’s stiffed who never got paid fairly—or at all—for what they did." Your discussion of the experience of enslaved people, when they finally got their freedom, made me feel so happy to read. Excellent column! Thank you.
For the long term, we can learn a lot from the practical wisdom of those recovering from alcoholism and other addictions. Not everyone has to "hit bottom," though many do. For others an intervention by friends and family members (or reality in general) begins the process. I think of the second Trump administration as the U.S. hitting bottom. We've had so many wakeup calls, going back to before the Civil War, and we've squandered all of them sooner or later. As recovering alcoholics know, it's not enough to just stop drinking; we have to confront and deal with whatever the booze was helping us avoid. We USians are famous for whitewashing (literally) the past and/or pretending it doesn't matter. It does matter, and our refusal to deal with it is eating democracy alive.
I agree with the comparison, but why whitewash Trump’s current regime by referring to it as his 2nd administration. Language matters in this fight to retain our democracy.
the message will hit them in the wallet on the table and loosing their jobs because of tariffs... "Biden's fault" excuse can only go so far .."dog ate my homework" is the level of this "man's" intelligence... he truly believes his magas will believe him even if they are living under a bridge...
Excellent essay today. I think the masses are waking up, shaking off and about to explode into reaction! (I pray). I read an essay yesterday by Marc Friedman reviewing the book, The Art of War, by SunTzu, which is a detailed primer on fighting back fast before the bottom is hit. It’s going to take a lot of courage and hard work to save our beloved DEMOCRACY. But what choice to we have.? “We” did not vote for this, “We” must fight back to save “Us”.
The big question is—how long will it take? Every day means more restrictions on our freedoms, more destruction of the safety net we’ve paid into all our lives, and more damage done to our standing in the world.
No question here: We have had enough, more than enough. We are pissed off and anyone who doubts this will soon feel the sting of our anger. Thank you, Steven! You always write well, but today you've outdone yourself.
Trump is Putin’s apprentice. The idea is to bring America to the same state of society as in Russia, where the masses have to be destitute and brainwashed by propaganda - miseducated. Powerless and fearful they feel they have no choice but to submit to exploitation. Yes, it is a medieval strategy, still present today not only in Russia. However crazy, reckless and idiotic way the destruction of this beautiful country can be done - Trump is doing it on purpose.
I had enough of Felonious Phlegm long, LONG, ago. As long as the cowardice persists within the GOP, that which continues to validate and be complicit in all manner of shameful antics, such will continue to infect the body politic. Is there a cure? Will this virulence continue to spread to the point where some form of amputation is required? Seems that until one REALLY experiences pain, fever-inducing bedridden PAIN, will this patient finally come to its’ senses and take the necessary remedies of Empathy, Compassion, and Selfless Love, to finally understand the “remedies” were there all along. Just another stubborn patient refusing to take its medicine… WHY? Are we to be expected to toughen it out, while the “fittest” (seemingly in the form of wealth) amongst us gleefully mock any sign of weakness on our part? The signs are there. Boasts are made, lies or not, about what is to come. Are we preparing ourselves for more of the same? Becoming so accustomed to this illness that we are increasingly immune to all forms of civility? Prognosis, for now, doesn’t appear to be on the right path. Just yet.
A guy with a gold toilet telling Americans to live more frugally. 🙃
Howard Lutnick, perhaps the only Jew in the Cabinet, who burst into the loudest most inappropriate laughter in the Oval Office when trump once again insulted Schumer and called him a Palestinian.
It bears repeating: the Republican/MAGA plan is to have a workforce of barely literate people who are only fit to work in their factories or to fight in their wars.
Jung is very helpful in analyzing Trump.
There's what Trump's consciousness wants, adulation at his brilliance, good looks and all other positive, assumed qualities.
Then, there's what his unconscious imposes on those who don't fawn in his presence at his projected self-image.
Trump anti-immigrant fervor and desire to show the world his perspective on trade economics is brilliant will indeed make the US a far poorer place than it was. He is the bringer of our return to normality, as just another nation. As this unfolds his anger will increase.
I fear a return to the America of 1930 - a place where faith of all kinds had been sucked out of us and all that was left was fear.
Trump is the destroyer of faith.
Personally, I find Melanie Klein's theories to provide a usefull picture of the psychopathology that drives his behaviour, especially if we think about what his niece Mary Trump has described of his relationships with his mother and father. Trump is trapped forever in what Klein calls the "paranoid-schizoid position," that period of psychological development that every child must go through (emphasis on through) between the ages of about 18-36 months. This phase is characterised by destructive, impulsive, enraged feelings (think of what we call the "terrible twos") which the child experiences in the face of increasing awareness of the limitations being placed on him/her by the demands of "civilisation" (toilet training, eating with utensils rather than fingers, boundaries and the word "no" etc) This phase lays the groundwork for the child being able to navigate its way into the challenges of the next phase (what Klein calls the "depressive position") where it learns to feel remorse, guilt, forgiveness, cooperation, an understanding that others have needs, respect for boundaries, etc. (Think of the development of social skills like cooperation that kids learn in the first year of two of school or daycare for example). Children who are building more complex psychological scaffolding will move back and forth between these phases of development as they negotiate their way through these early years -- it doesn't happen in a perfect, linear fashion, and all kinds of things can derail or block parts of the journey (illness, disruptions in family stability, loss, abuse, ineffective or unresponsive parenting, etc). Most kids work this through more or less, but some don't. We know from Mary Trump that Trump's father was cruel and humiliating, and that his mother was cold, distant and unavailable (and it is interesting to note how the adult Trump idealises and idolises both parents, rather than being able to negotiate holding both positive and negative feelings about them). Trump is stuck in the paranoid-schizoid phase (really, we could say he was abandoned there by both parents, who failed to support his psychological and social development), which expresses itself in his character pathology (malignant narcissism) and sociopathy. His internal world is filled with envy, rage, the need to exact revenge, and the need to destroy. This latter (I think) is the single most important thing we need to understand about Trump: anything "good" must be destroyed so that no one else can have it. The few people he can tolerate, he experiences only as narcissistic extensions of himself until they are of no further use to him. All this makes him (as we are seeing now in technicolour) an extremely dangerous man. As Steven says, Trump is all about breaking things. The need to destroy undergirds everything he does and says. And this is the person who has his finger on the nuclear button....
I won't engage with your psychological evaluation as I'm unqualified to assess other than to agree with the general perspective.
As Brad DeLong says, this isn't a Presidency, it's eldercare with Nuclear Codes.
I find DeLong’s description not only insensitive to our “Elders,” but untrue as well. Anyone in actual Elder Care would not have access (or probably any interest ) to nuclear codes.
We must ask ourselves the ultimate question!
How many of us will succumb to Fear and lie down in Despair vs. how many of us will rise up in Anger?”
The next question which begs asking is “What must happen for the majority of us to rise up in Anger?”
I pose a simple answer!
Americans are the kingpin of our own domestic economy!
Americans spend almost 70 cents of every dollar spent in our economy!
We CANNOT depend on King Donnie to screw up the economy! The Wiley Fox knows when he’s overreaching and backs off with 90-day reprieves!
Americans must starve the U.S. oligarchs outright!
Boycott ALL “ big box” retailers!
Shop only small, locally-owned shops!
Stop ALL unnecessary spending!
Stop all major purchases!
SAVE YOUR MONEY!
Hit these wealthy overlords in their pockets!
These wealthy overlords continue to destroy our government and will reduce us to serfs in our own country!
Make them cry for mercy!
We Americans have the ultimate economic power, the “Power of the Purse!”
“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.” - Eleanor Roosevelt
Let’s not go silent into the night…
https://open.substack.com/pub/albellenchia/p/slowly-i-turned?r=7wk5d&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Thank you for reminding us of the great Eleanor Roosevelt's words!
When losers are losing, that’s when there is a burst of increased danger. (Me, based on personal experience.)
Another loss for the losers. Tufts student ordered released immediately. “Her continued detention cannot stand.”
The Mayor of Newark was arrested or “detained” (?) at an ICE facility. He has been protesting & maintains the facility was not properly permitted. Members of Congress and others were not “detained”. There is supposed to be a HS statement that says he is till being held “in New Jersey.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/09/new-jersey-mayor-ras-baraka-ice-00339287
Perfect reminder Mr Bellencia. Thank you
Ah, yes, the halcyon days of the 1930s when my grandfather, working in an auto plant during the depression, was laid off when his wife died, two months after the birth of my father, because he was now single, and they were prioritizing jobs for the married men, even though he had an infant son to support and hospital bills resulting from the birth and death which it took him years to pay.
My grandfather was an autoworker, and my dad's stepmother worked in a shoe factory. They could not afford college for the children. My father joined the navy, which sent him to college and graduate school for a career of over 25 years. That was the upward mobility in my family that gave me the chance for college and graduate school at a state university. Now the cost of study at that state university would be beyond my reach. With increasing automation, the factory jobs are not guaranteed for life. Do we need factories? Yes, but not the factories that make simple items but the more complex ones such as solar panels and semiconductor chips. And we have to be aware that those jobs will change as the future changes and retraining needs to be available for those workers who will lose jobs when the paradigm shifts.
We never hear about making education affordable. Indeed, Trump and company are doing their best to make it unaffordable and to destroy research. No, Trump and the others want to create a permanent underclass that they can exploit financially and politically, so for them, upward mobility is out of the question. It was not a question for Trump's cabinet, most of whom come from wealthy families. For them, it is about not just maintaining that privileged position but obtaining even more wealth or power.
Just a friendly reminder to all who have thought that progressives are "radical left crazies". Bernie has called for free education for all for decades. This is a slightly different stance than conservatives have had which includes burning books and firing librarians.
Trump just fired the Librarian of Congess!!
An actual professional Librarian he hired in his first reign. CORRECTIONAL: appointed by President Obama.
The fired Librarian of Congress was appointed during Obama's presidency. At that time, the term was changed from life to ten years. The fired librarian was a year away the end of her term. It appears that she committed the cardinal sins of being good at her job, being a woman, being black, and being appointed by Obama.
Thank you for correction regarding Obama appointment .
During the previous election, Trump said, "I like uneducated people." He's doing his best to keep people that way!
I like it when all people are treated fairly. Every kid should pay the same unless they are on academic scholarship.
Thank you for the quotes from Been in the Storm So Long, that provide insight into the thoughts and experiences of former slaves as they reflected on their post-slavery lives. The engineered failure of Reconstruction, then the imposition of Jim Crow laws in the South, were intentional barriers to former slaves' efforts to realize lives as truly free people. This is what the Civil Rights movement was about, one hundred years after the end of the Civil War, and this is why the overt rampant racism of today is so disheartening.
Thx. We are still paying the consequences for that.
As Howard Beale (Peter Finch) said in “Network” ….I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
The Donald pulls most of his "facts" out of his lower orifice. His sadistic derangement syndrome is poison; pure poison. Depraved and cruel, he WANTS the people to suffer. The torment he wants to impose on the masses must not be accepted or allowed. It puzzles me how and why any one person would want to create so much misery for so many people. It puzzles me all the more how many, in the millions, follow along.
As to Howard Lutnick, he should feel ashamed. His mother-in-law has no worries. Lutnick is worth over $2 BILLION. Mama-in-Law probably uses her Social Security as chump change. The rest of us don’t; and, can’t. Does Lutnick want to create his very own gulag right here in the United States? Workers assembling widgets in massive factories? Lutnick is shamefully dismissive of the everyday American, looking down his nose at the masses. That personality thrives well throughout the Trump cabal.
While we may become a bit poorer because of Trump's ill-fated and poorly-contrived "business savvy", we never are powerless in the authentic sense so long as we do not see ourselves as powerless. By all measure we must not be silent. Silence = complicity. To remain silent under these circumstances would make bargain with evil. Evil owns this White House. We cannot allow that evil to own us.
Howard Lutnick’s mother-in-law (according to reporting relying on public records) lives with Howard and her daughter. The woman is 94 y/o. Odds are very good she doesn’t manage her own finances and would never know the difference.
He is a small man no matter how important his title(s) now or in the past. Most recently he stood in the Oval Office with officials from the UK and US sycophants. trump once again did his political insult routine; once again it included calling Schumer a Palestinian. Unless Stephen Miller was lurking off camera, Lutnick was likely the only Jewish person there representing the administration. He felt it necessary to show how small he is; to laugh the most, more loudly, and longest at all the insults but especially at the slur.
(The day before, Wednesday, Schumer told Dems not to commit to voting for DJT’s crypto bill. It was voted down Thursday with Rand Paul & Hawley each voting against it for their own reasons. It may not be dead. Thune voted against bringing to the floor which allows him to request it be voted on again at some point.)
"He wants us to be like the vendors he’s stiffed who never got paid fairly—or at all—for what they did." Your discussion of the experience of enslaved people, when they finally got their freedom, made me feel so happy to read. Excellent column! Thank you.
Thanks much.
Again though, I struggle with how we get this message to those in thrall to Trump watching Fox News, OAN, etc. How??
For the long term, we can learn a lot from the practical wisdom of those recovering from alcoholism and other addictions. Not everyone has to "hit bottom," though many do. For others an intervention by friends and family members (or reality in general) begins the process. I think of the second Trump administration as the U.S. hitting bottom. We've had so many wakeup calls, going back to before the Civil War, and we've squandered all of them sooner or later. As recovering alcoholics know, it's not enough to just stop drinking; we have to confront and deal with whatever the booze was helping us avoid. We USians are famous for whitewashing (literally) the past and/or pretending it doesn't matter. It does matter, and our refusal to deal with it is eating democracy alive.
I agree with the comparison, but why whitewash Trump’s current regime by referring to it as his 2nd administration. Language matters in this fight to retain our democracy.
the message will hit them in the wallet on the table and loosing their jobs because of tariffs... "Biden's fault" excuse can only go so far .."dog ate my homework" is the level of this "man's" intelligence... he truly believes his magas will believe him even if they are living under a bridge...
Excellent essay today. I think the masses are waking up, shaking off and about to explode into reaction! (I pray). I read an essay yesterday by Marc Friedman reviewing the book, The Art of War, by SunTzu, which is a detailed primer on fighting back fast before the bottom is hit. It’s going to take a lot of courage and hard work to save our beloved DEMOCRACY. But what choice to we have.? “We” did not vote for this, “We” must fight back to save “Us”.
Carpe diem.
Thx. Agree this requires courage and speed.
The big question is—how long will it take? Every day means more restrictions on our freedoms, more destruction of the safety net we’ve paid into all our lives, and more damage done to our standing in the world.
And, in my neck of the canyons, there are still not “ masses of people waking up,” I’m sad to say.
No question here: We have had enough, more than enough. We are pissed off and anyone who doubts this will soon feel the sting of our anger. Thank you, Steven! You always write well, but today you've outdone yourself.
Always have a vision, and include love in that vision.
I found the position of the running democrat candidate for senate in Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, really wonderful.
Trump is Putin’s apprentice. The idea is to bring America to the same state of society as in Russia, where the masses have to be destitute and brainwashed by propaganda - miseducated. Powerless and fearful they feel they have no choice but to submit to exploitation. Yes, it is a medieval strategy, still present today not only in Russia. However crazy, reckless and idiotic way the destruction of this beautiful country can be done - Trump is doing it on purpose.
Thank you, Steven.
I had enough of Felonious Phlegm long, LONG, ago. As long as the cowardice persists within the GOP, that which continues to validate and be complicit in all manner of shameful antics, such will continue to infect the body politic. Is there a cure? Will this virulence continue to spread to the point where some form of amputation is required? Seems that until one REALLY experiences pain, fever-inducing bedridden PAIN, will this patient finally come to its’ senses and take the necessary remedies of Empathy, Compassion, and Selfless Love, to finally understand the “remedies” were there all along. Just another stubborn patient refusing to take its medicine… WHY? Are we to be expected to toughen it out, while the “fittest” (seemingly in the form of wealth) amongst us gleefully mock any sign of weakness on our part? The signs are there. Boasts are made, lies or not, about what is to come. Are we preparing ourselves for more of the same? Becoming so accustomed to this illness that we are increasingly immune to all forms of civility? Prognosis, for now, doesn’t appear to be on the right path. Just yet.
As always, I am Hopeful.
A guy with a gold toilet telling Americans to live more frugally. 🙃
Howard Lutnick, perhaps the only Jew in the Cabinet, who burst into the loudest most inappropriate laughter in the Oval Office when trump once again insulted Schumer and called him a Palestinian.
It bears repeating: the Republican/MAGA plan is to have a workforce of barely literate people who are only fit to work in their factories or to fight in their wars.