The denouement of Donald Trump
It has long seemed to me one of the oddest of human phenomena that ego frequently achieves the exact opposite of what it desires. The braggart draws attention to his or her achievements in a way that paradoxically diminishes those achievements. Boastfulness causes people to be less admiring, less envious than they otherwise might be. Bombast weirdly achieves its moral contrapositive. Whenever love and respect are demanded, resentment and ridicule carry the day.
Of course, any time I speak of “ego” these days I’m inevitably speaking of the world’s quintessential egotist, Donald Trump. It’s amazing how much he could have achieved with a little less braggadocio and a little more discretion. He could have gotten away with 99 percent of his crimes and had half the country’s thanks and the other half’s uneasy puzzlement at how he got away with it. He might have even won a second term. But when Donald Trump’s ego blows it, it just keeps on blowing it.
We noticed this almost right away. No sooner did he become president of the United States than he found it necessary to brag about the crowd size at his inauguration. Think of it yourself: you’re president of the United States. You have arrived. You are, by definition, the most important person on earth. What possible need do you have to boast about anything ever again? From that point forward you can let your achievements do your boasting for you, for drying crying out loud. You can bask in humility and still get everyone’s envy. In fact, the humbler you are the more envy you will get.
It is a monument to the sheer size of his ego. He became POTUS and yet it didn’t even begin to fill his bottomless neediness. He cannot begin a sentence on any topic without ending it about himself and how great he is. It’s so bad that even his ardent admirers, the few with IQs above 85, are embarrassed by his stupid boastful mouth.
Which brings me to the denouement of Donald Trump. As you’ve probably already heard, Trump has said on an audio recording that he regretted not declassifying top secret military documents that he unlawfully stole. This directly contradicts his stated belief that when he took them he didn’t know that he couldn’t declassify them with his mind. It means he intended to use deception as his defence. It means Game Over for Donald.
Federal prosecutors have obtained the audio and it means, once again, that thanks to his ego and his big mouth his defence has been narrowed to virtually nothing. I am convinced that Trump kept those documents in order to make himself feel more important. Once again, being president of the United States simply wasn’t enough. Unbelievable. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.