“He’s the object of derision. It’s his nightmare. He can’t control the script. He can’t control the cinematography. He can’t control what’s being said about him. And the outcome could go in a direction he really doesn’t want,” said Tim O’Brien, a Trump biographer and critic.
I felt a weird sense of almost pity reading this. On the surface, when I think about how deeply uncomfortable this scenario was for Trump, I'm glad, because he's laughable and this is nothing compared to the harms he has wrought on the world. But at a level deeper than that, when I think about how, for a narcissist like Trump, this is probably the greatest torture one could devise, and that's so pathetic that it's just sad.
To people like Trump, everything is about power. Everything is adversarial. The system that Trump exists within, that he's a part of perpetuating, teaches that power is everything and you either oppress others or be one of the subjugated.
When I was a kid, I ended up teaching myself to ignore hunger due to a bundle of things including poverty and eating disorders, so nowadays, I literally don't notice my hunger. I have to set alarms to remember to eat and in the rare instances where I do feel the physical hunger, I rarely notice it as that. I wonder whether people like Trump do the same with their capacity to feel for Human goodness. Forgive the overly poetic phrasing, but it feels like they've sold their soul for the ability to feel safe in the world, because they have opted into the adversarial worldview I described above.