Primary and Secondary Racism

I am old. I really notice the difference the past few years have wrought: still in (relatively) good shape, I am  nevertheless growing weaker. No complaints; this was and is to be expected. However, I did not expect our democracy to grow weaker along with me.

Unfortunately for us and for the world, our current president neither understands nor cares about democracy. How else can one interpret, say, his indifference to the protests to maintain freedoms which are taking place in Hong Kong?

A rational person can have no doubts about the dangers of Trump’s fondness for dictators and autocrats. Similarly, no objective person can doubt that Mr. Trump is a racist. His racism is the subject of this article, in which I introduce a new concept, secondary racism.

1. Primary Racism

This is the classic form of racism, which has plagued our country since its founding—and before—and is still present in a vehement way, albeit in a less vehement way than in the past. Racism was a key ingredient of the milk on which Uncle Sam grew up to be tall and powerful. Only relatively recently has decency taught the decent that prejudice is a sickness; those affected by it must fight for their health; those afflicted by it must fight for their rights.

Not every non-minority member, however, is aware of this disease; some, like a TB patient deliberately and joyfully coughing in a doctor’s face, even flaunt it. Trump is one of these.

His assertion that he ‘hasn’t a racist bone in his body,’ is perhaps the most egregious of the thousands of lies he has told since taking office. Here is a (partial) list of his animus against African Americans, as recounted by the late Nobel-prize winning author, Toni Morrison:

On Election Day, how eagerly had so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated--embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company had been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama had been born in the United States, and also seemed to condone the beating of a Back Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos.The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

(To this sad list I would add his having called for the death  penalty, in a full-page newspaper ad, of five minority kids who were railroaded by the police into confessing a crime they did not commit. When, years later, they were proven innocent by DNA analysis, Trump insisted that they should remain in jail because the police should never be doubted. What could be more racist than that?)

To his obvious racism against blacks, his more recent behavior has given us many examples of prejudice against browns as well. He might not have originated the crisis at the border; he has, however, made it a lot worse.

Examples abound. He has referred to Mexicans as rapists and murderers; he has attempted to build a wall separating the (mostly) white North from the (mostly) brown South. He has referred to those seeking asylum from violence and chaos in their home counties, as an “infestation;” it is no accident that the white supremacist who recently murdered and injured many in El Paso used the same term. Another example of Trump's animus against Latino immigrants is his policy of separating children from parents, which has affected many families. This cruel practice will go down in the history books, I think, along with other shameful deeds such as the internment of Japanese Americans during World War ll.

It is hard to think of something more callous than the recent ICE raid in Mississippi, during which hundreds of undocumented Latinos were arrested while many of their children had no one to pick them up from school. Yes, it is hard to think of something to match this cruelty, but, knowing Trump, something worse will probably follow.

No doubt about it, Trump is a racist. But is he a secondary racist as well?

2. Secondary Racism

Before we define secondary racism, let us define the pathology of its primary practitioner.

I have no problem classifying Trump as being mentally ill, suffering from a severe personality disorder. This is not a liberal or conservative issue, or at least, it shouldn’t be. His pathology speaks and tweets for itself everywhere. The president is a classic case of narcissistic personality disorder, so severe that he and he alone has been considered by several clinicians to be a malignant narcissist. I am not a psychiatrist, but I am a physician; I am aware that one is not supposed to diagnose without a clinical examination, but Trump's is such an extreme case that the diagnosis screams out to us merely by observing his behavior.

Trump’s moral world is simple. For him, what is good is that which supports him; what is evil is what opposes him. He has stated that  a good day for him is a day  in which he trounces all opponents and comes out on top. This is one of the chief characteristics of narcissism: extreme egotism.

Another characteristic is a near-total lack of empathy. A good example of this is a photo taken during his trip to console the people of El Paso after the terrorist attack, a trip which turned out to be a debacle. It shows Trump in a photo with an infant whose parents were killed in the massacre. The infant is held by his wife, Melania, far off to the side. Trump beams at the camera, with his thumbs pointing upwards in a gesture of triumph. He shows absolutely no concern for the infant. Contrast this with the clip of Beto O’Rourke hugging a desperate man crying over his loss.

Another characteristic of narcissists is extreme neediness; the narcissist needs constant praise to cover up, at least temporarily, the desperate insecurity of his inner life. During that same visit to El Paso, Trump, instead of consoling victims, bragged about the crowd size at a recent rally.

A narcissist like Trump thinks that he is so special that he can do everything himself. This is why his White House is so chaotic; this is why Trump ignores experts.

What, then, is secondary racism? Secondary racism is selective racism used as a tool to vanquish  enemies. A good example of this is the president's severe criticism of Elijah Cummings, a black politician, who dared to vigorously protest the treatment of children at the border. Trump excoriated Cumming’s record in Baltimore, and, to boot, excoriated the city of Baltimore as well. Yes, Baltimore has its problems, but it has many advantages as well. (I have lived in Baltimore for many years.) It has a high murder rate; St. Louis’s rate, however, is even worse. Note that Trump has never criticized St. Louis, which lies, at least most of the time, in a Republican state. St. Louis has a large black population as well. That Trump singles out Baltimore and a politician who vociferously opposes him and  ignores similar or worse problems in red states, is an example of secondary racism.

Most African Americans oppose Trump; they are well aware of his primary racism. Let us now imagine a thought experiment. Imagine that blacks were as deluded about Trump as  the whites of his base are; let us imagine that he had the support of the black community. If this were so, I have no doubt that Trump’s narcissism would trump his primary racism. That people adulate him is even more important to him than the ethnicity of his adulators.

Trump characterized his undereducated white working-class supporters, before he needed them, as losers. Whoever praises him is good in his wretched book, the color of their skin, if I am correct, is less important. This I call secondary racism, extreme prejudice against any member of the human race  who opposes him.

Trump, whose malicious racism is apparent to every objective person, is mentally ill; perhaps he can’t help what he’s doing. We, however, elected him; in addition, he still has, God help us,  many supporters. What’s wrong with us?

The Tragic Case of Donald Trump

Trump is not only the worst president in U.S. history, he is arguably the most transparent one as well. If you don't know why he acts the way he does by now, you either haven't been paying attention, or, more seriously, you are inclined to believe that the writing on his identity's wall tends to lead to an heroic interpretation, rather than to a clinical one.

The purpose of this article is not only to explain why Trump acts the way he does, but also to indicate why his personality disorder is so dangerous to the well-being of the United States and to the entire world. I will illustrate this with the help of an excerpt from Stephen Hawking's latest and last book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, published a few months after the great scientist's death in March 2018, at the age of seventy-six. I will address Trump's personality-disorder first.

1. The Malignant Narcissist

All non-partisan observers should know by now that Trump is neither moral nor immoral, but amoral. Morality for him is that which supports him; immorality for him is any form of opposition--What can be more amoral than that? The examples are legion! One of the latest is his criticism of Mark Hertling, the Navy Seal who was instrumental in capturing Saddam Hussein and killing Osama bin Laden. The retired admiral took Trump to task for his attacks on the press. When Chris Wallace of Fox News asked for a comment on Hertling's criticism, Trump interrupted and stated that the admiral was a Clinton and Obama supporter. (An accusation which the admiral subsequently vehemently denied). For Trump, the accusation of being a Clinton or Obama supporter nullifies the objectivity of whatever is said; whatever opponents say is by definition immoral, according to his internal, very limited dictionary. 

If you would prefer a clinical reason that explains Trump's behavior rather that an ethical one, it is malignant narcissism, an extreme form of vanity. Trump lives on praise as a vampire lives on blood; without it he becomes desiccated, like a grape after a  week in a desert.

Because he lacks a center, he must imagine himself to be the center of the universe. Because he knows so little, he pretends to know everything in order to salvage his precarious equilibrium. If deep down in his psyche he believes that he is worthless--this is why narcissists need constant praise--he surely knows how to cover up his lack of character with his characteristic bragging. "How would you grade your presidency so far?" Trump was asked in a recent interview. "A+," he replied; "Can I go higher than that?" He has been saying such ridiculous things for so long that
one isn't sure if he really believes the lies he tells. I think he does, which is sad and scary--Trump, after all, is the most powerful person in the world. He does not have the right stuff, however; we know it, and deep down there he knows it as well.

2. The Ignorant Narcissist

Trump claims that he is a "very stable genius," and that he knows "all the words," while in reality he is profoundly ignorant of that which one needs to know in order to govern, and cannot even put a decent sentence together. His tragedy, which has become ours, is a toxic combination of ignorance and inability to learn. Learning involves, among other things, humility and the ability to listen. Trump's lack of both of these qualities astounds. How can you learn if you are driven to pretend that you are smarter than everyone else and know all the answers already? One of his former instructors at the Wharton School of Business declared that Trump was a terrible student for this very reason.

Trump's inability to learn, his delusion that he knows all the answers, and his impulsiveness in making decisions without expert input are very dangerous flaws indeed. One of many examples follows. Trump discovered that South Korea has a trade surplus with the United States. Impulsively, he decided to pull out troops from South Korea and transfer missile defenses to Oregon. This would be an unmitigated disaster, since South Korea's proximity to "Little Rocket Man" means that a missile launched at the United States would be detected much earlier, a fact of crucial importance. Trump apparently directed his staff to have a letter ready for his signature, a letter informing the South Koreans that the United States was withdrawing from its military commitments. A patriotic aide intercepted the letter; Trump subsequently forgot about it. Whew! (The source of this anecdote is Bob Woodward's book, Fear, which chronicles the truly fearsome and amoralTrumpian chaos).

Why is he, in addition to his narcissism, so ignorant? He doesn't read. Kelly, the Secretary of Defense, considers Trump to be at the level of a fifth-grader. If he doesn't read, and he apparently doesn't, it is far worse than that. Aides apparently have to have texts illustrated with pictures, so that the president can grasp what is going on in informative meetings. Trump is known to "keep up" with the news by watching television, not by reading. This is truly unprecedented.

How does a refusal or inability to read affect a human being's ability to learn? For this, we turn to a passage from Steven Hawking's last book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, (Bantam Books, 2018):

Trump ridiculously claims that  he is “a very stable genius”—if he were, he wouldn’t have to make such outlandish claims. Stephen Hawking lacked the narcissism to boast, nor did he need to—his genius was apparent to all. The great scientist who, amazingly, lasted over half a century after receiving a diagnosis of a malady which usually proves fatal within a few years, unfortunately died in March of this year, 2018, at the age of seventy-six, “a very stable genius,” despite his crippling handicap, to the very end of his life. Not only characterized by stability, his genius, as one might expect from a scientist, was also informed by rationality and by a progressive stance as well. He was thus in vehement opposition to the inane populism of Donald Trump. 

What follows is a quote from Hawkings's book:

The DNA in a human egg or sperm contains three billion base pairs of nucleic acids...the total amount of useful information in our genes is probably something like a hundred million bits...By contrast, a paperback novel might contain two million bits of information. Therefore, a human is equivalent to about fifty Harry Potter books, and a major modern national library can contain about five million books--or about ten trillion bits. The amount of information handed down in books or via the internet is 100,000 times as much as there is in DNA.


                                         --pages 76-


What we quoted from his book might not have been written with Trump in mind, but it exposes very well the current American—and world—predicament. Trump isn’t able and isn’t even willing to learn from experts, since he doesn’t read and suffers from a pathology that makes him imagine that he knows all the answers already—a truly toxic combination!

A few pages further on, Hawking writes: 

An even greater limitation (the first arising from specialization in narrower and narrower fields due exponential growth of knowledge) and danger for future generations
is that we still have the instincts, and in particular the aggressive impulses, that we had in caveman days.
                                     
                                                     --page 80

Trump’s aggression and greed are not tempered by wisdom, since he has no access to the wise. Trump’s hates and delusions are not tempered by the light of experience either; his illness prevents him from seeing light in the world, since he lives in his own world, which is dark. (He lives in a primitive world of nitbits, as it were). Trump is thus not merely a narcissist, but a Neolithic Narcissist; we’ve got a caveman in the White House and all, to put it mildly, isn’t well.

Republican Patriots, Where Are You?

O the pundits are pontificating again!--They have many American eyes, as well as many eyes around the world, right where they want them: fixed on CNN.

I repeat what you undoubtedly already know by now: Trump sided with the enemy during a joint conference with a murderous thug. The cover of a recent Daily News (July 17, 2018) best sums up the disgraceful spectacle: Trump is holding hands with a bare-chested Putin, while his other hand, armed with a gun, fires a bullet into Poor Uncle Sam's unsuspecting head.

Dear gobsmacked pundits, how can you be so terribly surprised? I admit Trump even outtrumped Trump with his latest idiocy, but surprised--maybe, but only a little. This is the man who headed the nefarious birther movement for five years; he discarded his slander only after his election, when old lies had to accede to new ones to keep his base baser than ever. And the racism! I also never forgot his animus against the five minority youths accused of raping a white Central Park jogger--even after they were proven innocent, by DNA analysis, after many years in prison! This inveterate, unintellectual crackpot liar didn't deserve to be president--I've known that for years. Some pundits opined that he'd grow into the job; yeah, I thought, as likely as a chickie could pick and peck enough to grow up into a brontosaurus. Pundits are less sanguine now.

What follows are what a Republican with a conscience and a conscientious Democrat have said about the disastrous summit:

Senator John McCain: No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.

John Brennan, a former director of the C.I.A. tweeted the following, here quoted in its entirety: Donald Trump's press conference in Helsinki rises and exceeds the threshold of "high crimes and misdemeanors." It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump's comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots, where are you?

Wow has finally come to now!

Chuck Schumer, the minority Senate leader began his comment thus: His behavior is so inexplicable and so against the interests of the United States...

Against the interests of the nation, yes, but inexplicable, Mr. Schumer? I think not. Donald Trump has always been anything but inconsistent.

Many experts on TV and elsewhere are asserting in ever greater numbers that the reason behind Trump's kowtowing to Putin is because the latter has dirt on Donald, and might even be in a position to blackmail him. Maybe so, but there is a deeper reason which underlies and explicates the first. We will discuss these two reasons in turn.

First Explanation of Trump's Treasonous Behavior: The Pee Tape

Trump has done a lot of business in Russia over the years; recall his son's statement that Trump, Inc. has profited immensely from ventures in Russia. It is also obvious to anyone who is impartial that Trump's business has been questionable. He has stiffed many workers who were his employees; he hired illegal immigrants and paid them coolie wages; activities such as his charity, Trump University, etc. have been pure scams. These dishonest dealings refer to activities in the United Sates; one could hardly imagine that his projects in Russia would have been pursued in  a more  honest manner, given the rampant corruption and mafia-like thuggery in that country. There is a good deal of evidence that Trump did (does?) have considerable contacts with the Russian mob.

The government of Russia, a country  which has been continually devolving into a police state, has perfected the art of spying on its citizens, a tradition that dates back to czarist times.

It's hard for Americans to realize the extent of the severe restriction on personal freedom in totalitarian countries. I have some knowledge of the spying that went on in East Germany, the former Soviet satellite. I had the opportunity to see some of the archives the SED (the Communist government of the DDR) kept on their citizens. The building that contained them was full, the records--compiled before the digital revolution--were thick. It seems that spying on each other was a national pastime

Trump was a prominent businessman in Russia years before he ran for office, so it is quite possible that agents, with Putin's blessing, have compiled compromising material with which he could be blackmailed.

The most damning possibility is the existence of the so-called pee tape. According to the Steele dossier, Trump was lured to the Ritz Carlton in Moscow to witness two prostitutes urinate in a bed of the presidential suite--but not just any bed, but the bed in which the Obamas had slept in during a visit to Moscow. The dossier refers to Trump's 'perverted conduct at the Ritz Carlton'.  A tape of this sordid incident was allegedly made.

The existence of this tape is by no means certain; the evidence for it is circumstantial, supported, however, by four apparently reliable sources.

Due to the fact that Trump has never been a stranger to compromising behavior, let us assume that Putin has damaging information on Trump. But even if he does, I don't think this is the real reason behind Trump's behavior. One musk ask why Trump hates Obama so vehemently in the first place; why he is so obsessed with promulgating his brand; why he has been so desperate to impress, etc.

Our sometimes scraggly pundits need to be spruced up by Occam's razor--what is the most likely reason why Trump acts the way he does?

Second Explanation of Trump's Treasonous Behavior: the Diagnosis

The best way to realize why Trump behaves the way he does is to conclude that he is mentally ill. He is a textbook case of narcissistic personality disorder. He has little or no empathy for others; he is so obsessed with self aggrandizement that he views himself at the center of a solo solar system, reducing all other bodies to satellites; if you don't like to bask in his sunlight, you're an enemy; if a moon accepts its own light as a mere reflection of his, it's a friend. All of these traits are indicative of a severe personality disorder.

I know it sounds partisan, but on analysis, I think malignant narcissism is the best way to explain Trump.

A central part of narcissistic personality disorder is anxiety, the barely conscious realization that one is a failure, causing a negative feedback loop. It's like what the Buddhist tradition calls a hungry ghost, a giant spirit with a tiny head. It is always hungry but never can eat enough to be satisfied. Greedy people are said to be born in hell as hungry ghosts.

The disease explains why Trump is obsessed with Russia, the Mueller investigation, and the (il)legitimacy of his victory. Putin doesn't question whether Trump won big or not; Mueller, by investigating Russian meddling, puts the president's victory into question. Therefore, at least according to our analysis, Mueller is an enemy and Putin is a friend. Remember it's all about him, he can't stand any competition. An independent judiciary and a free press in his view cast shade on the Sun God, thus making them enemies of  his private light.

Regarding his anxiety over the election, the example of Hitler comes to mind. He never won the popular vote; in 1932, the Nazi Party won 36% of the vote, down slightly from the previous election. Germany then and now has a coalition government; after he was appointed Chancellor by the senile Hindenburg, Hitler declared an emergency and took over the nation. He never worried about whether the majority voted for him or not. Compare this with Trump's insistence that his inaugural crowds were the biggest ever; that millions of illegals voted for Clinton, etc. His narcissistic insecurities explain why he insists that his wimpy victory was nothing other than spectacular; they also explain why he believes that the F.B.I is conspiring against him. If you're not for him, you're part of a witch hunt.

Hitler didn't care what anybody thought; he pursued his hates with manic determination. Trump, in contrast, is obsessed with what everybody thinks; praise, his heroin, trumps everything.

Dr. Allen Frances, the psychiatrist who devised the criteria for diagnosing narcissistic personality disorder, believes Trump lacks an important criterion for the illness: he thrives, while a narcissist is always ridden and riven with and by anxieties.

I do not agree. If Trump were self-assured and at peace with himself, why would he always be talking nonsense, such as No collusion, No collusion, No collusion? If he were sure of his abilities, why would he insist on being "a very stable genius?' If he had inner strength, wouldn't he be able to withstand at least some criticism? If he were more self-confident, would he divide the world into sycophants and rivals? No, he is a very insecure man; the resultant anxiety is becoming more apparent every day.

To sum up: he is a malignant narcissist, he is mentally ill. He is also way over his head as president. There is no better way to explain why he continues to damage our country without a shred of conscious insight. We are thus becoming pawns of a shameful, shameless bumbleton King. 

I will now illustrate his pathology by a famous painting, Saturn Devouring his Sons, one of the black paintings by Goya.

Saturn has been driven mad by anxiety; a prophecy has declared that one of his sons will overthrow him. To prevent this, he devours them one by one. Jupiter will eventually slay him and force him to vomit up his siblings, magically restored to life. After this, the new king will cast the old monster down to Tartarus forever.

Look into Saturn's eyes. What you see are fear and madness. Saturn feels compelled to kill his sons; his eyes inform us, however, that  he knows that all the horror will be in vain. His eyes know that he will fail.

Now look into the eyes of Trump in this recent photograph:

Although fear in the eyes of Saturn has been exaggerated to make a striking artistic point, I see more than a little of this fear in Trump's. This is not the face of a man at peace. This is the face of a man who knows that his lies cannot hide the truth forever, namely, that he's a soulwreck, a failed human being.

Trump is devouring our children, as it were, the institutions that have taken us hundreds of years to perfect.  How long are we going to let Big T. and his Mini-Titans tear our country apart?

Second New Year's Message, January 14, 2018

Now that the War On Christmas, imagined by Fox News and its premier viewer. Donald Trump,  is over for another year; now that their attempt at imagining that a combination of Christianity and Capitalism has turned the nation into one huge department store  called Goys R Us; now that a blast of arctic weather has kept many indoors for a while, some of whom might have more time for reflection, it is time to turn our attention once again to figurative blasts of arctic weather that are responsible for much of  our nation's current chilly malaise, a self-inflicted case of inner global cooling.

This article assumes that you have long since figured out that Trump is a flaming narcissist; that he is incompetent; unfit for office; a barely literate person (un)leading the most powerful nation on earth during these best and worst of times, a present full of promise, yet fraught with ever-present danger, and that, for our country's sake and for the sake of the world,  he should never have left the unreality of Reality TV, the audience of which formed a significant base of his supporters--most of whom alas! continue to think he's the best thing to come their way since Fox News, prayer, and automatic weapons.

Someone recently told me that while the wound Trump has already inflicted on our country and on the free world is deep, there will be a recovery, a time of healing, which, let's hope, begins with the November 2018 mid-term elections.  Let's hope that's true, I replied; deep wounds, however, leave deep scars. I am still cautiously optimistic; I believe a lot of healthy tissue will remain. The body politic might limp for a while, but will walk on in reasonable health--provided that we wake up, that is, and see to it that it gets the care that it and we, the people, need.

Two serious threats to our well-being will be discussed here, one of which, let us hope, will not last, the other one, more insidious, has already caused considerable damage.  The first is Trump's attempts to weaken the checks and balances, which are mainstays of democracy; the other is unregulated capitalism, which Trump indeed fosters, but has been wreaking its slow havoc for many years.

First Threat: Undermining Checks and Balances

When Americans of my generation (I'm in my eighth decade) studied the American Revolution in high school, we learned the catchphrase, "Taxation without representation is tyranny," just as we had memorized, in another context, "In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue," doggerel we had committed to memory several grades earlier.  The taxation slogan, popular during the Revolutionary War, indicates a major and valid concern of the Founding Fathers. best expressed by a great president four score and seven years later, the hope that "the government of the people, by the people and of the people shall not perish from this earth."  It was a new and glorious adventure, since just about the entire world was under autocratic rule at that time.  George Washington was to be our president, not our king.  In order to help assure that the government of the new country would never devolve into one headed by a  tyrant, we elected a paper king, as it were, the Constitution; we would be ruled by laws, not by the unelected; Louis IV's "L'État, c'est moi," ("the State is I"),  had become the Founding Fathers' "The State is us,'' "L'État, c'est nous").  A key principle of the Constitution is the establishment of checks and balances as essential safeguards of freedom.  Of utmost importance here is the First Amendment, which guarantees free speech and the freedom of the press.  Tyrants and these two freedoms mix as well as mashed potatoes and motor oil; history provides many examples of figurative versions of this very unsavory dish, which has poisoned the well-being of countless millions.  Equally important as the First Amendment is the separation of powers, enshrined in the Constitution as well.  The three branches of government, the executive, the legislative and the judiciary each have their essential functions and, as long as their continued function remains a national priority, they will remain alembics through which no despot can hope to pass.

Although I am cautiously optimistic that our institutions will survive Trump, they are indeed under threat, perhaps as never before.  In Trump's Orwellian world, real news is called fake news and vice versa.  Any report that is critical of him, which is now just about all objective reporting, is deemed mendacious.  It's even worse than that.  The First Amendment assures that everyone has the right to speak her mind, which means, since we are all human and fallible, every individual she or he can be wrong.  The Amendment implies that a free and honest debate should separate the wheat from the chaff.  Alas, a lot of chaff passes for wheat these days.  The degree of polarization of our society today is very sad indeed; we tend to argue at each other, rather than debate with each other. Worse, many of us get our news from unreliable sources, inaccuracies at best and lies at worst that not only apply no pins to our ignorant bubbles, but provide us with a soapy dopey goo with which we continue to increase them.

The weakening of First Amendment rights is, sad to write, not the only problem. Insidious attacks on the separation of powers have become more overt during the Trump administration as well. It has long since been well known to the more astute observes among us that Trump possesses the traits of a narcissist to an alarming degree.  A statement by Michael Wolff, the author of the Trump exposé, Fire and Fury, indicates a severe character flaw in the president.  He can't abide playing second fiddle to anyone.  It's all about him. This prevents him from surrounding himself with first-rate minds which can guide and challenge him. He is instead advised by relatives, by the callow Hope Hicks, and by that obnoxious young sycophant-bull dog, Stephen Miller.  What's worse, he's playing on a toy fiddle without ever having taken lessons.  He doesn't read, is only semi-literate, has little political knowledge and almost no desire to learn--and thinks he's "like, really smart"--"a stable genius."  If these flaws weren't enough, he also shamelessly and openly displays our national shame, racism.

It's not surprising then to discover that he doesn't know how politics works and tends toward authoritarian rule, a government  of Trump, by Trump and for Trump.  He  doesn't understand, or at least refuses to abide by, the separation of powers doctrine. Our Kiddie King Louie actually said this: "I have an absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department."  He was furious when Jeffrey Sessions recused himself for having lied to Congress about meetings with Russians.  Trump, I think, really believes that the primary duty of the Attorney General is to protect him, and not to serve the American people.  Currently, a group of politicians who are putting their own need for power above country, are doing their best to undermine the independence and integrity of Robert Mueller, who is in charge of the investigation into Russian collusion and into Trump-family financial shenanigans.

Second Threat: No Checks and Skewed Balances

The Constitution protects individual freedoms but does not assure freedoms from want.  The Constitution predates the rise of industrial capitalism; threats to inequality hardly kept Thomas Jefferson up at night, who, like so many of the elite of his day, "owned" slaves. The underside of capitalism, immortalized by Dickens, was yet to come.  A good analogy is the exposure of Northern Hemisphere songbirds to cats.  These birds did not co-evolve with cats, who were brought over from Europe; the former possess little defenses against the latter.  Everyone who lets his cat out should place a bell around its neck as a little minatory tocsin; if birds and cats had evolved together, Northern Hemisphere birds wouldn't need such a warning; with the help of visual, aural, and olfactory clues, they would naturally be as leery of cats as antelope are of lions.

Great Britain has come a long way from Dickensonian sqaulor, the United States not so much.  What are some of the checks and balances to the inequality which are inevitable byproducts of unregulated capitalism?  I suggest a few: the right to work at a living wage when work is available, adequate social support when it is not; the right to affordable health care; the right to adequate housing, the right to a safe environment and access to affordable education. Most Western countries have come a long way to realizing these goals; why do we, the richest country in the world, continue to be outliers?

Capitalism is the engine of wealth. fuel by expertise and innovation.  It tends to view workers as things, however, and people are not things. 

The threats to democracy by the increasing inequality fostered by the current regime is truly alarming.  Trump promised to "drain the swamp"; he lied, of course, and packed the swamp with ribbeting oligarchs.

I am cautiously optimistic that we can heal our serious Trumpian wounds, bear our deep Trumpian scars, and get back on a straighter and narrower path, but only if enough citizens resist and become politically active.  If we are unable to defeat the kleptocrats in next yea'rs mid-term elections, for instance, we will continue to be exploited by the government we deserve.