#46 TRUMP: AMERICA’S 5TH GRADE CALIGULA

Caligula, in his own special darkness

“That is exactly what happens when you have a national leader in one of the realms [of delusion]–the whole nation becomes part of that realm.”

–Chogyam Trungpa, Transcending Madness

Infamous Roman emperor Caligula (12-41 C.E.) comes to mind when considering Donald Trump—a leader who became a sure sign of power hungry greed over genuine public good. Unlike Trump, Caligula managed to accomplish many public works and showed some judiciousness and generosity early in his reign.  On the very first day on the job, the Roman senate managed to sign a law giving him absolute power, which he happily wielded, especially as the years unfolded, against his apparently endless supply of enemies, especially those in the senate.  He wanted absolute obeisance and ruthlessly persecuted anyone he thought disloyal.  He flouted all standard rules meant to preserve the dignity of his office, and routinely dressed up as if he were a god, quite enjoying the way gods get treated. (Further, eerie resemblances abound.)

Donald Trump expresses the American empire come to its decadence.

We must daily contend with his ferocious dominance over our discourse and his extravagant dismantling of our republic, it’s norms and laws, for personal gain.  Of the state and federal government cases against him, only one has reached a conclusion (in May, guilty of 34 felonies), and yet he hasn’t set foot in a prison.  The rule of law lacks teeth enough to take him down.  He continues to escape any true reckoning and corrupts anyone who comes into his orbit.

He also seems to be disintegrating before our eyes, such that the Harris campaign urges people to watch his speeches as a way to get their votes.  He can’t seem to get very far without going off the rails.  If he’s asked a question on, say, Google, he responds with a deeply felt answer on Virginia voting laws.

Well, who knows what amounts to “deeply felt” for a man so utterly dedicated to his lies and their ability to create “truth,” he long ago stopped bothering to make them cohere.  If it comes out of his mouth drenched in aggrievement, that’s the formula that always works.  You can hear him shouting at his mother: “Mom, I didn’t do it!  He did!”  He inevitably raises this to gargantuan scale: “Our administration had the greatest economic record in the history of the world.  The Biden-Harris administration has been the worst…an utter disaster of incomprehensible proportions!  I’m the one who can protect you, and they are the worst human beings on the face of the earth!” or something like that…every fucking time.  He just goes through this schtick of avoiding all responsibility, all resemblance to fact, and praising himself in grandiloquent terms as the Dear Leader, and everyone else idiots and criminals of the lowest order.

If you’re reading this blog, you know this.  It remains confounding that his faithful adherents never seem to catch on to this simple-minded jingle on endless repeat.  He’s perhaps wearing down at this point, unable to think up any further song and dance.  But that’s just it: he launched into this a very long time ago, ludicrously rode it into the White House, and now continues to hammer away at his many perceived enemies (essentially anyone who criticizes him), while plotting (publicly, on the stump) his revenge.  It’s this lust for whining hatefulness that leads many to attribute to him the emotional maturity of a two year old.

Before the adoring crowd

But I reject that.  I figure his maturation got arrested at fifth grade.

He’s the kid with the big mouth sitting around the table at lunch who can always find someone to pick on and humiliate, to the amusement of his clique.  He performs for them, makes them laugh in derision and superiority, and thrives on the approval.  He’s got just enough purchase on pecking order and stereotypes to use it as a weapon—a weapon he still employs today, putting out unhinged tweets in all caps in the middle of the night.  He’s always projected himself, projected his image as a way to conquer the social order, to raise himself up.  He never learned any lesson that this might involve actual achievement, like, for instance, a quarterback has to earn on the gridiron and can’t earn anywhere else.  That achievement isn’t theoretical; it has to be lived.

Donald Trump has lived a disastrous life, and the true disaster of his existence comes from never getting caught in a way he can’t squirm out of.  Life has never decimated his ego, cut it down to size, in the way that it has for many of the prison inmates I work with who’ve had no choice but to come to terms with a failed life.  But it could be anything regular citizens go through, like a divorce or finally facing an addiction or simply struggling to keep your life together.  It breaks you down, makes you look at yourself.  Donald Trump stands a monument to never having faced anything at all about himself.  All he’s ever done amounts to covering the lies with more lies, a life of cons and grifts and sleight of hand.  He’s an epic house of cards that somehow queasily stays upright, now a disaster for us all.

He’s the product of, as my friend Margot observed recently, “a cold as ice mother and a Nazi father.”  It had to be those two who bought his bullshit fifth grader complaints; it must have worked when nothing else did.  It seems obvious that no love lived in that house, and it never got planted in a way that it can grow in Donald.  That desiccated soil got salted for good measure.

I heard a lady on the radio interviewed after one of his rallies. “We love him and he loves us,” she said.  He loves nothing but himself, though he does like it when you worship him.  It’s as plain as day, lady, and yet you can’t see it.  So we’re living in a nation under mass hypnosis. Like the hypnotist who can make the hypnotized feel it’s suddenly freezing cold until they actively shiver and then switch to sweltering such that they start to take off their clothes, it’s an astounding display of puppetry.

Very early on, back in 2015, a healer I work with told me that his voice was “a kind of black magic.”  I remember regarding that as hyperbole, but after a few months I started to realize how right she was.  People fall under the spell, and really do believe Trump to be their protector; Trump, the honest man, the genuine man, gets unfairly harassed by the media, the legal system, the deep state; Trump will make everyone rich; Trump will drain the swamp; and so on and so on and oh so so on.  Life in the upsidedown, where the criminal continuously proclaims his honesty while seeing legal transgressions by his enemies in every direction.  Like the Republican party generally, Trump remains as guilty as sin of everything he accuses others of being.  He’s utterly unfit for the office of president in every conceivable way.  “He doesn’t deserve to be elected dog-catcher!” as his ex-lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, ranted about him.

At least George W. Bush, another idiot scion of Republican aristocracy, could manage to read the reports waiting for him on the Resolute Desk.  Trump couldn’t be bothered.  One wonders if he avoids them because he doesn’t trust himself to understand what they’re saying.  He pushes ahead with whatever impulse arises, and since all his impulses arise from egocentrism, his actions—and their results—follow accordingly.

He convinces himself instead that he’s the only one who knows what to do, and if it blows up in his face, he’ll simply blame someone else or declare it a success IN ALL CAPS!!!  (People are saying!)

I went to see Ed Podvoll, a psychiatrist who founded the Buddhist and Contemplative Psychology department at Naropa University, a few days before he died.  I think he had caught that last wind people get shortly before they go.  I asked him what the difference between a neurotic and psychotic was, and he said, “The psychotic finds that neurosis doesn’t work and therefore has to keep going.”  In other words, neurotic projection hasn’t assuaged how ill at ease you feel, so in the next step you have to double-down and insist unceasingly that your fiction is reality, and at that point you’re spinning fast enough for it to turn into psychosis.

It’s not just Donald Trump spinning into psychosis: it’s the whole fucking country.  This election is in no way a choice.  The contrast here couldn’t be more naked.  Whatever her weaknesses might be, Harris has, in dharma terms, bodhichitta and lungta.  That is, she shows she’s capable of caring about others, and she really does radiate confident life-force, brilliant chi.  Trump’s a false god if there ever was one.  He will shred the constitution and bill of rights, corrupt the government, kick out tens of millions of people who live here, turn the government’s guns on any dissent, and…but you know all this.

At least, I hope you do.

The only thing that’s saved us up till now is Trump’s stupidity.  With just a little cleverness, he could have sold himself as a more moderate Republican rather than provoking resistance at every turn from the larger world.  But the man’s desperate to stay out of prison and grasp the gold ring, as he sees it: a world, a planet, under his total control.  It’s always the cherished dream of a loveless person like Trump (…or Putin).

And almost magically, nearly the entire Republican party vigorously covers up his putrid falsity and licks his boots at every turn.  J.D. Vance can stand before 43 million people on TV and smoothly declare that Donald Trump had fought to preserve Obamacare when he had tried everything in his power to destroy it.  That typifies, as much as anything, who and what we’re dealing with: a remarkable shamelessness without the slightest moral integrity bent on personal gain and, as Vance has said himself, the destruction of American democracy and the installation of a dictator.  (Is that what they taught you at Yale Law School?)

In Buddhist psychological terms, Trump most resembles the hungry ghost—a needy spirit, his mouth ablaze with a desire he can never really quench and an enormous belly he can never fill, no matter how much he tries to consume.  But he’s got another distorted emotional realm there, too: jealous god.  He never can enjoy the life of luxury he’s inherited because he’s unendingly embroiled in bitter fights, while furiously maintaining his fictional reality, whatever that pretense happens to be at the moment.  He lacks the true cunning of the jealous god (like Putin demonstrates), but nevertheless, he’s smart enough to get a stranglehold on the Republican party.  You’re either an enemy or a sycophant.  There’s no middle ground.  That’s all he sees.  He lacks the subtlety of Caligula, who would mock the insincerity of the Roman senators who made a show of bowing and scraping so that they might keep their heads on their shoulders.

Have you ever seen him laugh?

All of that said (and I could certainly go on), it’s not like I don’t feel any empathy for Donald Trump.  At the core, he’s a profoundly pathetic human being.  In Buddhist terms, he’s done little to accumulate merit, but he has used it up at a colossal rate.  Even if he realizes his dream of total control and sweet vengeance on all his enemies (like Nancy Pelosi and Haitians and late night comedians), his satisfaction will be short-lived.  As unprepared for the after life as a man can be, his only direction is down.  His long odyssey of suffering will be unimaginable.  You can’t create harm in so many ways and in so many directions without it rebounding on you in the end.  Loveless, childish, and so deeply entangled in his own deceptions, I can only hope that sunlight finally penetrates into the heart of him and redeems him.  It’s that redemption he truly needs, no matter how long it takes, one he would readily deny to everyone else.

The product of his own thought