Donald Trump and the Triumph of  Narcissism 

January 22, 2026
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Although I am neither an historian nor a psychologist, I know enough  American history to know that Trump’s demand that  Greenland capitulate to his desire  for ownership,  regardless of the will of its inhabitants, is not merely wholly without precedent  and, in fact,  strategically unnecessary, but reckless and  demented to a terrifying degree.   At the same time,  I know enough  about narcissism to know that one  afflicted  with this insidious and sometimes  extraordinarily powerful  disorder  is the absolute last person you want near power, that much the more, absolute power.   Yet there he is.  The entire world  has witnessed  the pathology of this disorder displayed in Trump’s actions and language  now for over a decade:   The true narcissist is compelled by a prodigious energy to find  perpetual affirmations and reflections of their fabled identity everywhere he or she looks and in everything and everyone he or she perceives.  For  the narcissist, everything and everywhere and everyone is a mirror in which the narcissist  must see, on some level, some reflection of who they believe they are. If they are met with something other than this fantasy, what  they see must be diminished, renamed, redefined or, if threatening enough, destroyed altogether.  If the narcissist  cannot be the object  of ceaseless  adoration then  being the object of ceaseless attention will do.  Trump, the “thing in itself” in terms of narcissism, is a master practitioner of both and, as New Yorkers know,  has been enacting this pathology  for his entire adult life and doing so with spectacular success. In his first term and in the  first year of  his second term, Trump has provided so many examples of this horrible affliction  it would take 50 pages simply to compile a fraction of them,  but I list here a few  examples, in no particular order or particular importance, to illustrate the point:  Trump’s televised cabinet meetings, in which grown men and women ( easily the most unqualified jack-asses in the history of the institution ) are obliged time and time again to thank Trump for his leadership and praise his all around sublimity in words and tone so obsequious  as to make Nicolae Ceausescu or Kim Jong Un cringe;   Trump’s complete and utter degradation  of the Department of Justice  into his personal law firm, tasked not with representing the citizens of the United States, but with both  protecting Trump and his pals,  as well as employing the awesome power of the state  to ruin the lives of  Trump’s perceived  enemies;   Trump’s transformation and ballooning of ICE into  what is essentially  his private army, currently wreaking havoc and committing murder in Minneapolis with what appears to be complete impunity ; Trump’s disgraceful employment  of Presidential Pardons to  absolve thousands of convicted criminals whose actions justify Trump’s lies ( as in Jan 6, 2020),  or criminal operators that can help  the Trump family garner billions, ( as in Binance founder Changpeng Zhao ), or those Trump can  use for political purposes, ( as in Eric Adams . )  Or  simply  because they are Trump’s pals.  One might also include Trump’s heretofore unfathomable ultra racist wholesale designation of Somali immigrants as “garbage ”  or , once again, his studied refusal to recognize MLK Day.  Then, of course, there is  the comparatively comical but no less grotesque renaming of  The United States Institute of Peace into the Donald Trump United  States Institute of Peace, as well as his proposed Board of Peace, an international body created  to solve  global conflicts of  which Trump would be Chair For Life.  And last but not least, Trump’s renaming of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts ( which he also chairs ) into  the “Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” transforming a national memorial to  a beloved slain president into a personal tribute,  the act of which might be called sublime narcissism.

One can, like Trump,  go on and on and on and on and on and on.  

And then there is Trump’s political rhetoric, which also illustrates Trump’s need to  remake the world in his own image no matter the reality.    For over  a decade of hearing this person in his political guise I  was puzzled  by aspects of his  rhetoric ( I am not referring to the idiotic babble of his self-described “weave” ), hearing in it something like an echo of a very familiar  tune that eluded me. Then one day, not long ago, I recognized it:  whether consciously or not, the structure of Trump’s rhetoric echoes that of the deity in the first Book of Genesis:  Listen.  

 “And God said, “ Let there be light, and there was light.  And God saw that the light was good and he separated light from darkness.” 

The world created by the word.

And now  a miscellaneous  sampling of  Trump.   

“Covid will vanish like a miracle.”

“I won the election in 2020.” 

“I ended seven ( or eight or nine or ten ) wars.”

“Gasoline is down to $2:50” 

“ We cut the prices of pharmaceutical by 400 percent.  Some say 600 percent.”  

No explanations.  No reasons.  No syllogisms.  Nothing but blunt God- like declarations meant to be received  as self -evident truths. It matters not at all to Trump or his devotees that the declarations  are  total bullshit.  Trump’s words create the world.  

Reality constructed  by pronouncement.  And endless repetition.  

Monday in an endless and incoherent press conference  in D. C.,  Trump repeated the lie about the 2020 election  as well as many other untruths and smears.  

And yet, even as he now lumbers rather than walks and frequently nods out in front of the world’s press, far from diminishing  with age,  the past couple of weeks have revealed Trump’s affliction to be growing to  Caesarian  levels. This,  at the same time he has predictably and systemically replaced  all responsible  and knowledgeable advisors with mirror reflections of himself, come what may.  No moment  revealed this  reality more than two brief  exchanges within a long January  Oval Office interview with the New York Times.  In the first, Trump is asked about his plans to take over Greenland and his reasons for doing so.   

President Trump: Really it is, to me, it’s ownership. Ownership is very important.

David E. Sanger: Why is ownership important here?

President Trump: Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success. I think that ownership gives you a thing that you can’t do, whether you’re talking about a lease or a treaty. Ownership gives you things and elements that you can’t get from just signing a document, that you can have a base.

Katie Rogers: Psychologically important to you or to the United States?

President Trump: Psychologically important for me. Now, maybe another president would feel differently, but so far I’ve been right about everything.

It is simply not possible, even if surrounded by absolute  lackeys, that  Trump is unaware of the 1951 Treaty that allows the United States to have as many as 17 bases in Greenland as were maintained throughout the Cold War.  Yet, acknowledgement  of that fact would undermine and expose Trump’s true need, that the possession of Greenland is not   strategically important for the defense of the United States but rather“ Psychologically important for me.”  

Hence foreign policy based not on reality but narcissistic need.  (And why not ?  Hasn’t Trump  “been right about everything else ?” )

And yet, in virtually every commentary I read or heard in the MSM about  this incredible statement — foreign policy that threatens to rupture the world order based not on necessity  or reality but on the psychological need of a single individual –  it was excused not as the ideation of a narcissistic lunatic but somehow a remnant  of Trump’s days as a  real estate tycoon.  A quirk of sorts.  And  quite understandable, when you think about it,  given the circumstances.  

The second excerpt  came when Trump was asked a question about the subject that is perhaps most loathsome to him because it is the  most  revealing of his view of the presidency, and even more so of himself.  Trump was asked to name what, if anything, were the boundaries, limits, and constraints on his authority as commander in chief and on limits to his global power   

“Yeah,” Trump answered, “  there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me”.

Trump’s morality.  Trump’s own mind.  These are the only things that can stop him.  Consider that a moment. 

Several nights ago, the President of the United States sent the following message to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of Norway:

“Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a ‘right of ownership’ anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only that a boat landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any other person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland. Thank you! President DJT”    

Given their source  and the immense power that currently resides in the speaker and writer of such absolutely insane statements,  and the fact that all potential external guardrails have been removed, such words should send a chill down the spine of not merely every American citizen but every person on this earth.  

It  seems to me impossible for a reasonably intelligent and conscious  person to read even these three examples and not conclude that the President of the United States is stark, raving mad.  More: that his madness has a name and its name is narcissism, in Trump’s case malignant narcissism.   And yet, saying that, I fear  that the affliction propelling the man re-making the world before our very eyes has become so insidiously central to our degraded, social media deranged, techno driven and rootless sensibilities and so vital to the capitalistic ethos as to be omnipresent, and hence as unseen as the oxygen  we breathe. Consider only the creation, rise, and ever growing power of an ever expanding legion of self-proclaimed “influencers”,  an occupation that would not  exist in a healthy, self respecting culture,  did not exist until the advent of social media, and cannot exist without rampaging  narcissism  and its first cousin shameless self promotion.   Consider too, the  corresponding, ever expanding army of  human balloons who are more than willing to be  “influenced.” Lastly, ponder that according to poll after poll almost 60% of young people aspire not to be doctors, teachers, musicians, or writers,  but “influencers. ”   (And why not ? Some might wind up working for the Trump Administration. )  I can only think that if  historian  Christopher Lasch, author of the seminal 1979 book,  The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations  were still alive his head would explode.     

So…we have arrived at the moment in which the  psychological needs of the President of the United States are what creates American foreign policy; policy, mind you, that in the words of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney constitute “ a rupture, not a transition.”   

A few years ago I remember feeling bemused by the subtitle of Maggie Haberman’s  Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, which was published in 2022, thinking it presumptuous or even hyperbolic. I  see it now, in 2026,   as at the very least prescient,  if not prophetic.  And that is terrifying. 

How did this come to pass ?  And what do we do ?  How was such a man, so spectacularly  unfit, unwell, uninterested in anything but enriching himself and  remaking the world in his own image, elected — not once but twice !  — to the pinnacle of world power ?  I am quite certain that, despite some 70 million of my compatriots having voted for this man,   I am one of millions of  Americans who, 10 years after Donald Trump pronounced  that “I alone can fix it , ”  has found himself or herself staring at a screen or reading a newspaper and thinking, “ How is this ludicrous conman / clown doing what he is  doing ?  What is he doing there ?  What does this say about us ?  How did this happen? “

Even after wholesale evisceration  of the working and middle classes by globalization, championed and  orchestrated by Bill Clinton,  even after the disastrous presidency of George W. Bush and his multiple endless wars ,  even after  the tepid presidency of Barack Obama, who promised change  only to  retain  many of the same architects of the financial meltdown of 2008, even after the often hapless Biden and his equally narcissistic insistence  that he was somehow fit for a second term, even after  the complete devolution of what remains of the Left into ultra divisive, crazy making,  thought policing identitarians  and so much more…how did this happen ?  

More importantly, what, if anything, can we as individuals  do about it ?  When I  stare into the confluence of forces that have led to  this moment,  this farcical  tragedy of history,  I am often overwhelmed to the place of paralysis.  And as a father I am often petrified  for the future of my child, as I expect are millions and millions of other parents.  All too often in the silence of the night I have found myself haunted by the words  of Antonio Gramsci  : “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the time of monsters.”

And yet one must do something.  We are at war,  a war that is at root psychological, intellectual and spiritual with profoundly dangerous political ramifications.  “The first casualty of war, “ warned Aeschylus, some  2,500 years before Foucault and the advent of social media,  “ is truth.”  For me, post-modern babble to the contrary be damned,  the only known route to something approximating a livable truth is through language.  “The beginning of wisdom, “ wrote Confucius“ is to call things by their proper name.”   More to the point is a statement sometimes attributed to Benjamin Franklin:  “Good government is when things are called by their right name.”  

Even as he ripped off Ronald Reagan’s all too seductive “Make America Great Again”  slogan ( and, of course, instantly franchised it ), and other than his love affair  with enormous tax breaks and obliteration of regulation for corporations,  Donald J. Trump was never a Republican, though he has wrapped himself in flags like no other American in history, sometimes publicly humping them on stage for good measure.  And yet, like Lincoln,  he is called a Republican.  Nor has he ever been a conservative,  as, with precious few exceptions,  the only thing he has ever tried to conserve is his own ever extending power. And yet, when convenient, he is considered by some to somehow be in the tradition  of Edmond Burke.    And while he has been often and rightfully called a facsist  and he has without question used the power of the state to try and institute  fascistic control over the press, higher education, cultural institutions  and anything else he or his minions can think of, I personally find it hard to believe the man could be  motivated by any particular doctrine ( and fascism, however repugnant  and repellent, is a doctrine, and one that is meant to exalt a people, not merely a person )  that is not an expression of his seemingly  boundless and rapidly metastasizing narcissism.  Trump is Other.  Trump is narcissism  incarnate.  

A very wise teacher once told me that gestures are what we do when when don’t know what else to do, and in that spirit I offer a gesture, knowing full well its limits.      

Following Confucius, if we at this moment can do little else, let us at the very least call things by their right name.  Let Trump  be known first and foremost as  a narcissist and let his   actions and policies be seen at their core as nothing more than expressions of his narcissistic hunger and need.  Let his party be known and understood as the Narcissist   Party — by definition a party of one — and his triumphs be understood as triumphs of this affliction.   Let us state such openly  and often, and in the hope, faint though it may be, that some glimpse of this horrible moment  will seep through. And let us acknowledge too, that even as he embodies the illness like no other and strides the globe like a lumbering  colossus,   Trump is not the cause of this madness but a symptom thereof, and the sickness  that animates him to remake the world in his image will remain, save an unseeable transformation,  after he is finally, gratefully,  gone.  

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On the Edge of Silence

January 9, 2022

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.”    

Albert Camus 

It was just around three o’clock on an overcast afternoon and I was taking my Sunday constitutional.  I had just crossed Houston Street when I heard the sirens coming from all directions.  A moment later at 1st Ave and 2nd   St   when the cop cars sped past me going the wrong way in a one-way street, I knew that whatever was happening was very serious, indeed.    I walked in the direction they drove to see the flashing lights of cop cars join the flashing lights of cop cars that had already arrived.  

 There too was as an engine of the FDNY.  The street was blocked.   The vehicles were now cramped together on the corner of A and 2nd St and they had all silenced their sirens.  In fact, despite the fact that a crowd of perhaps 30 people had gathered there, drawn by the flashing lights or curiosity or morbidity or whatever, the entire block, citizen and civil servant, seemed to be enveloped in a very un-New York City silence.  

All eyes were frozen on a young man standing on his fire escape five flights above the sidewalk.  

He was pale and wearing shorts and a tee shirt, on the tall side, perhaps 35 years old.  What became immediately and chillingly clear was that standing in front of all of us was a fellow soul who, for whatever reasons had been driven to the place where life itself had become unbearable – “not worth living,“ in the words of Camus — and a permanent solution to that intolerable   state seemed to be just a little movement away.   One move and then for the young man, a very different kind of silence.  

The window to the right of the man was open and one could hear, just barely, muffled voices emanating out of it.  Perhaps even a conversation was taking place but, despite the silence, it was impossible to make out a single word.  From time to time the man moved a step or so in either direction or stood tall or reached out to the grab the fire escape. Most of the time he was absolutely motionless.   Meanwhile the murmuring from the window continued as did the silence in the street below.

At one point the window below the murmuring suddenly opened and a cop filled the square.    For a moment he stuck out his head and studied the man on the platform above him, the man whose life it was his job to save.  Then, just as suddenly he retreated back into the darkness.  

Somewhere close to where I stood, just barely audible I became aware of a woman I could not see reciting the Hail Mary in Spanish.  She would finish it and then begin again, adding to the bizarre sense that something almost sacramental was taking place.      

A young African American who wandered into the scene asked me, almost in a whisper, “What’s going on?  Was the man threatening to jump? “

“Yes, “ I answered, adding for whatever reason, “ It’s a hard world. “ 

“Yes, “ she replied. “ It really is. “  

Then we watched in silence.  

Once or twice I exchanged glances with the man to my right but said nothing.  

The murmuring continued and the man seemed to respond. Slowly, very, very slowly and in fits and starts, he  crawled head first into his window.   I had no idea how much time passed.  Time seems bendy in such moments.  How long was I there?  Five minutes ?. Eight minutes at most ?  And yet somehow it seemed much, much longer.   

All I know was that, at last, he vanished into his window.  He was safe.  And, in some sense that I did not consider until later, so were we.  We, those who for whatever reason had gathered beneath him, were not to be witnesses to a primal struggle that ended in horror, not to witness a violent rejection of the sacrality of life, not to be told in the most graphic possible language that ‘Life was not worth living.”  

I turned to leave.   The young woman I spoke to touched my arm and looked into my face.   

“Be safe, “ she said.  Be safe.”      “You too, “ I said..    “Be safe.”  

The  man to my right also met my eyes.  He said nothing.  He was not, I understood,  the talking type.  He nodded his head and patted me on the back in  some sign of some kind of solidarity   and walked east into the  remains of his day.    

 And with these little gestures from two strangers I almost certainly will never see again, I was moved.  I was moved because we strangers had shared something;  something that could have gone terribly  wrong and yet, for reasons we will never know, any more than we will know the reasons that drove the man to the edge,   did not  and would not .

We shared a moment of curiosity or concern or empathy, or fear, or understanding or even recognition or some combination of all of these —  but it was something shared; something deeply human and   even primal was felt and shared by the three of us and I suspect, on one level or other, every other person there.   

As I walked on and reflected it occurred to me that we had inadvertently shared in something sacred: the sparing of a human life,  asking  Camus’s ultimate philosophical question and answering  “yes.” 

In a in a city ravaged by covid and savage inequality,  in a country where trust and empathy are considered by many to be the characteristics of suckers and losers, in  a world committing global suicide in plain sight and in slow motion, I’ll take it.   

With gratitude, I’ll take it.   

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Good Riddance to the Sickness that Is Trump

January 20, 2021

 

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Just about anyone who has lived a while on this earth  can remember a time in their life when reality seemed so overwhelming and  out of control, when events seemed to be  spinning at such a speed and attacking from so many angles  that it was all you could do to hold on to your sanity by filtering lots of it out or just not letting some of it in. 

At such times  things are pushed away to be dealt with at a later date when it is possible to take it in.  Then, after a while, you look back and wonder:  were things really that crazy ? Did that really happen?  How did I survive ? 

One such moment came to me today when, contemplating the end of Trump, I  suddenly remembered the infamous April 23, 2020 press “bleach” briefing — and also what came after it. To recap: After hearing of a study that found that disinfectants and bleach can kill Covid  when it lingered on certain kinds of surfaces, President Trump used his Trump brain to publicly  ponder the possibility of injecting  bleach and disinfectant into the human body to address Covid 19.  

What the President of the United States said was this: “And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning, because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that, so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me. “

Like much  of America, I watched helplessly as Trump once again spoke with both enormous confidence and astonishing ignorance about a subject of which he knew absolutely nothing.     By this point in his presidency, Trump episodes of talking out of his ass were legion: he had pontificated imbecilicly about Frederick Douglass, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, the Civil War, you name it.

But the bleach injection idiocy,  partly due to Sarah Cooper’s hilarious spoofs on the moment,partly due to increasing disgust at Trump’s frivolousness in the wake of a deadly pandemic and partly due to the fact that this time he was talking about something that could potentially kill someone   proved a much bigger and more embarrassing story than did Trump’s earlier idiocies. 

Trump understood this and, as is his want, he fought back with his usual weapons: lies and repetition and more lies and repetition. The talk about injecting the bleach, Trump insisted straight-faced  the next day, was sarcasm. He was asking reporters a question sarcastically, he said, “just to see their reaction.”  That the incident  was caught on video made no difference to Trump, who later repeated the line about sarcasm in one of his debates with Joe Biden.  

Like the rest of an increasingly exhausted and demoralized America, I didn’t give either statement another thought. 

Until today, that is.   Until today when I considered the fact that in the past four years  it had become perfectly normal that the President of the United States could do things like  

a) muse publicly about injecting disinfectant into the human body to cure a deadly virus ravishing the nation he was obstensibly governing 

b) lie about the musing and claim he was being sarcastic 

c) find sarcasm (even a lie about sarcasm) an appropriate mode of communication while addressing the nation about the deadly virus ravishing the nation.  

I had not really thought about all that – not the full and abject horror and danger such a reality  merits — until today when I began to realize what a ceaseless psychic assault the Trump presidency has been.   And I suppose I could begin to fully realize this  only because it finally ends tomorrow.  

You know you are living in an age of absolute spiritual and civic degeneracy when incidents that are absolutely crazy and  deeply repulsive  are barely noticed and scarcely remembered a few months  or even days later.  And for the past four years such things have happened on a daily basis.  

Such a world is exceedingly if insidiously perilous.

I have no illusions about Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.  I know who he is and what they are.  That said, I know that from tomorrow at noon  things will be better, if only because we will not have a sociopath in the White House nor a man who believes that every situation and relationship at every moment should be viewed as a transaction.   Because of those facts alone, four years from now, on the day before the next inauguration, I do not expect to be asking myself in horror: were things really that crazy ?  Did that really happen ?  How did we survive ?  

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An Open Letter to Trump’s Betrayed “Patriots” 

January 11, 2021

This is an open letter to any and all of the “Patriots” who attended President Trump’s “Save America March” on Jan 6., especially those who smashed down doors and windows and rampaged through the Capitol believing you could overturn the results of the election and hand Trump the presidency. It is even more so addressed to the (as yet) relatively few whose involvement in the frenzied attack has seen them lose their jobs, be arrested for federal crimes or remain on the run from the FBI.   

My questions are simple and are asked in complete sincerity.  How does it feel to be completely and utterly betrayed by the object of your affection and devotion?  How does it feel to have sacrificed your livelihood and freedom for a person who could not possibly care less about you and who turned on you with no more thought than to swatting a fly?  

I ask specifically about the turn of events that took place between January 6 and January 7, 2021.   To wit: Encouraged by President Trump and others, you journeyed to D.C. from all over the country and on Wednesday morning gathered with thousands of other like minded souls  at the Ellipse.  There you heard a series of speakers repeat to you an enormous older lie within a preposterous newer lie:  the election was stolen but Vice President Mike Pence had the power to overturn the results and restore Trump’s rightful  second term if only he mustered the courage to do so.   It was your job to encourage Pence  to do so.   Alternately, if Pence proved a coward…   

Speaker after speaker put forth one variation after another of this demonstrable nonsense until at last the Great Leader ( who is somehow also the Great Victim) President Trump himself arrived and spoke for two hours, bellowing on about the same.   At one point he said,  “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard, ” a sentence and sentiment that was made absurd by the belligerent and crazed  words that followed, including, of course, a  multitude  of lies a sample of which follows:    

“When you catch somebody in a fraud, you are allowed to go by very different rules. So I hope Mike has the courage to do what he has to do, and I hope he doesn’t listen to the RINOs and the stupid people that he’s listening to.”

“I hope Mike is going to do the right thing. I hope so. I hope so, because if Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. … 

“We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women, and we’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them, because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”

“We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that is what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal. …

“You will have an illegitimate president. That is what you will have, and we can’t let that happen. These are the facts that you won’t hear from the fake news media. It’s all part of the suppression effort. They don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to talk about it. …

“We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”  

 “Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you.…”

“And I’ll be there with you.”  

Of course, Trump had no intention of joining his rabble army on their March on the Capitol  and immediately slipped into his armored limousine to watch the fun and games on TV from the safety of the White House. 

 For me, out of all of the lies Trump told you that day, that one is the worst as he pretended to solidarity and to place  himself at the same risk he was demanding from you.    

At any rate,  within an hour many of you were smashing your way into the preposterously ill guarded Capitol Building,  soon to be roaming the halls, some of you taking selfies like drunk teenage tourists, or wrecking offices or defecating in the hallways, while others engaged in far more sinister endeavors including searching for Mike Pence in order to hang him.    Meanwhile, the man you did all this for watched you on TV, lamenting to his aides about how “low class” you looked while doing absolutely nothing to stop or even address your rampage for over two hours, as images of the chaos shocked and horrified the entire world.  

As you rioted , certification of the Electoral College was on hold – a fact that I am certain brought joy and hope to the heart of your leader – because the legislative body of the United States had been driven from our Capitol.  

Finally, only after President-Elect Joe Biden appeared on national television and demanded President Trump order you out of the building did the President release a video that must rank as one of the most insane statements ever made by an American President.  Largely ignoring the absolute chaos in the Capitol, even in the midst of a world-shaking event, Trump’s statement is made up exclusively of lies about the election, or commiserations of your “hurt” and “’pain” coupled with entreaties to “go home in peace” as you continue to rampage with absolute impunity.  As if talking to children the President of the United States adds that he “loves you” and informs you that you are “very special.”   

Twenty four  hours later Trump speaks to you again and — poof! — there is no talk of  “very different rules”,  “of courage”, “ of showing strength,” and “having to be strong”, “of taking back our country,” of “never  giving up or conceding”; of “stopping the steal,” “of not taking it anymore”, of “fighting like hell or not having a country anymore” , of “your pain” and “hurt “of being “special”  or of his “love.”   

In the place of love and your special place in American history, instead, your leader says this: “Like all Americans, I am outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem.  America is and must always be a nation of law and order. The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy. To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay.”

Overnight, without warning,  the same man who urged you to travel to Washington to save democracy was now unambiguously declaring to all the world that you have defiled democracy, that you do not represent this country and that you, not he, will pay for the terrifying, criminal spectacle he orchestrated  for his sole benefit.  

This from the man who the day before proclaimed “I’ll be with you.”  

Hearing these words last  Thursday,   even after four years of listening to this person, I will confess to being stunned by the absolute contempt showered upon you by one to whom you, in turn,  had showered with loyalty. Stunned, that is,     by the enormity of his betrayal.  

In my experience, few if any wounds are as profound, as confusing and as crushing as that of betrayal. Thankfully, I have not known betrayal often, but so painful are its memories, I hope to God to never know it again.  

I wonder if you know it now, now that you have been identified and fired from your job, or fearful of being identified  and fired from your job; or thinking over last week’s adventure from a jail cell; or awaiting a knock on the your door. I wonder  if you recognize it for what it is ?  If you realize that you are hardly even a human being to this man ?  That you are no more than a thing to be used and discarded as you have been so used and discarded? 

I understand the futility of these questions I ask yet I am compelled to ask them.  I also understand that within the agonizing realization of betrayal is the emancipating possibility of clarity.

Like it or not, you are my fellow countryman and I am yours.   I need to understand you as much as humanly possible.     More importantly, you need to understand you. We need to understand each other.    If we cannot,  we are bound, in time, to rip each other’s throat’s out.  

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My First and Last Visit to Hudson Yards

April 7, 2019

Figuring I did not need to invite any more darkness and vulgarity into my head than that provided on a daily basis from Trump’s White House, and after reading horrific account after horrific account following its opening, I had avoided an actual visit to the thing called Hudson Yards, which cost a zillion dollars to make even as it received lots of those zillions in massive tax breaks.

Today, fortified perhaps by the lovely weather, my curiosity got the best of me, and so I set out on my trusty Trek to take it in and see for myself what all the hoopla was all about.
After all, I reckoned, how often does a city like New York suddenly sprout nothing short of a “new neighborhood “ out of a bunch of old railroad tracks?

From a distance, approaching from the south, there is a moment or two when the Hudson Yards is reminiscent of a scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy and Toto and company glimpse the Emerald City looming far past the poppy fields. Indeed, in the High Line, the Hudson Yards even has its own version of the Yellow Brick Road, where I saw thousands of pilgrims and leads straight into the place.

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I arrived and looked around and looked around some more and still have no idea what all the hoopla is about. There are a number of exceedingly tall, exceedingly scary looking buildings where people are meant to live or work in or do something in and which made me feel paramecium -like when I looked up at them.

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There was a very high-end shopping mall catering to people with way too much money.
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There were insane and deeply cynical signs all over the place exhorting people to “Climb to new heights” and “Work where it matters” and “Discover your new home, “ as if Hudson Yards were engaged in a public self help project or, ya know, affordable to anyone.

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My favorite sign read, “Welcome to your new neighborhood,” as if this terrifying collection of towers could ever properly be referred to as a neighborhood.

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There was something called The Shed, which is meant to be an art space and where videos blare at you concerning the wonders of The Shed. From a distance, I thought that part of The Shed was covered by an enormous plastic sheet, but no. The thing that looks like an enormous plastic sheet is part of The Shed. Permanently.

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Finally, in what seems to be the center of the “Yards” stood the thing called The Vessel, where people were invited to climb up many flights of stairs and take “selfies,” peering out over the high-end mall or The Shed or, for the more adventurous, in the direction of the Westside Highway.

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The Vessel

And I’m here to tell ya, many, many people did.

I tried to find beauty and found none. I then settled for finding something remotely interesting and found none of that either. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. What I found is a place reeking of a certain moneyed banality. And all I knew was I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there. The idea that any sane, more or less educated human being would want to hang out in Hudson Yards, never mind live there, is inconceivable to me. But then again, the fact that millions of Americans believe that Donald Trump was chosen by God to be president is inconceivable to me.

And here we are.

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I am happy to be away from the thing called Hudson Yards and I cannot imagine ever returning there. Why would I? As Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, “There is no there there.”
What is there is an absolute contempt for all that is human, scaled, and empathetic that no amount of public relations can disguise.
Hudson Yards may well be the most cynical development in the history of New York City. It is certainly the most cynical location I have ever visited.

Give me my apartment with a bathtub in the kitchen, which, though cramped, feels like a home. Give me my neighborhood, which, even when it drives me mad, is, in actual fact, a neighborhood.

Addendum: Apparently massive tax breaks were not enough for the makers of New York’s newest “neighborhood:” they had to rob from funding meant for the most struggling communities. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2019/04/hudson-yards-financing-eb5-investor-visa-program-immigration/586897/

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