Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President by Justin A. Frank

Author:Justin A. Frank [Frank, Justin A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: politics, psychology
ISBN: 9780735220331
Google: 07lMDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2018-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF DESTRUCTIVENESS

I can go back into my office and pick up the telephone and in 25 minutes 70 million people will be dead.

~President Richard M. Nixon

The habituating narcotic of hate destroys all the good things that, together, we stand for.

~former Speaker of the House Jim Wright (D—TX)

Donald Trump came to the presidency as a builder, a real estate mogul who constructed and put his name on hotels, casinos, luxury high-rise residential towers, and resorts around the world. He built an empire surpassing his father’s; instead of putting the family name on a middle-class village in Brooklyn, he attached it to a high-end tower in Manhattan. Trump later expanded his success as a builder into a multipurpose brand, plastering his name on a wide variety of commercial products and enterprises, and transforming his persona into a character presented as “Billionaire Donald Trump” on the hit television series The Apprentice. Later, as his 2016 campaign-season victories mounted and his unlikely political successes grew steadily in number, he positioned himself as the builder of a movement, who claimed he could do with human resources what he had prided himself on achieving with construction materials.

Trump came to the presidency as a destroyer as well. He vanquished his GOP rivals for the nomination with startling efficiency. He exploded protocol, defied norms, disregarded convention, broke rules and perhaps laws, and encouraged similar behavior among the men and women who made up the movement he built. He also left a trail of destruction along the path that led him to politics—bankruptcies, divorces, broken deals, abandoned and empty buildings, and personal fortunes lost by individuals who put their trust and faith in his word, his brand, and the fantasies he sold to the gamblers whose losses funded his casinos. As president, he has dismantled federal agencies and rolled back consumer protections. He has hacked away at the Environmental Protection Agency, taken back public lands to facilitate commercial development, and abolished net neutrality.

All of us are driven by conflicting urges to build and to destroy. Both are powerful inborn drives, competing for dominance in the personality for the entirety of our lives. Freud observed both of them as operative in the determinative drives that he labeled the life instinct and the death instinct. As noted earlier, Melanie Klein saw both drives as present and influential beginning in the earliest stages of infancy. The infant’s earliest attempts to manage his destructive drives are central to Klein’s concept of the formation of the personality, which she traces back to the baby’s limited initial experience and understanding of the world in general and his mother or other essential caregiver in particular. The baby’s unconscious management of his destructive impulses, in Klein’s formulation, can shape his personality for life, and is sensitive to his particular dynamics with his mother. Trump’s enormous capacity for destruction, at times more prevalent than his more traditionally celebrated ability to build and construct, is seen in sharper relief when viewed as the adult expression of the lifelong failure to manage his unconscious destructive impulse to destroy.

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