Perhaps even his own destruction.
In some ways, we all do. The ancient Greeks were on to something when they intuited that one’s greatest strengths also can be one’s greatest weaknesses.
In large personalities such as Trump’s, that schism is even more exaggerated.
All his life, Trump has existed immune from consequence. No matter how badly he failed or how much trouble he got into, his wealth, his family connections, his growing celebrity and his undeniable personal charisma allowed him to evade responsibility for anything bad he’d done or said.
This encouraged a bravado on his part that his fans and followers found inspiring and endearing—and others found first irritating then maddening.
He believed he could brazen or buffalo his way through anything with blustering and bullying. He believed this because no one stopped him or called him on it.
No one—not his family, his friends, his business associates, other politicians, his millions of supporters, or even the law itself—held him accountable.
The lesson he learned was that, whenever a mess of his own making blocked his path, the solution to the problem was to get mean and then meaner.
And the obstacle always disappeared.
But there’s a danger in thinking that the rules of existence that govern every other human being just don’t apply to you.
Trump has been sustained through episodes of bad behavior and outright criminality by the devotion of his political base, the millions of Americans who have placed their faith with him and made him the dominant historical figure.
They stayed with him even when he elevated his interests above theirs—giving himself and other billionaires massive tax cuts rather than building the wall his supporters wanted or rebuilding the nation’s crumbling infrastructure. They hung in there even when he fed them one fib after another, stacking lie upon lie as if he were building a five-story structure of deceit. They clung to him even when his mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic meant Americans died at five times the rate of people in other industrialized nations and thousands upon thousands of grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles died before their time.
That’s because he never turned on them.
He never treated them the way he treated everyone who disagreed with him or, God forbid, tried to hold him morally responsible for something awful he’d done.
Until now.
That’s the significance of the tawdry Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
I can’t say with certainty that Epstein, a sexual predator of children, killed himself or was murdered. I also don’t know if he or anyone else kept a list of his clients or friends who were fellow degenerates.
But I do understand why Trump’s clumsy attempts at escaping scrutiny for his relationship have—finally—driven a wedge between him and his base.
The world in which Epstein seems almost designed to offend the moral sensibilities of middle America. Epstein’s world was one in which privilege allowed a person to dispense with consideration for anyone else’s humanity and violate innocence with impunity.
Trump’s friendship with this despicable man—and the president’s recorded comments saying he knew something about Epstein’s vile proclivities while he was chumming around with him—have created a problem for him with his base.
And he’s begun to react the way he does whenever he has a problem.
He snarls. He belittles. He threatens.
Mostly, he rages.
In short, he’s showing to his base the face he’s always shown the rest of us when we question or disagree with him.
He doesn’t grasp—or doesn’t want to grasp—that even people who support him want to know how Epstein could molest and abuse children for so long while in the company of and under the eye of people who should have known better.
Such as Donald Trump.
Because Trump always has relied on brazening his way through any difficulty, he’s ill-equipped to meet and deal with this challenge.
He helped create a political universe in which lies are treated with the same veneration as the truth and where a lack of proof is just seen as evidence of an even deeper and more all-encompassing conspiracy.
His denials, when they’re grounded in fact, bounce off the force field of unreality and irresponsibility that’s saved and sustained him through his life.
Once it protected him.
Now, though, it doesn’t.
