A CLINICALCASE

We used to call it a "gestalt," meaning a worldview, and I had meant to explore how it develops and has consequences through time from conception when DNA guides the creation of a certain body that works a certain way to the end, hopefully decades away after many forces and deficits have created and been created by whatever happened, where it was, and how it turned out.  I hadn't thought so much about a specific example, except myself since I'm so handy.  But then I found this case study of the President, a compelling and highly consequential example:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/10/george-conway-trump-unfit-office/599128/

(Because this was written by George Conway III, married to Kellyanne who belligerently defends Trump, that needs to be noted.  Kellyanne's grandfather is said to have been a mafia enforcer.  No one can account for George.)

By now a lot of people have addressed Trump, but this is remarkably complete in terms of psychology and what is now called "character syndromes", patterns of malfunction that are identified everywhere in all kinds of people, even in terms of a whole culture -- most notably narcissism and sociopathy.  Both propel plot lines on TV all the time, both in the villains and the heroes.  Plainly they feature large in modern life.  They are much more real than the divided fantasies of political parties.

In this essay there's not much emphasis on madness, organic malfunction of thought that is obviously departed from reality.  Lately there has been more talk about senile dementia, most often in terms of families. Trump's father died of this inheritable condition. Trump has one of the most scrutinized and most controlled roles in the world so we know a lot about what it's like and where it came from, but almost nothing about what to do except to confine him.  None of the eloquent narratives suggest other solutions.  Some malevolent people see it as an opportunity or their own schemes.

Nothing physical compels Trump to violate all the rules, except his own inability to keep from falling down.  He never learned any rules in the first place.  The social fantasy of privileges from the office he holds is a function developed a couple of centuries ago by men acting on convictions about reality that they were willing to argue about.  Otherwise, husky men would seize Trump and carry him away.  The founders stayed within the context of people like themselves, though they knew very well what a mad king like George III could do before he was deposed.  He created a new country!  If women, blacks or indigenous persons had been included in the discussion, the checks and balances that worked among sane and "rule of law" men might have been challenged.  We can only hope it's not too late.  

I'm not qualified to suggest new safeguards, but what is the qualification anyway?  I can certainly diagnose.  First, we are clearly in the middle of a mega-meta cultural transition that has destabilized the old institutions but not yet created new functional ways of keeping order.  Trump and Pence can imitate religion as it was in the 19th century without being challenged.  The churches, the universities, the law, medicine, families, were all more or less based on the same assumptions about God and people that have since been discredited among educated people.  Even evolution is deeply challenged by the science that defined it.  The industrial revolution has turned out to be a "blowout" that may kill us.  And so on.  We are in danger, we are divided, we are moving in great numbers from one context to another, and we don't really know what to do except cling to what used to work.

Trump knows nothing of this.  He knows neither history nor geography, couldn't locate where he is going on a map since all he sees is the inside of his jet.  All his life he had inhabited a mafia-structured cocoon based on the exploitation of the cement construction industry.  He is self-rotting, self-infected, a product of resource exploitation.  He has only one method and it doesn't work anymore. He hasn't even got a good tailor.

Trump excuses himself with a vision of the world he gets from WWII screen writers inventing patriotic triumphs in order to motivate a country at war with the values that Trump cherishes most:  power, brutality, a version of wealth that is cheesy and in the end amounts to secret bookkeeping.  His father was German;  his mother was a skivvy, just Scots enough to provide a cover story taken from the romance of that resistant bit of Britain.  (I use it myself.)  When he was a young man, he was healthy and vigorous enough to be seen as handsome and attractive, unlike his children who are already ridiculous.  He was always pushy, arrogant and smutty in what he thought was an amusing way.  His women had to be altered with bleach and implants so big that clothes don't quite fit, eyes can't open all the way.

Trump is Darth Vader but his Star Wars view of the world is on the wrong side of the story.  To get to the right side, one must take an Eastern view, Buddhist like Yoda.  What would Yoda advise us now?

There's no way except to just get on with it.  Preserve as much of the honorable Rule of Law as possible, get Trump into a gilded hospital room and regulate his drugs, then wait to see who else collapses because they are connected.  The oil-and-gas industry is doomed, climate change is already redefining geography, and the lingering Nazi and Confederate delusions need to be finished off.  The internet is changing daily, both technically and through the same kind of invented rules that were never designed for this world.  Corporations need to be ended, anachronisms of empire.  They are NOT people.

I'd rewrite the second amendment, require the election of two presidents (one for managing money and one for policy, further diluting the separation of powers where money decisions are controlled by the legislature), and eliminate the electoral college, but make registration to vote automatic at age 18.  I'd divide the country into regional eco-systems and add a self-managing infrastructure system in each that bundled the states around major cities until they became vestigial.  And so on.  Lots of ideas out there.  Trump, crazy as he is, only gets in the way.  He's not a demon -- just a dime store tin duck fit for a popgun shooting gallery.  Elections are moot at this point.  He's barely walking and talking.