In this article, I describe how I came to look at Trump differently. Not that my opposition to him has diminished one bit. But my sense of him as a person has shifted.
Something happened to me in the process of putting together a meme about Trump last week. It led to look at him in a way that I had not before.
How it started
It started with me being very upset about the war, on so many levels. At the very end of the day on which he was about to annihilate a civilization, Trump decided that he had already won. He literally said that he had achieved “regime change” and that Iran’s new leadership was “reasonable.”
After wasting tens of billions and unleashing untold misery on the world, he turned on a dime and went into full gaslighting mode.
I wanted to find a way to channel my outrage. Putting something in the form of a meme is a useful exercise because it forces you to simplify an idea to its essence. The notion I wanted to express was that, for all its scariness, Trump’s bluster was mostly pathetic. It reminded me of when the Wizard of Oz was revealed to be a little man behind the big shadow.
I came up with the notion a photo where he looks scary, and juxtaposing it with the text: “Scary does not mean powerful.” I searched for photographs that would show an angry, snarling Trump. I chose one and worked with it to create the meme. Then I looked at the result. I noticed that, in the process of paying attention to the design, something had shifted in the way I had been looking at Trump’s picture.
We generally don’t pay attention
We live in a world so saturated with images that we don’t actually look at them very much. We glance at them briefly and take for granted that the first meaning to emerge from that glance is what the photo means. In other words, we treat images as symbols, shortcuts for expressing simple meanings, just as words do.
This is how language works. We need symbols to communicate some version of what we mean that is good enough to allow for connection. But something happens when that default mode of taking images or words at face value is interrupted. This is what happens when we look at a painting or photograph in a museum. Or when we listen to a piece of music instead of hearing it as background noise. Or when we listen to poetry.
Something similar happens in mindful conversation. We don’t rush to react to what another person said; we take a moment to absorb it and notice how it resonates with us. We can then respond instead of merely reacting.
At such moments, we move beyond the immediate, stereotypical meaning to see something else: the complexity that was hiding in plain sight.
Looking in a different way
And so, as I looked at my meme, something troubled me about the picture of Trump I had used. Yes, it was a picture of an angry man, a man closed off to anything but his own grievances. But now it also evoked, for me, someone on the edge of sadness, desperately trying to seal off any access to the incipient tears and the fears that lie underneath.
In other words: a human being dealing with human vulnerability the only way that this particular human being knows how to deal with vulnerability, which is to dissociate from it.
In that moment, I felt the presence of Fred Trump, the mean man who turned his olderst son into a desperate alcoholic and shaped his second son into a hungry ghost on an endless bender for power and adulation. Of course, before Fred Trump, there was Grandpa Trump who had done a number on Fred. And, before that, a whole chain of cause and effect leading to this moment.
Vulnerability
Vulnerability is part of the human condition. I think of it as one of the faces of dukkha.
I can understand how someone who has lived Trump’s life would find it even harder than most to accept vulnerability, as it would trigger a painful reminder of his essential weakness.
Having compassion for Trump’s suffering does not in any way mean condoning his behavior or even accepting it. I feel just as committed as before to being part of the resistance to the Mad King.
If anything, compassion may strengthen that resolve, because now there is an added dimension to it.
Seeing the current insanity as related to dukkha and vulnerability and putting it within context of a chain of cause and effect frees the issue from a Manichean frame. We are not talking about Good vs Evil. Psychopaths and sociopaths are not the evil spawn of some immaculate conception. They are part of the vast process of the world being the world.
Doing what we can to change the world
Of course, we need to oppose them. We also need to do our best to change the ecosystem to mitigate their effect. I do not believe that we can eradicate dukkha from the world. But, if somebody helps a Grandpa Trump be a little more grounded, this will help his son Fred to be a little less mean, and in turn will help his son Donald be a little happier… and the world a lot happier.