A leader – I would like to say “by definition” – is one who cares about other people. There are plenty of self-styled leaders out there who don’t really care about others, or even much care for them. They are into leadership for the recognition, power, and influence, and if they have to interact with others, it’s only with the objective of promoting themselves, not serving others or a Greater Good.
President Trump is our best example of a so-called leader who doesn’t really care about people. For Trump, they are either behind him or in his way.
Trump’s election in 2016 was the outcome of at least three factors: an impatience for change among the American people, their idolatrous fascination with celebrity and wealth, and a deep childish insecurity that Trump’s campaign had successfully exploited in his run-up to November.
I explored that last one in my post A Nation of Children. There I brought out of the corner and into the light a part of our personality called the Inner Child. This is an emotional complex of feelings, attachments, magical thinking, and adaptive strategies which comes into formation during those early years of childhood. Back then we were underlings inside a theistic universe ruled by taller powers who sometimes weren’t all that provident. Their own insecurities – amplified by the stress of being parents and having less-than-perfect role models in their taller powers farther up the ancestral line – made it necessary for us to find ways of getting our needs met in spite of them.
Our Inner Child – really, no matter how happy and well-adjusted we happen to be now – operates by a different set of rules from the one that guides and informs our Higher Self (aka the rational adult our families and communities need us to be).
True enough, there’s all that innocence, curiosity, playfulness, and spontaneous trust that we praise as childlike; let’s call that the “bright side” of our Inner Child. On the “dark side,” however, are other characteristics: shame, self-doubt, selfishness, and calculated distrust that are rightly called childish. It was our dark side that Trump exploited for his election, and his strategy has continued, not only unabated but exacerbated, in the more than three-and-a-half years since.
The dark side of our Inner Child needs to divide an often confusing and unpredictable reality into the sharp dualities of good and bad, right and wrong, “for me” and “against me,” insiders and everybody else. This helped us negotiate an early home environment of abuse, disruption, neglect, and mixed messages. Even if it wasn’t all that bad for us growing up, there’s still a good measure of insecurity that we picked up on our adventure of separating into the self-conscious individual we are today.
When we feel stressed, pushed into a corner or put on the spot before we’re ready, our security strategies get activated and can easily force offline our adult capacities for contextual reasoning, fair consideration, critical thinking, problem solving, and self-control.
In order to get his way, Trump has poked, pushed, threatened, blamed, humiliated, intimidated and antagonized – and all with remarkable success. He has entranced the Republican party, rolled back protective regulations, tipped the table of wealth in his favor, repealed basic civil and human rights, demonized liberals and Democrats, alienated ethnic and gender minorities, circumvented essential protocols and safeguards of democracy, undermined the credentials of a moral society, incited violence between Americans, and invited interference by foreign countries in our national elections.
Now, we want to say that he did all these things without our consent. But we put him in office, didn’t we? Well, maybe not a popular majority of us, but enough of us did. And of those who did vote for Trump the first time around, I’m arguing that it was our Inner Child and not our Higher Self that pulled the lever that day.
We (those who voted for him) allowed him to weaken our faith in ourselves and each other and to put our hopes on him instead, that he would be the one to carry us through. He persuaded us to first question and then withdraw our compassion for one another. And then he played on our resultant self-isolation by convincing us that we were small and impotent – yet deserving and better than everyone else. The part of us that felt this way looked on Trump as the one we had been waiting for all along, and we eagerly gave him the keys to our destiny.
So we should all be able to agree that Donald Trump doesn’t care about other people, unless they are useful to him in getting what he wants. He doesn’t care about other people because he doesn’t understand them. He can’t identify with their human experience because he’s not in touch with his own.
A clear and direct line of awareness has roots in one’s empathic (introverted) familiarity with experiences of pain, hunger, separation and loss, which in turn enables a sympathetic (extroverted) understanding of those same feelings in others.
This is the psychological basis of compassion, where one is able to identify with another and is moved by goodwill to bring comfort, encouragement, and aid to the other in need. Trump’s lack of empathy and self-understanding is what’s behind his inability to have compassion for and truly understand other people.
I am arguing that Donald Trump needs our compassion – have you ever felt unloved and misunderstood? – but he doesn’t deserve our vote this coming November. I’m pretty sure that America and the world would not survive another term with him in office. Maybe the Republican party can promote a real leader in his place, who knows?
Either way, when the day comes, let’s show up to vote with our Higher Self. Can we promise that to each other?
Tracts of Revolution 