MAGA's psychotic love of hateful domination

"The man is stark raving mad."

Such was a foreign diplomat's informal yet authoritative assessment of Donald Trump following his demolition-ball diatribe aimed with maximum malevolence at members of the United Nations General Assembly yesterday.

"[He] spoke almost four times longer than his allotted 15 minutes," observed Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor, "meandering ... from gripes about a faulty teleprompter to sweeping condemnations of internationalism, climate action and immigration" and "browbeating fellow world leaders."

Their "reaction," noted the columnist, "was largely one of stunned silence." But what about the reaction outside the assembly hall? asked the tweeting diplomat. "Do Americans not see how embarrassing this is?"

Evidently, no. Not, anyway, an embarrassingly large number of them. As Tharoor's fellow Post-ers Michael Birnbaum, John Hudson and Adam Taylor (who somehow have kept their jobs) further observed:

In Trump’s first term, leaders who opposed his policy stances held out hope that his election was an aberration and that the United States would soon return to its more familiar internationalist role. Now they recognize that Trump is speaking on behalf of a strong constituency in his country — and that the changes he is bringing to the international system could outlast his presidency [survive his regime].

His constituency is indeed strong — enduringly strong — and so pretty much okay with sharing his stark raving madness. That too is an informal yet authoritative assessment of Trump supporters.

Let us review along with the Brookings Institution's Jonathan Rauch. We're talking about a

politician who admires foreign dictators, encourages an insurrection, claims unlimited powers, compares his opponents to vermin, treats the state as his personal property, lies, bullies [and] threatens. [Nonetheless,] in 2024, knowing full well what it was doing, and presented in the Republican primary and the general election with many alternatives who did not embrace semi-fascism, the American electorate chose Donald J. Trump.

If that's not madness — appallingly stark, frequently raving — then authentic electoral insanity is yet to be defined in psephologists' Diagnostic Manual of Voter Disorders. If so, the vernacular of more perspicacious laymen does the diagnostic lifting for the specialists: "These people are fucking crazy."

More to the point, these people's austere derangement lies in, and is motivated by, "anger, fear, humiliation, and the drive for domination," as delineated by Rauch's Brookings colleague William Galston in his book subtitled Dark Passions.

Those four symptoms of Trump's "strong constituency" — interchangeable with the mass movements analyzed three-quarters of a century ago by Eric Hoffer in True Believers — account for the Burkean conservative in me. For as Galston goes on to note, "Too often, liberal optimists are blindsided by ambitious leaders’ ability to mobilize" the public's latent attributes. His prescription: "[Optimists] must set aside their illusions about human nature and history."

I would amend Galston's analysis to this extent: In politics, Symptom 4, "the drive for domination," is less a passion than a psychosis — a grave dissociative disease that cripples the imperative of compromise, which is what the business of politics is all about. And no one, not even Trump, exemplifies disabling domination more than the nakedly psychotic Steven Miller.

We stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You [our enemies] have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred.... We will defeat the forces of darkness and evil.

Thus ranted Miller, Trump's alter id, at Charlie Kirk's memorial service. Touching.

While again ranting on Fox News, Miller kindly identified the enemy as "the Democrat Party," which "is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization." Those supporting it, then, and the many funding it, would be the 75 million Americans who in November voted for Kamala Harris. And as Trump said at Kirk's memorial, "I hate my opponent" — make that plural, per Miller — "and I don’t want the best for them.”

About that, he said "I'm sorry" to Kirk's widow. But there was no sorrow in Trump. Only gleeful seething, monumental ignorance and, above all, the drive to dominate and destroy — to dismantle the entire, preexisting American political system which insists, in his diseased mind, on intolerable compromise.

"The man is stark raving mad." As are all who think his "Trump First" and "Only Trump" domination agenda is acceptable.

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