Donald Trump is an irrepressible buffoon. This is why even frenemies like Russian President Vladimir Putin – who see him as a “useful idiot” – must continually laugh at him behind his back.
But nothing betrays what little respect Trump commands on the world stage quite like his allies doing the same.
Donald Trump departed London on Wednesday after a dramatic two days at the NATO summit where he bickered with Emmanuel Macron, had to meet behind-closed-doors with host leader Boris Johnson, and was mocked by Justin Trudeau – resulting in the president calling him ‘two-faced’ and furiously canceling his final scheduled press conference.
Trump reacted in a snit of anger after Johnson, Macron and Trudeau were caught on a hot mic mocking him during a leaders’ reception at Buckingham Palace Tuesday night hosted by the Queen.
(The Daily Mail, December 4, 2019)
No doubt you can imagine the ridicule Trump would be tweeting if similar mocking had forced President Obama to abandon his NATO agenda to fly home with his tail between his legs.
To be fair, though, this just reflects that Trump’s boorish buffoonery has become so odious, even putative allies now treat him like a skunk at their annual gatherings. I
What’s more, this was hardly the first time world leaders have mocked Trump behind his back. I commented on this unprecedented dissing of a US president in “G20: Trump Foolish, Friendless, and Feckless (and Those Friggin’ Trump Kids!),” July 12, 2017; Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman were caught on tape at the 2018 G20 summit high-fiving at Trump’s expense (mercifully there was no audio); and who can forget this:
President Trump has long argued that the United States has been taken advantage of by other nations — a ‘laughing stock to the entire World,’ he said on Twitter in 2014 — and his political rise was based on the premise that he had the strength and resolve to change that.
But at the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, Trump got a comeuppance on the world’s biggest stage. … The embarrassing exchange came when Trump boasted that his administration had accomplished more over two years than ‘almost any administration’ in American history, eliciting audible guffaws in the cavernous chamber hall.
(The Washington Post, September 25, 2018)
Alas, Trump suffers a congenital compulsion to project, which I diagnosed several years ago as follows:
The psychopathology afoot here is called projection. It is defined by people attributing to others traits, faults, and blame that inhere in themselves. And it explains almost every insult Trump has hurled at his opponents throughout this presidential campaign.
So when you hear him calling other people crooked, insecure, weak, beholden to special interests, liars, etc., be mindful that he’s just revealing self-conscious truths about himself, dimwittedly.
(“Forget the Clinton Foundation. Shut Down the Trump Organization!” The iPINIONS Journal, August 26, 2016)
But I’m no doctor; nor do I care to play one here. That’s why I welcomed the second opinion of no less an expert than a Harvard psychiatrist offered on Trump’s “primitive” habit of projecting as I diagnosed.
Donald Trump’s description of Chair of the House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff as a ‘deranged human being is simply the president projecting onto others what is true about himself,’ a prominent psychiatrist has said.
On the sidelines of the NATO summit in the U.K., Trump said on Tuesday that Schiff’s handling of the impeachment process showed that he ‘grew up with a complex for lots of reasons that are obvious,’ adding, ‘I think he’s a very sick man, and he lies.’
The former assistant clinical professor of Harvard Medical School, Lance Dodes, who first sounded the alarm [about] the president’s mental state two years ago, said Trump could just as easily have been talking about himself.
(Newsweek, December 4, 2019)
In other words, Trump harbors an inferiority complex, which is compounded by an obvious case of imposter syndrome. He manifests a preternatural need to embellish every aspect of his life, which stems from growing up in Queens (a.k.a. the other side of the tracks).
This is why he’s always projecting his insecurities and feelings of inferiority onto others. And, unsurprisingly, he often targets those in Manhattan and beyond – who are richer, smarter, braver, and better (in every way) than he knows he will ever be.
Trump knows that hucksterism and bravado define the Trump Organization. This reinforces his insecurity and feeling of inferiority and fuels his abiding fear that those traits could make him a laughing stock to the entire world. And, because he treats the country as just another acquisition of his organization, he is now living his worst fears: being exposed not only as a laughing stock but on a stage for the entire world to see to boot.
Not to mention the financial consequences he’s suffering as his reputation as an international laughing stock grows …
That said, it’s axiomatic that men exposed in this humiliating fashion lash out in a vain attempt to show their manhood (to themselves and everyone else). Which cannot bode well if that man is as powerful, thin-skinned, and vindictive as this president of the United States.
O Canada.
Related commentaries:
G20 summit…
projection…
Trump organization…