I am determined to make this the last post I do with Trump’s name in its contents. For this post, I will admit where his actions were helpful and also give some excuses for his despicable actions. Yes, Trump did many ugly things while he occupied the Oval Office, but some of them were actually helpful. I’ll get into those in a few paragraphs.

It’s hard to rate them but maybe the most damaging was saying the outrageous, despicable, hateful things so frequently he gave like-minded people license to do the same. I realize that these people have always been in the cloaked edges of society. But by his actions he became the flag that they could rally around and proudly wave.

Here is a little snippet from one of my regular reads that speaks my mind on this topic;

You’ve made bigotry, misogyny, and racism socially acceptable again and that has been a kind of twisted gift because it’s allowed me to really see people; not as they pretend to be on the surface—but in the very depths of their wounded, weaponized hearts.

For years your supporters would tell me that they loved you because you “spoke your mind”. That was never the real story. The truth is, they loved you because you’ve spoken their minds.

You normalized their contempt for humanity.

John Pavlovitz – Things That Need To Be Said

I must thank Trump for now making it much easier to identify those politicians, friends, strangers, and yes, even clergy who now regularly display their intolerant and malicious behavior on their personal social media sites. Ironically, those very proclamations after the insurrection of January 6 will end up being the primary fodder that gets some of them jail time for their insidious actions that day.

I think you may also have been helpful to give us a text-book example of how not to elect our government officials. Just because a con-man says words that you might sympathize with doesn’t mean that they will do things that need to be done. Every fifty years or so we seem to have to learn these things all over again. Trump will be that example until 2060 or so I imagine.

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In some ways I suppose I should be sympathetic to Trump. After all, he was spurned and raised by a person much like he ended up mirroring. He was given enormous wealth and no morality to do worthy things with it. This just shows us that parenting, even the wealthy version of it, is incredibly important to building character. It’s too bad we can’t require parents to have a license before propagating the species. 😎

Narcissism as shown to the right is a personality disorder likely linked to mismatches in parent-child relationships with either excessive adoration or excessive criticism that is poorly attuned to the child’s experience. So, you could say that it is not his fault that he is as he is. In Trump’s case the cause is likely excessive criticism that drove the final stake in his heart.