Donald Trump reminds me of someone I used to know. Actually he reminds me of four little someones, my children when they were toddlers.
Our president is a big, fat crybaby and the first two weeks of his presidency have been nothing more than an extended temper tantrum. Unfortunately, his Republican enablers like Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are no different than the pandering parents who are more afraid that their toddler won’t be their friend than of the destruction facilitated by their lack of spine or character.
[pullquote align=”right” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]Sadly, the Mitch McConnells and Paul Ryans of this world have hitched their star to this puerile idiot. [/pullquote]
How does Trump resemble a toddler? Let me count the ways:
1. Trump, like all toddlers, is a narcissist. He can see the world and the people in it only through the prism of his own needs and desires. It is always about him. Only someone with the maturity of a two-year-old could take the opportunity of a memorial service for fallen CIA members and boast about the (pathetic) size of the crowds at his inaugural, use his Black History Month as an opportunity to continue his vendetta toward the press, or pollute the National Prayer Breakfast with a “prayer” for his reality TV successor Arnold Swarzeneggar.
2. Trump has exceedingly poor impulse control. One of the most notable things about toddlers is that they cannot control their own emotions and actions. On more than one occasion I observed my toddlers doing something they were expressly told not to do (writing on the wall, for example) while simultaneously scolding themselves for doing it. They had enough awareness to recognize that they shouldn’t write on the wall, but not enough self-control to keep themselves from doing so.
Trump routinely shoots his mouth off before putting his brain in gear. Indeed, his Twitter account exists precisely for this purpose. His poor impulse control closely allied to his gargantuan narcissism may impress his followers, many of whom also have the reasoning skills of a toddler, but it appalls the grown ups in the room.
3. Toddlers love bad words. When I disciplined my toddlers or refused to buy them something they wanted, they occasionally reacted by calling me a “poopy head,” which in their minds passed for a witty epithet. Trump behaves the same way, referring to Crooked Hillary and Crazy Bernie or Chuck Schumer’s “fake tears.”and imagining he is regaling us with bon mots.
4. Trump thinks girls have “cooties.” Trump isn’t merely a misogynist; he appears to fear women and degrades them to manage that fear.
Slate quotes those who worked with him on The Apprentice:
“He would talk about the female contestants’ bodies a lot from the control room,” recalls one midlevel producer. “We shot in Trump Tower, the control room was on the seventh floor, and he walked in one day and was talking about a contestant, saying, ‘Her breasts were so much bigger at the casting. Maybe she had her period then.’ He knows he’s mic’d and that 30 people are hearing this, but he didn’t care. That’s kind of him. During the campaign, when he was talking about Megyn Kelly, I thought: He’s obsessed with menstruation.”
It must have been his worst nightmare when Assistant Attorney General Sally Yates and a series of female Federal judges defied him and made him look, yet again, like the mean, petty intellectual pipsqueak that he is.
5. Toddlers hate sharing and Trump does, too. Most toddlers, when first apprised of the concept of sharing, are dumbfounded. Why on earth would they share something in their possession? That appears to be Trump’s attitude, too. He gives surprisingly little to charity and then only when forced by journalists’ investigations to do so.
6. Trump always wants to throw people out. Trump seems to think America is his secret clubhouse and he’s going to build a wall to keep out Mexicans, use immigration policies to keep out Muslims, pull the press credentials of news organizations to keep out those who are “unfair” to him.
7. Trump, like most toddlers, insists that everything is someone else’s fault. It’s the immigrants! It’s the Muslims! It anyone who doesn’t look like us!
Trump is a loser. He has an extraordinarily long list of failures. He’s created more businesses that failed than just about anyone you can name. He inherited millions of dollars and how has only millions of dollars to show for it. He routinely refuses to pay his bills, and considers himself a genius for behaving like a thief. He won’t release his tax returns and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to suspect that’s because they would reveal that HE, and no one else, is responsible for his own failures and might implicate him as a tool of Vladimir Putin.
All of us have an inner toddler. It’s enjoyable to think the world revolves around us; it’s fun to give into every impulse; we love using bad words; many of us still think girls have cooties; we hate sharing and we’d all love to throw out those who aren’t our friends; above all, it’s much more fun to blame our failures on other people than to accept responsibility for them.
The Mitch McConnells and Paul Ryans of this world have hitched their star to this puerile idiot. They think they can control him just like the German political class thought it could control Hitler. They imagine they can get what they want through his petty, vindictive antics, just like the German political class thought it could get what it wanted through what it initially viewed as Hitler’s petty, vindictive antics. Instead, millions of their people died and Germany was leveled to the ground by its enemies.
Like the parents who spoil the toddler, they ended up with a monster, and we will, too, if we don’t move to rein in this petty, vindictive clown with the ego of a two year old.
