It is one of the distinct tragedies of our time that the unsound mind of Donald Trump has become our national preoccupation. As a country, we are all undergoing an exceedingly painful crash course in Abnormal Psychology. As a member of the world community, America’s national identity has been strewn and shredded upon the shallow, unkempt shores of one man’s dangerously skewed grasp on reality.
Few of us has ever been more disturbingly and consistently treated to the jarring spectacle of such deep mental dysfunction. Even fewer still would have ever knowingly consented to bear witness to such an unnerving drama. Without exception, every day of this presidency has been a nightmarish trespass into the darkness of Donald Trump’s gruesome thought processes or horrifying lack thereof. It will take many of us years to recover from this dark, unwanted journey.
Many of us won’t.
Forget polls. Forget opinions. Forget politics. For the moment, even, forget America. This is a human tragedy of epic proportions, worthy of the great philosopher, Sophocles, and his treatises on the pervasive delusions of man. Donald Trump is a classic study in witlessness, a cautionary tale borne out over and over again throughout our history, forever admonishing us that one man’s irredeemable flaws, left unchecked, can infect all of humanity.
For those of us burdened with a conscience and the merest inkling of right and wrong, the flaws in Trump’s character blaze as bright as the sun in an unremitting desert.
It is all so painfully obvious. It is so blatantly inarguable. It is as inevitably conclusive as tragedy, itself.
Within the unenlightened, unknowable depths of this mind, there is — quite simply — something gone, something lacking, something which perhaps was never there to begin with. We have many words for it. Some of us call it compassion. Some of us call it empathy. Some of us refer to it, simply, as humanity. We can’t always put our finger on it or describe it with surgical precision. But we know that there is something missing which should, by all conventional norms of decency, be there.
Something. Something that defines us as a species. Something that elevates us above the mosquito and the reptile. Something we all feel when we encounter it and something which astonishes and alarms us when we find it to be missing.
Whether through self-immolation or the ultimate mercies of our achingly slow political machinery - one way or another, this searing farce of a presidency — this woeful Greek tragedy of folly and human imbecility will end. We will erase the impact of Trump’s blight from our laws and from our hearts. We will set about righting the wrongs which he has so disgracefully normalized. One way or another, we will move on from this.
But Trump’s foul inhumane depths which have been drudged up and splayed across our national consciousness will never be entirely forgotten.
America, as a whole, will recover. America, as a whole, will endure.
Like slack-jawed, shell-shocked survivors of trauma, though, some of us will remain scarred and forever haunted by this experience; transfixed in place by the horror of what we have so unwillingly experienced.
Because now we have had a ringside seat to a show most of us never cast a ballot for, never purchased admission to, never wanted to bear witness to in our lifetimes.
The implacable darkness of Donald Trump’s mind.