I can’t say or write anything about Donald Trump that isn’t being said or written everywhere—and, for the most part, by people who are more articulate and informed than I am. But still, since there isn’t anything I can do about him and his followers I feel a need to say or write something—if only to join with other, like-minded souls who are experiencing the same sense of dread and despondency about what’s happening now and what might happen in the future. And I want to write something so I can tell myself, no matter what happens later on, that I didn’t just shake my head, wring my hands and watch this final “reality” show in passive silence.
Trump does not seem real to me. That feeling could derive from the fact I don’t want him or his political “movement” to be real; the consequences are too terrifying to imagine (Germany in the late 1920’s and early ‘30s). Or this feeling could be because there is about him a quality of inhuman-ness—as if he were a machine that operates without the basic spark of animation; something with the form of a human but without an actual mind, heart or soul.
When I listen to him speak I don’t feel the existence of any meaningful process of thought or depth of feeling behind his absurd pronouncements and daily contradictions. His words, even the puerile hostility and sarcasm, his main form of expression, seem to be uttered randomly, without any psychological context or an awareness of cause and effect; like a robot that has experienced a breakdown in its original programming.
He even looks made-up (and I don’t mean all the actual make-up), I mean that he appears to be the creation of some alien life-forms that were working without any original concept or diagrams of what a human actually looks like.
