08/09/2025
"She is a threat to humanity." This really gives deep insight into what drives this man. This is a man driven almost exclusively by fear. That's not to say something silly, like he's afraid of Rosie O'Donnell and has to make sure that the secret service keeps an eye out for her. He knows she's not going to spontaneously come back from Ireland and try to harm him. It's a deeper kind of fear than that.
To a degree, he is afraid of quite literally everything around him. We all know to scan for potential threats in any environment that we're in, but we can designate certain things, situations, or people as safe. I don't think he's able to do that, or rather, everything around him is seen as a potential threat, such that he's never able to truly relax or feel safe. No matter where he's at or who he's with, his “tough guy persona” is a shield, a protective barrier between the fear that he holds inside, so desperately trying to protect, and the world outside of himself. Every moment he lives is potentially terrifying and dangerous, without reprieve.
You can see it in how easily the fear can come flying out screaming from behind that shield. If asked an objectively reasonable question of which he doesn't have a good answer, or even simply disagreeing with someone on an opinion, the tough guy shield drops and yhe desperate terror underneath comes out trying to fight off the perceived threat.
I think the people who put him on a pedestal are drawn to him because of this. When they say they “see themselves in him,” they probably aren't consciously aware, and if there is an awareness, they probably can't articulate it, but it's that fear that anything and everything in the world is a possible threat, to be met with a desperate attempt to feel safe from it.
In trauma work, you would help a person to understand that they can only control themselves and not everyone around them. There's a powerful allure to trying to get everyone else to change in order to feel safe, and the idea of facing one's deepest, innermost fears, alongside the reality that you can only do it by focusing on yourself is even scarier, because it means coming face-to-face with that fear, instead of projecting it outward onto the world. Neither one feels particularly good, but projecting it onto the world doesn't feel as daunting of a task as looking inward, and certainly not as scary. Healing from pain and fear comes from realizing you have to look inward, that you can't just live in that pain and fear and expect the world to go enable it forever.
As President, you have the power to make a decent shot at trying to mold the world around you to enable the raw, open pain and fear rather than face it head on. I imagine, too, this is why the people who say that they can “see themselves in him” are seeing their own pain, their own fear, and believe the only way to help it is to try to change the world around them to enable that pain and fear. The idea of courageously facing it head on is itself so terrifying, that focusing outward seems like the only feasible option. I don't imagine most of them are consciously aware of this, and if there is some awareness, I don't believe they can fully articulate it, not because of any lack of intelligence or anything like that, but because the lack of awareness is itself a form of protection from the pain and fear. In that sense, it's understandable, and you can't necessarily blame people for doing it when they believe there is no other option, including Trump himself.
This doesn't mean endorsing it, as there still exists a need for personal responsibility, and not forcing the rest of society to alter itself to the exclusion of that responsibility.
Trump will not be looking under his bed tonight to make sure Rosie O'Donnell isn't there, but I hope and pray that he will have the courage to look inside himself, and really see himself in a way that no one probably ever has, because he's learned that isn't okay to do so. I hope and pray the same for those who see themselves in him as well, because there is hope. You just have to look in the right places to find it, and that's inside, not out.
