The Don has been enjoying his real life performance of his role on the Apprentice for a while. Uttering the words “You’re Fired” fills him a sadistic joy that can bring more pleasure than an orgasm. So far, in his second term he has fired (or had others fire) most Inspector Generals that oversee potential fraud in government agencies, Carla Hayden, the head of the Library of Congress, Cameron Mitchell, the Acting FEMA Director and many more.
His recent firing of Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn’t like the job report numbers is a doozy. Unprecedented yes, surprising no. Once again it brings us face to face with the most disturbing, daunting, and consequential element of The Don’s personality and why he is so dangerous.
I am reminded of Kelly Ann Conway’s famous line from The Don’s first term, “alternate facts.” In 2017, Conway used this phrase during a January 22, 2017, interview on “Meet the Press,” to defend press Secretary Sean Spicer’s false statement that The Don’s inauguration crowd size was bigger than Obama’s, despite photos disproving these absurd claims.
It was the first salvo in a neverending attempt to treat facts as something that are mutable and dependent not on observation, but on the whim of a man who is a sociopathic liar, a man who will say anything to support his beliefs and deny anything that deflates him. It was that moment that made me realize what we were up against. It was so absurd it seemed funny. It turns out that we are not laughing much anymore. It was equivalent to a kindergartner insisting there were 10 triangles on the blackboard when there were only five. Even when you are five years old, you would be hard pressed to insist there were 10 triangles. How would you feel about giving total power to someone who bends reality this way? Well we did, not just once, but twice.
Yet this is where we are. A sociopath who can operate without any consequences for his behavior, due to the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, is a scary scenario. It is also a fundamental element of an autocrat’s playbook.
As a psychologist of many years, who has treated narcissists, it is clear to me that to defend themselves against deep feelings of humiliation and ‘smallness” they construct their own sense of a grand reality which they defend vehemently. There is a need for one’s version of reality to be true despite the evidence, because to be wrong, is not tolerable. Take January 6th and the Big Lie that the election was stolen. No matter how hard the Republicans tried to find fraud, they failed. They lost countless lawsuits. The facts didn’t matter, only “alternative facts.” The Don’s evil genius is to question any and all facts that don’t live in his preferred reality to the point that facts lose their meaning. When five triangles are 10 triangles “alternate facts” become an alternate reality and democracy can’t be sustained in an alternative reality. If that 5 year old became the teacher of the class our entire understanding of math would be transformed.
In the most recent case of the firing of Erika McEntarfer The Don decided that he didn’t like the numbers on the monthly job report so he claimed it was “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” He also said: “I believe the numbers were phony, just like they were before the election,” and there were other times. So you know what I did? I fired her, and you know what I did? The right thing.”
Bill Blain, a London-based bond trader who publishes a newsletter popular among market experts called Blain’s Morning Porridge, wrote on Monday: “Friday, Aug. 1 might go down in history as the day the U.S. Treasury market died. There was an art to reading U.S. data. It relied on trust. Now that is broken — if you can’t trust the data, what can you trust?” That’s The Don’s strategy: muddy the waters so much that all facts become a matter of opinion. What happens when the person The Don appoints to replace McEntarfer decides to just make up the next job report? It’s a total house of cards. Ultimately, it will fail because if people are being laid off and jobs are scarce, they will feel the pain. Meanwhile, rather than addressing a real problem with job growth, policy based on an alternative reality will not rectify matters; the American public and economy will pay the price.
The firing of McEntarfer won’t be the last. Why stop at jobs? Why not GDP? The number of People in poverty? Inflation numbers? It’s a dangerous and slippery slope; one that The Don and his cronies have no qualms taking us down. Without a shared reality of facts, we become a Banana Republic.
Do you remember his egregious denial of the COVID virus and assurances that we would be fine, despite having information to the contrary? This was a case of delusional thinking that led to unnecessary deaths. How many died because of his inability to deal with the facts and his need to imagine an alternate universe where the idea of a pandemic couldn’t be true? In his mind, he was making America great. How dare this stupid virus show up and ruin the party! The Don was never concerned that so many were dying; he was just concerned that it was a blemish on his presidency and was fucking with his beautiful economy. Instead of making the safety and health of the American people his priority, he spent the beginning of the pandemic downplaying its life threatening potential and whining about how the pandemic was ruining things. The jobs report does the same thing; it ruins his projection that we are humming like a well oiled machine. Denial can only go far before reality sets in and blows it up. How much damage will be caused before it does? Just ask the families who lost loved ones to Covid because of his lack of actions.
Don’t like an intelligence report that contradicts your view? Go after the analysts. Don’t like the interest rates, threaten to fire the head of the Fed, Jerome Powell. Don’t like the way Brazil is treating their ex-president, who, like The Don, tried to overthrow the government after he lost an election? Put a 50% tariff on goods and sanction a Supreme Court justice who is spearheading the investigation? And my favorite: don’t want Americans to know their history get the Smithsonian Institute to remove the any information regarding your two impeachments. Now the museum exhibits only includes three presidents who faced serious possibilities of removal: Andrew Johnson, Richard M Nixon, and Bill Clinton. My hope is that they removed him because they are working on building a bigger area for The Don so when he is impeached for the third time there will be room for the exhibit.
The Grand Offal Party 