Then your soul is in the lost and found

I’m sure many of you are are as sick of this topic as a friend of mine, who responded to some of my musings yesterday with the observation that he “preferred it when Trump wasn’t president so we didn’t have to spend this amount of energy on the interior mental world of a profoundly sick person.” This observation could naturally lead one down the sick or evil and what’s the difference rabbit hole, so go ask Alice if you’re so inclined.

LGM commenter BigG:

The idea that Trump is failing is popular and easy to see where it comes from. But it is very misleading.
Trump fails at what he attempts to do, probably more than half the time, and he always has. It’s his MO that he tries something really big, does it incompetently, fails, retreats from that…and instantly tries something different that is even bigger. This is what has made him ultimately reach the state he is at, he never gives up. Most people are chastised by looking foolish and failing badly and they reconsider their approach. Trump can’t do that, because of the Black Hole of Need in his soul, so he just remakes the history in his head and doubles down. So while he seemingly has a scandal or failure every week that would doom any other politician, it hasn’t reduced his Need, so things continue to get worse.
So yes, Trump is failing/has failed/will continue to fail at many of the individual things he tries. But he is being very successful at turning this into a fascist country, because the constant daily attempts at outrageous corruption and in your face brutality break down the democratic fiber of our society. Authoritarianism will just become the expected way that government works. Soon, everyone under the age of 30 will have lived their whole adult life in “Trumps America”. All large corporations have already adjusted to just bathing in the corruption, and are loving it, so they are never going to want to go back.
So, yes, Trump is an ignorant and stupid man, but his approach to taking over everything has been wildly successful.

This is depressingly plausible. (I would just add that his incredible amount of social privilege is what allows him to keep doing this without finding a permanent failure state, in the way that Elon Musk could play poker and not go broke no matter how terrible a poker player he is, by just buying more chips).

A couple of friends of ours look into the chasm in which some nameless dread lurks:

In response to the argument that Trump isn’t merely a sleazy salesman always talking his book — although of course he has always been that — but someone or something that is much more profoundly evil/damaged:

All his stories are based on nothing. There are no buses of illegal voters. He thinks there are, so it’s fine to puff it up a little more into a punchier image of cackling Dems with fistfuls of ballots.

In terms of the question of does he believe his own crap, he sort of does and sort of doesn’t. What he absolutely lacks, and what is so mystifying to sane people, is any desire to know what’s true before believing it. Like, I don’t want to believe things that aren’t true. You don’t. We’re all extremely fallible and subject to the usual psychological biases which work against our full alignment of belief with truth. But he’s just miles beyond that. He needs to believe the things that support his pathologies, so he will do that, even as he’s semi-aware that his simple story of the moment is not technically true. It *should* be true, and so in some sense it is. The salesman puffery is an intentional layer on top of the delusions he’s not fully cognizant of.

A response to this:

This may be semantics, but I don’t see it the same way.

I think you are to some extent still framing Donald Trump as a person with a normally functioning brain who has chosen a certain path. I think he has a brain that is fundamentally not working. He doesn’t just have NPD, he has an extreme version, and it has gotten *worse* as he has gotten older.

I think by the time you get to President Trump, he is fully capable of letting his emotions override any sense of true/false. That is, he is *not* making in any way a conscious decision that it would be better for him to insist that X, his brain is just saying:

Every fact says this did not happen
Emotionally, I want to believe it

And the part of his brain that records “facts” is just much more strongly connected to the second pathway, so that is what gets recorded as fact. And if that is what is happening, there is no meaning to asking “does he believe it” because that is not a part of how his brain operates. You might as well ask whether the NPC in an online RPG is angry that you stole his sword.

There must be some way out of this place.