The premise of the 1988 movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit is that cartoon characters, called Toons, live in Los Angeles alongside real people and star in animated films. At one point, evil Judge Doom, the enemy of Toons, declares that to lure a Toon out of hiding all you need is to start tapping a beat. No Toon can resist the urge to come out and dance.
It is a perfect description of an artistic personality. Performers are born to entertain, it is their nature.
Actors tend to be neurotic, self-involved to the point of narcissism and, underneath it all, deeply insecure. They often have only a tenuous grasp of reality. Yet, despite all that–or rather because of that–they are able to transform themselves into believable characters and create an alternative world.
Trump is a prime example of an artistic personality, displaying all the characteristics of the type. Unfortunately for him, he was born into a family of a cut-throat New York real estate developer who insisted that young Donald go into business. Trump has always been a great promoter but a lousy businessman. His true calling, like that of Roger Rabbit, was entertainment. He loved the spotlight and craved to be featured on celebrity pages. He engaged in business ventures such as beauty pageants and professional wrestling, which generated publicity without necessarily being lucrative.
As to actors in their work, appearances and the impression he created in the audience was more important than reality. He was perhaps the only rich person in the world to regularly accuse Forbesof underreporting the size of his fortune.
By the end of the 1990s, Trump was washed up as a businessman. He still maintained a billionaire lifestyle–he had to be in character after all–but most of that was apparently built on air and on debt. He stopped pretending to be a developer and was merely licensing his name to other people looking to capitalize on his image. In other words, he was a showman.
Then, in the early 2000s, he was approached by producer Mark Burnett with the idea of starring in a reality television show, The Apprentice. Burnett divined Trump’s enormous potential as a performer. He was, after all, a natural. Thus a star was born.
Now, an artistic personality is not in and of itself an impediment to success in business or politics. Quite a few successful business people are also excellent promoters–of themselves and their products, selling both to their customers and investors. In politics, too, since the advent of television leaders have to be good performers. And Reagan turned his experience as an actor to good use in politics.
The problem with Trump is that he combines an extreme artistic personality with a highly pronounced urge to fail. And that is a lethal combination.
Even as a lousy businessman Trump should have been considerably richer than he is. At a young age he got a huge leg up in his father’s real estate business. He had the initial capital, the name recognition and all the connections. He also had a vision: his renovation of the Commodore Hotel on 42nd Street and its conversion to the Grand Hyatt in 1980 was one of the early construction projects in New York after the city nearly went bust in the mid-1970s. Several of his subsequent deals were equally daring and brilliant, including the Trump Tower and the renovation of the Plaza Hotel. Like other artistic personalities, Trump had talents.
With properties in New York still dirt-cheap, Trump was in a unique position to make a killing, to become a billionaire many times over. Yet, he repeatedly and, it seems, deliberately, lost it all, demonstrating an enviable consistency. Opportunities were not taken advantage of and, worse, potentially successful undertakings were ran into the ground. Time and again, Trump has had to seek protection in Chapter 11 and hobnob with undesirables, like Russian mobster Felix Sater and other questionable Russian oligarchs, as well as murky clients from around the world who were buying his properties and bailing him out.
But once his true calling was discovered, Trump achieved great success with Apprentice, which he hosted for 14 seasons. The show boosted his name recognition and contributed greatly–if not decisively–to his successful run for presidency, but his run in and of itself was a form of death wish–the urge to destroy what he had built.
Since becoming president, Trump’s desire for self-destruction has been on daily display. He constantly says and does things that would have sunk any other American politician. Just look at his advocacy of Vladimir Putin: Trump is praising him even as questions persist about his campaign’s coordination with the Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. It’s as if he’s daring his critics and tempting fate.
Curiously, the nature of his base and the moral degradation of the Republican Party have been such that his antics don’t cut into his 35-40% nationwide support figures. Every outrage is declared a new normal. As he once boasted, he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue in New York without losing his supporters.
Was I the only one who heard a tinge of regret in this statement?
Trump constantly raises the ante, as if to see whether the fresh antic, more despicable than the one before, will finally do the trick.
Trump has been at times compared to Hitler. His supporters are outraged, but driving such comparisons is what the two men share, namely artistic personality and death wish.
They followed a broadly similar trajectory: like Trump, Hitler failed in his first career choice–he washed up as a painter in Vienna, and was snubbed by the modernist Austrian artistic establishment the way Trump was cold-shouldered by the cultured New York business elite.
While Trump was discovered by a reality TV producer, Hitler stumbled upon his reality show on his own, becoming a rabble-rouser at nationalist rallies throughout Germany.
Both men created their own reality and mesmerized their followers. Both were cults: if you are not enraptured by Hitler or by Trump, you can’t fathom what their followers can possibly see in them. And, acting on their artistic impulse, both men achieved considerable, and totally unexpected, success. Much to everyone’s surprise, Hitler became Germany’s leader, rearmed the country and started a war which for a time was nothing but a string of spectacular victories. By the end of 1941 Hitler controlled virtually the entire Europe.
Understandably, Hitler’s entourage, his party comrades and his generals were in awe of his achievements. They came to believe that their doubts had been misplaced and that this Austrian blowhard knew what he was doing. But Hitler’s early successes only encouraged him to become even more reckless and to ignore professional opinion even more, listening to nothing but his gut. He committed colossal blunders which caused the world great suffering and resulted in the destruction of Germany. But in the end he got what subconsciously he had been after all along: a massive failure.
Trump, likewise, won the nomination, then the presidency, against all expectations. The stock market, which was supposed to tank after his victory, rocketed by 50%, creating $10 trillion of extra wealth. The unemployment rate fell to its lowest level in half a century. His critics within the Republican Party were silenced, naysayers and professionals left the White House and now Trump has set himself loose.
My prediction is that he will keep raising the ante and engaging in progressively more outrageous conduct. We will be lucky if all he wrecks is the economy and his presidency. WIth his finger on the nuclear button, a far more horrendous outcome can’t be excluded.
Allen Frances, a former professor of psychiatry at Duke University, told CNN: “Calling Trump crazy hides the fact that we’re crazy for having elected him and even crazier for allowing his crazy policies to persist. Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin and Mao were in the last century. He may be responsible for many more million deaths than they were.”
