Why Men are Reluctant to Attack Donald Trump

As a follow-up to my last post, I thought that some explanation regarding why Donald Trump, who is clearly an incompetent and corrupt leader with a major psychiatric disorder, receives so little resistance from other males, some of whom are powerful. Their subservience to him is astounding in historical terms. As I said earlier, Richard Nixon left office voluntarily after considerably less-significant violations of the law. Trump has elevated himself to the level of one of the greatest criminals in American history, yet he still receives little public criticism. To me, as an amateur evolutionary biologist, Trump is exhibiting classic alpha male primate behavior, and, because all humans are primates, they accept his behavior instinctively without thinking about it much. There have also been social and economic conditions that have caused males to revert to their primate instincts to some extent. Over the past several decades, feminism, contraception and employment opportunities have reduced female dependence on males, and this has been a blow to male egos. Furthermore, the evolution of the economy has significantly reduced the number of available well-paying jobs for males. In addition, the pandemic caused families to spend more time together at home, and this added to male-female stresses, because, among primates, males and females tend to live separately – nuclear families are not the norm. The upshot is that males have generally undergone a reduction in social status in recent years, and, rather than attracting harems of beautiful women, they are being given the cold shoulder. Where Trump comes in, I think, is that he lives the way that many men would like to live, though they would never admit it. The absence of critical thinking in men has caused them to overlook the fact that Trump has a history of making poor decisions. A related fact, I think, is that women themselves tend to respect men less now than they used to. There is currently a popular narrative among women that they are the victims of male abuse. That may be accurate in some situations, but to me it seems as if many women are unable to determine whether that is actually the case in their situation.

Just as a brief refresher, I should recap some of Trump's offenses. From his first term, he will be remembered for wasting the time of the federal government with two impeachments, followed by lying about his political loss in 2020 and supporting an illegal attack on congress. He was also sympathetic to the scientifically unsupported anti-vax movement. In his second term, which has barely begun, he has appointed some of the most unqualified people in American history to join his administration, threatened other countries with large tariffs and staged an attempted coup in Los Angeles. He has also ignored constitutional rights in the deportation of immigrants. Each phase in the ascent of Trump's rise to power has resembled a new episode of The Emperor's New Clothes. I think that the underlying dynamic is that unhappy American males have provided enough support to Republicans that they have been willing to overlook Trump's deficiencies. Trump literally is an act, and I can't say that I've identified any examples from any time in his life where he actually said or did anything that was in the public interest. Currently, men admire him, I think, because they would love to behave foolishly, attract throngs of gold-digging women and enjoy themselves without ever taking responsibility for anything or being held accountable. This aspect of the Trump phenomenon can be explained as male worship of male primate behavior. Trump has also attracted some opportunistic women, but their numbers are considerably lower.

The question becomes "Why do otherwise intelligent men support Trump?" This is a little more difficult to answer. The Republican politicians among them feel compelled to protect their political careers: this is a purely selfish motive. The tech billionaires also seem to be greedy, and supporting Trump is a lower risk to them than opposing him. In the case of some of them, Elon Musk for example, he has his own set of psychiatric problems and probably overestimated the probability of benefitting from an alliance with Trump. Trump's life history consists primarily of benefitting at someone else's expense.

My main view of this situation hasn't changed. It isn't a question of whether Trump will succeed in the long-term. It is demonstrably impossible for him to succeed, because none of his policies are well-thought-out, and most of his appointees are unqualified. At the moment, Trump and his Republican allies are attempting to delay the inevitable economic and social disaster that is brewing until after he leaves office.

Why Greater Awareness is Necessary in the U.S.

While there is an abundance of information available now for most people to study topics of interest to them, one of my chief sources of cognitive dissonance these days is that politicians, corporations and the news media have increasingly channeled public discussion into narrow channels that collectively tend to block out conceptually challenging topics. Although I am completely sick of thinking about Donald Trump, viewing images of him, hearing him speak, and having to read and see inadequate discussions about him, the Trump phenomenon in public life is the best example of what is wrong in the U.S at this moment. I've already written about how the internet and social media have stirred up a lot of confusion, but I think that, additionally, it is necessary to discuss in detail some of Trump's specific shortcomings. What I find unsettling is that Trump is never confronted directly about his enormous deficiencies and weaknesses as a person, which are particularly important now that he is the de facto most powerful person in the world.

First, it has to be said that Trump is deeply ignorant. He doesn't read, and most of his ideas are ones that he adopted by habituation while he was growing up. In those days, women and minorities did not have equal rights, gay people were generally in the closet, there was little evidence of impending global warming, and businessmen in New York City often operated in a cutthroat manner. Trump displayed dishonesty at an early age by hiring a person to take the SAT for him. Most of Trump's "ideas" are longstanding formulations that he has been using to get his way throughout his life. As far as I've been able to determine, what little curiosity he has tends to focus on ways to manipulate people to meet his objectives. This seems to be the same pattern followed by his father and his father's father. Some of his grandfather's wealth came from prostitution, and this may have influenced Trump's attitude toward women.

During his second term as president, it is easier to identify his thinking processes than it was during his first term. In the first term he was battling his own appointees and faced with impeachment twice, and the pandemic added to the confusion. In his second term, he has concentrated on consolidating his power and is consciously copying Viktor Orbán of Hungary. It is already apparent that he has no understanding of world economics, and it seems that his advisors are generally unwilling to take the risk of enlightening him if they know better. Trump's primary transactional methodology seems to be to inflict pain of one kind or another and then switch plans if the first one doesn't achieve the desired results. I think that this is one of the best examples of how deeply ignorant Trump really is. It is obvious that he has no understanding of global economics, and he is simply operating on his old business model from his real estate background, which also failed. When he first rolled out his tariff plan, he had not anticipated the extent to which it would roil world financial markets, and he was essentially forced to cancel it immediately. I also find it instructive to examine him as an arbiter of conflict resolution between world leaders. He has already given up on creating a Ukraine-Russia resolution, and he even seems to have encouraged Benjamin Netanyahu to escalate the genocide in Gaza. In both instances, since there was nothing in it for him, he had a hard time staying focused. Following his instincts, he prefers to spend his time soliciting bribes from Arab states and bilking people with new cryptocurrency schemes. Traditionally, Trump and his family have been grifters, and that is still their default model.

The other main deficiencies in Trump, I think, are psychiatric in nature. It seems that, within a political context, bringing up psychiatric issues is a taboo. There is currently a slight drift toward an easing, at least with respect to senility, but technically that isn't a psychiatric issue. Age was brought up for Ronald Reagan in his second term, so there is a historical precedent. A lot has already been written about Trump's psychiatric state, even by a niece and nephew. More significantly, "200 mental health professionals" warned "that Donald Trump is dangerous because of 'his symptoms of severe, untreatable personality disorder – malignant narcissism.'" Although psychiatry does not get much attention in America, I think that this description of Trump is reasonably accurate. I think that anyone who has paid attention to him for several years can pick this up easily, without much convincing. At this point, Trump's psychological makeup is far more dangerous than Joe Biden's senility would have been if he had been reelected. I have yet to see any full-scale discussion of this problem in the news media. 

What can readily be observed now is that Trump has been unable to resolve any significant issues within his purview, ranging from the federal budget deficit to appropriate taxation to international conflicts. Rather, Trump is simply continuing his cycle of bullying, intimidation and empty proposals. It is readily apparent that, not only is he distracting from the resolution of issues that are of public importance, but that he may actually just prefer to punish people unfairly for his personal enjoyment. To him, minorities, immigrants, women and non-binary people are fair game. Also, because he was an academic dunce, he seems to derive a sadistic pleasure from punishing Ivy League universities. 

I am getting tired of hearing the word "democracy" being used as a panacea for issues such as the Trump phenomenon. Since Trump was duly elected in an accepted democratic process, I think that the focus should shift toward greater public awareness. We should now be barraged with news, videos, podcasts and articles regarding the dangers of the Trump presidency. This may be absent because we are living in an increasingly corporate-controlled country, where the calculated costs of challenging Trump are often outweighing the benefits.

Diary

My new telescope mount has arrived, and I will be assembling it shortly. It is of much higher quality than my previous mount and should last for the rest of my life. I am only going to be using it casually, as I have already spent several years stargazing.

Of course, I am still reluctantly following the political news. I think that, in less than five months, the momentum against Trump has already shifted significantly. In his second term, with all of the guardrails removed, he has been free to show just how incompetent he is. I think that all he's managed to do so far is slow global economic growth and damage the federal government. He seems to want to tear up the U.S. constitution, but I don't think he's succeeding at all. As the French would say, he is a "dwarf on stilts." At the moment, I don't think he's far from alienating just the American public, but the billionaires and the Republican Party. He is proving to be a stupid fat guy on weight-loss medication. I think that he is on a trajectory in which he could eventually be impeached again and removed from office.

Some readers may have been surprised to see that my last post was a quotation from the Bible. This is not to say that I've suddenly had an improbable religious conversion, but that the Bible is a text like any other and can be read for a variety of reasons. If Jesus Christ was an actual historical figure, you don't have to look at him ideologically. I see him as a person of his time who had strong opinions and voiced them publicly at his own peril. In modern terms, the Parable of the Blind can be seen as a critique of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu. They are not unlike modern-day Pharisees. Unfortunately, Christ's prophecy in his case didn't exactly pan out, because he was executed, and they weren't, but, in principle, he was probably right.

The readership of this blog has been expanding over the last few years. From 2014 to 2020 I was getting only about 100-200 pageviews per month. Starting with the pandemic, pageviews have continuously increased. I think that some of my most popular posts must have attracted web crawlers that have gradually indexed the entire blog. Now people are reading very old posts that were hardly ever read. The upshot is that the number of pageviews per month is currently approaching 12,000, and I'm getting more comments. But I don't think that anything on the blog is about to "go viral," so I'm not very concerned. Since I have no ads and don't charge any fees, I'm not about to become wealthy.

I did end up spending a couple of hours cleaning up the pollen on the back porch. The previous owner kept the screens covered with thick plastic year-round, and she didn't use the porch much. I think that earlier, when her mother lived in the house, they had parties and played cards there. There was a refrigerator. When I moved in, it looked a bit like a museum. When her daughter moved in in about the year 2000, she was divorced, and her children had already grown up. I think that she had a boyfriend for a few years, but he never lived in this house and died long ago. She and her mother were Italians who used to live on Long Island.

Because the back porch wasn't used much, the eastern phoebes got into the habit of building their nests above it. When I moved in in 2023, they were there. In 2024 they built a nest there and laid eggs in it but abandoned the nest before they hatched. Since I was going in and out of the back door frequently, because the tomatoes were planted nearby, the phoebes must have become scared. This year, they attempted for several days to build a nest above the front porch, but they couldn't attach it to the wall properly, and their building materials kept falling off. I helped them out by installing a small wooden ledge where they had been trying to build the nest, and they immediately built a nest on it. There is currently a female phoebe in the nest incubating her eggs. The same birds usually return to the same location each year. Eastern phoebes are a good species to have here, since there are lots of insects, and they are voracious insect-eaters.

The spring turned out to be colder and rainier than usual, but there haven't been any freezes, and my tomatoes have been planted and are doing well. The weather has just changed to warm and sunny. I think that living in the woods has been good for my health. I haven't been sick at all, and my previous allergies have disappeared.

I've been reading a new book on the history of Indo-European languages, which I am finding quite interesting, and will be commenting on it soon.