ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS via Getty Images
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It was to be expected that the first electoral debate among the candidates for the White House it would have been transformed by the president into a vulgar brawl that also dragged his democratic opponent without any possibility of confrontation between divergent political programs.
Donald Trump, even before being a president of the United States with original political theses, is a character with an oblique character who inspires his entire way of acting, especially when it is necessary to dominate his opponents.
Various observers of both sexes have expressed their opinion on its singular nature, going beyond the political-institutional controversy. His granddaughter, psychologist Mary L. Trump, in the book Too Much and Never Enought (Too much and never enough. How my family created the most dangerous man in the world) highlighted the distant origins of the complexes that affect the president today.
Donald’s adolescence, spent in a greedy and brutal family in the shadow of a cynical father and a neglected mother, shaped his narcissism in an irresponsible and unpredictable way from an early age which, in order to feel comfortable, he must self- consider himself the “greatest” of all and despise the whole world.
Bob Woodward, the reporter who led to Nixon’s impeachment with the Watergate revelations, provided with the recent book Rage, a similar image of the current Trump derived exclusively from his own words spoken in the 18 interviews recorded at the White House in the first seven months of this year, before and after the outbreak of the pandemic.
The man is a megalomaniac without political and personal restraints who considers himself worthy to have his own face carved in Mount Rushmore alongside those of his homeland father Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt. Turning to the interviewer he exclaims: “Bob, all the ideas are mine. Do you want to know the truth? Whatever I do as president is mine… ”. His yardstick is contempt for near and far: generals are “a bunch of sissies” (a bunch of pussies); Americans do not deserve to know what they had learned since January that covid-19 would have created many deaths without adequate intervention.
It is not surprising, then, that the Cleveland debate has gone into such a grim mode for American democracy. When Woodward ends his truth-interviews with a single comment “Trump, the wrong man for the job as president of the United States,” he highlights the fact that the 2016 election – legitimate – brought not one man to the White House who he thinks politically in an eccentric way with respect to the conservative and reforming traditions of America, but a psychologically alien character moved by anger towards others and a spirit of revenge towards those who have not so far appreciated him sufficiently.
The message addressed to the far-right armed militia i Proud Boys “Stay back, be ready”, as if to urge a bloody revolt if the electoral results were not favorable to the president, is something different from Law and Order. It is the result of a splitting of the personality which, on the one hand, presents itself as the godfather of the order and, on the other, believes that it can subvert at will the order it should guard.
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