Trump And The Essential Ugliness Of Solipsism

Alan: Trump is conscious but largely unaware.

He does not learn in the classical sense of acquiring knowledge-and-experience, then submitting it to wisdom's mill.

Why should he? He already knows it all.

Trump "trusts his instincts" - his "animal nature" - a frank confession that he has no use for specifically intellectual input.

Disgraceful Donald's instincts are so well-honed that he had no need to prepare for his summit with Kim Jong Un, who "ran circles around him," and "saw through" Trump so easily that he knew he would run circles around him.

Not surprisingly, it will now take genetic profilers three-to-five years to determine if any of the bones North Korea just repatriated belong to Americans -- or even if they belong to homo sapiens. 

Or Fido...

Trump's continual determination to attack/trash anyone he is not currently flattering deprives him of feedback loops that might inform him "who he is" as a single, interactive agent in the multifaceted drama of Life.

Thus surrendered to his instincts -- and with vanishingly little intellectual of cultural life -- it is "all Donald all the time."

All soliloquy-monologue.

... and late night tweets.

Trump conducts no real dialogue. 

And since he doesn't know how to talk with others --  but instead just grabs them in an ongoing series of "hostile takeovers" -- his legal team opposes a sit-down with Mueller.

Trump, on the other hand, is so convinced he can charm/seduce anyone with his solipsistic sense of blamelessness-verging-perfection that he himself, in his hermetic obtusity, wants to talk with Mueller, blithely unaware that the Special Counsel's dialectical ability (in combination with Trump's dialectical void) would be Drumpf's undoing.

It would be like Captain Kirk debating a "rogue computer" until he introduces such cognitive dissonace that the human equivalent of smoke would emerge from Donald's ears.

Trump is so committed to "putting himself" -- and only himself -- "out there" that all he gets back, indeed all he can get back, is another dose of his infinitely-regressing self image.

Trump is sheerly reactive - and worse still he reacts only to projections of himself.

In a dysfunctional way, this self-cathected feedback loop "works" so long as nothing stands between Trump and his reflected projections.

Even so, whether Mueller gets an interview or not, the Special Counsel stands in Trump's way.

Or soon will.

***

A picture is worth a thousand words.

I'm confident Trump feels "on the inside" how the caricature above looks "on the outside."