TRUMP IS US
TRUMP IS US
by Steven Goldsmith MD
When a New York Times reporter recently asked if there were limits on his global power, Donald Trump said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
So much for the U.S. Constitution he swore to uphold and defend. Forget international law. Forget Congress and the Supreme Court. Forget the Bible. Forget even God, now superfluous, banished in His retirement to a high-rise casino on the new Gaza Riviera. For Trump reigns as his own arbiter of everything. His own God.
Why should it surprise us that our President expresses such moral solipsism in the Year of Our Lord 2026; such contempt for the values that have guided our nation—officially if not always in practice? And by“President” I mean not just Trump, for this is not really about him. It is about the nature of a President, the sort of leader our society has earned. For in a parallel universe any alternative candidate the U.S. citizens might have elected in 2024 would be evincing the same amorality. (Perhaps not with such vulgarity, for Trump raises that bar to Olympian heights, but with the smarmy virtue that has greased all the degenerates and con artists who have slithered into our Oval Office for decades.) Why is this the best our nation can achieve?
Here is a clue. In recent months, YouTube bombarded me with ads of young women saying, “Yesterday my husband fucked me for three hours straight, and I went to sleep with my legs still shaking. . . .” In a similar ad ladies promised viewers that “your AM wood will be back with a vengeance.” In yet another a woman rapidly stroked the neck of a beverage bottle until its contents foamed over into her mouth. Can you imagine such ads ejaculating onto our TV screens back in the day? Leave It To Beaver (no pun intended) or Gunsmoke being interrupted for “a word from our sponsor” about butt plugs?
In brief, Trump is the elected (selected?) avatar of the intellectual, cultural, and, above all, moral degeneracy and vulgarization of our society. He belongs exactly where he is. Mind you, I am not a reflexive anti-Trumper. A Taft-Buchanan conservative, I voted for His Cosmic Majesty in 2024 over his predecessors—President Wormfood and Cackles, the DEI airhead—the way I’d choose severe colitis over colon cancer. But I have become a bipartisan hater of U.S. politicians. If I were not such a paragon of emotional stability and Christian virtue I would fantasize day and night about hanging 97 percent of these traitors by meathooks in town squares up and down the land.
Although I don’t regret that vote, I never believed that DJT is a maestro of 4-D chess. Any critical thinker, let alone a shrink like myself, can see that his chess set is short three pawns and a rook before he even opens the board. But set aside for now his ignorance, fifth-rate intellect, vulgarity, cognitive impairment, emotional incontinence, impulsivity, cruelty, and intolerance of dissent. Instead examine further the implications of the most salient attribute of his personality: the worship of self.
I believe that self-worship is the deadliest sin, for all other sins and crimes follow from that. Being the God of your life, with no moral guardrails. ME uber alles.
Let’s face it. My generation, to which Trump belongs, has blazed a dirt path of narcissism deep into the barren wilderness in which we now stand, without a compass, bereft of our bearings and roots, hollowed out by an anomie that festers. Other than self-absorption what is the meaning, the purpose of our lives?
In the sixties, teens and twenty-somethings, we worshipped our own tribe. We were special—hip, turned on, contemptuous of elders who had achieved nothing of value with the minor exceptions of surviving the Great Depression and winning WWII. “Never trust anyone over thirty,” we crowed. With no Depression or World War to occupy us, what did many of us who were not jungle-fighting do instead? We dropped acid; peacocked about in our beads, granny glasses, and tie-dyed shirts; and balled (the hip verb back then) anyone with a pulse. Free love, guarantor of a meaningful life. In short, except for our fabulous rock music, we were full of it, insufferable. I do not exempt myself.
In the 1970s Tom Wolfe labelled us the “Me Generation” because of our self-absorption, our emphasis on personal fulfillment. And in the1980s many of us morphed into yuppies, urban fashionistas (remember those red suspenders?) devoted to material acquisition. Investment banking was in, highlighted by Wolfe’s novelBonfire of the Vanities and the film Wall Street (“greed is good”); with church attendance increasingly declasse, an afterthought or irrelevance, we gradually stopped Merry Christmasing others, fearing their scarlet letter of opprobrium for such hate speech.
But you think we were bad? Younger generations have upped the ante of collective narcissism in their obsession with selfies and likes. To paraphrase Descartes, I receive a dozen likes, therefore I am. Our cell phones have become our cathedrals. The entering classes of my medical school, Columbia, at their White Coat Ceremony (on YouTube if you have a strong stomach) no longer swear allegiance to the venerable Hippocratic oath and its moral commands, but compose their own oaths (before they have seen a single patient!), which teem with the shibboleths of social justice and wokery. They never mention God—or even “gods,” the way Hippocrates did. After all, if no transcendent values, no standards guide us and if God is absent, having taken the last train to the Coast, and we are our own Gods, anything goes; might as well award these bright young things a participation trophy, toss them their MD diplomas frisbee-style and call it a day.
In a 1798 address to the Massachusetts Militia, John Adams said, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” We have fulfilled his warning. Politicians, regardless of party, soak in purulent puddles of self-aggrandizement, violating the Constitution 24/7, none more so than DJT. And we the people do little about it but scroll on our phones. In our post-moral, vulgarized, narcissistic society Trump serves as fitting flag-bearer.
As Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamazov, “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.”
Be well.
If you enjoyed this post and want to read more from me, please subscribe and follow.
Watch for the new Mad Shrink YouTube channel, to begin later this month.
Seems funny to me that grown men will go crazy over a bad call by the referee or argue over a rule change or violation, but when the government breaks the law, doesn’t follow the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, crickets !!!
I guess one could say we are balled ???
By the way, a very insightful article.
Well done !!!
I have nothing but contempt for all politicians since I realized that they see their only job as working on keeping that job. Forget everything about them caring for their constituents. When asked if I like Trump, my response is that he is better than what we could have gotten.