Trump Trumped
The Donald finds success in every field but one - life.
Geoffrey Hamilton
Blog, April 11, 2006
The 'talking cure' concept touted by psychoanalysts and others over the years should be really called
the talking disease. It is the cause of great harm, though it sometimes allows the discovery of what life
is all about which in the following case was one and the same.
Donald Trump in his reality show The Apprentice last week had just such
a damning epiphany. It all began when a
situation arose over the previous few weeks when a Jew named Lee took his Jewish holidays as
they fell, which turned out to be during two weeks of the show. The result was Lee
got two byes into the next respective rounds while two others got fired. Lee knew before entering
the contest that he would have this advantage, and so could have bowed out or asked to postpone his
appearence. What was worse was that an
Israeli Russian Jew, Lenny, on the same team, did not use these holidays as an excuse (his view).
Trump saw this situation developing weeks before and called it unfair, but acceptable back then.
This last week it was more pronounced because Lenny was again in the line of fire while Lee
had taken a second week off. The project manager, Bryce, had brought Lee and Lenny in with him
to the boardroom as candidates for firing because he believed it was unfair to punish the others who did good
work and stuck their necks out along with him. So he brought back those two who contributed the
least in his view. Bryce knew that Lee would not be fired, but his logic
was honourable by his reckoning.
Trump was upset by the dilemma he found himself in. There was no way he was
going to fire Lee for honouring a Jewish holiday, nor did he want to fire
Lenny who made an effort at least. Right away he knew his only choice was the fair
minded Bryce. But in his reluctance to do the inevitable thing Trump began a long slow
torturous conversation, his own talking cure.
It began with Trump responding to Bryce with "Life is unfair", then progressing to "Life is terrible",
and finally ending with the sincere outburst "Life sucks. You know that?!" It was remarkable
how these three levels of ever deepening despair were revealing what many suspected, but few
believed, that the rich are not always satisfied - and neither are the famous, the powerful - nor are the sexed-
up - or the well liked. Trump is all these things, yet he feels and knows life sucks.
This is also a guy who has lots of kids, wants more (which is hypocritical after "life sucks") and
cares little about the world in general - other than through some rich guy's
standard-charity-thinking. So as it seems Trump is not using any accurate
moral sense, his talking cure then is evidence not of a warning to the world so as much as it is a realization
of a truth created at that moment: A truth he didn't want to know. It's a new disease eating at his satisfaction.
Talking has the underrated ability to take us where we never expected or needed to
go. Trump never needed to know life sucks. He might not have found this out if not for the
series of spur-of-the-moment thoughts, words and emotions that just erupted from him and
to him. However, it did happen and so the infection begins. Psychological diseases, if there can be such diseases,
are often the result of
talk, not discovered or improved by talk. Perhaps without talk there would be no need for talk's deadly cures, via psycho
babble or not. If you want to avoid most talking diseases make friends with a dog, preferably one
you can't understand.
GRH
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