Chaos out of control in the Donald Trump administration

Echo opinion by Leonard Pitts, Jr., published in the St. Louis Post Dispatch:

Mary Trump wrote "TRUMP: Too much and never enough", insider information about the Trump family's dysfunctions.

Donald Trump is not simply weak,” writes his niece, Mary  Trump. Rather, “his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows, deep down, that he is nothing of what he claims to be. He knows that he has never been loved.”

That ruined young Donald Trump.

Even worse, it may yet ruin us all.

Leonard Pitts Jr. lpitts@miamiherald.com

Who goes to the movies when their brother is on his deathbed? Donald Trump is reported to have done just that, while his brother Fred was at the end stages of alcoholism.

Mary Trump's book arrives just as controversy swirls over reports that Russia paid a bounty for American deaths while the White House did nothing, Ivanka Trump is under fire for posing with a can of beans and ICE is training civilians to arrest undocumented immigrants. 

In other words, a typical week in the chaos that is the Trump presidency.

Meantime, the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic Trump once assured us would magically disappear is approaching 140,000. In response, the White House launches an attack on Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert and its most credible pandemic spokesperson, while Trump retweets a theory that “everyone is lying” about the virus to hurt him politically. It’s from Chuck Woolery, whose claim to fame is that he used to host “Love Connection.”

And again, seriously: Who does that?

The answer, of course, is no mystery to anyone who’s been paying attention. Still, Mary Trump performs a service by bringing to that answer both the authority of a psychologist — she holds a Ph.D. — and the insight of an insider.

Donald Trump is what you get when childhood is a zero-sum competition for the approval of “a high-functioning sociopath” whose values are expressible in dollars and cents. He is what happens when a boy is allowed to bluff, brag and bully his way through life, no one ever tells him “no” and everyone acts as if his waste products are without odor. 

Trump is what’s left when you subtract compassion, accountability, humility and the ability to laugh at yourself. (Maine Writer post script, has anybody witnessed Donald Trump spontaneously smiling lately....or ever?)