Donald Trump craves conflict like normal people crave food or water. He feeds off it, draws energy from it, and when it’s missing from his life, when he needs a jolt, he’ll go out of his way to create it, in any form he can find it, against any target that presents itself, including Gold Star families and fellow Republicans crucial to his election hopes. (In recent days he’s even tried to pick fights with fire marshals, for goodness sakes.)
The prospect of conflict gives Trump a reason for getting up in the morning, which also explains his habit of posting something angry and outrageous on Twitter long before 7 a.m., just to get his day started right. It’s his large pot of dark, black coffee. It puts that grim smile on his face.
As I write this — and it changes quickly — we are once again at the Chastened Donald point in the Trumpian mood swing, the point at which he placates staff and family by telling them that, OK, he knows that he needs to tone it down and be a good boy. But as we know by now, Chastened Donald is a temporary aberration. Like any junkie, pretty soon he starts looking for his next fix, and who knows where he’ll find it.
Conflict is crucial to him because only through constant conflict can he constantly reinforce his self-image as a winner. And when he picks a fight and loses? Oh boy.
He lost his battle against the Khan family — he lost it badly — and you can tell it just eats at him. He wants so badly to re-engage, to correct the injustice and humiliation visited upon him, and I guarantee he will return to it over and over again, like picking at an unhealed scab, in the weeks and months to come.
And if losing to the Khans can drive Trump batty, imagine what losing to Hillary Clinton will do to him between now and November.
It is inconceivable to me to want to put a child like this in the Oval Office. His reluctant enablers in Washington, the Paul Ryans and Mitch McConnells and Marco Rubios of the world, tell themselves and the voters that once Trump is elected president, they’ll be able to manage him, as if that were true and as if we should somehow find that reassuring.
Well, it isn’t true and it isn’t reassuring. The executive branch was not designed to serve as some grand kindergarten to manage the neuroses of a conflict junkie. When the founders drew up our constitutional system of checks and balances, they did so as a guarantee against accidents. They did not contemplate that we might consciously install a person as president whom we knew beforehand was temperamentally unfit to hold it, a person elected with a mandate to pull the whole system down.
Like the founders, I too used to think that such a thing would be impossible. Then again, I also used to admire John McCain, even though we disagreed politically. That changed after his selection of Sarah Palin to be his running mate, to be the proverbial one heartbeat away. In my naivete, I had thought Palin’s nomination would stand forever as the ultimate act of cynicism and political irresponsibility, of risking deep harm to the nation in order to pursue personal ambition for power.
I look at those in Republican leadership today — those who know better, who see the danger and yet stay silent — and I understand that putting Palin one heartbeat from the presidency was nothing in comparison.
