Donald Trump has no friends

| 6:30 am EDT June 11, 2018
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Last night Donald Trump (or whoever might be tweeting on his behalf at this point) went on yet another bender and blurted out “Sorry, we cannot let our friends, or enemies, take advantage of us on Trade anymore.” It’s still far from clear why he thinks “Trade” should have been capitalized. But it got me thinking. Trump in fact has no friends – not at an international, political, personal, or criminal level. And it may actually tell us a lot about what comes next.

Malignant narcissistic sociopaths don’t have friends, of course. But the smart ones figure out the importance of faking friendship and creating the illusion of loyalty, so they can cash in on it when needed. Donald Trump has only ever halfway figured this out. On a personal scale, he’s kept villains like Roger Stone and thugs Michael Cohen close to him, so he can get them to do his dirty work. But if he didn’t bother to save his loyal henchman Michael Flynn with a pardon, he’s not going to save Stone or Cohen either, and they’re likely on their way to figuring it out.

On a world scale, Trump has struggled with the friendship thing as well. Initially he understood that the leaders of the United States’ allies would have to play nice to him because he was the (pretend) President, and he knew he could take advantage of that a little bit. He pressured them all into visiting him at the White House, which vaguely legitimized his otherwise illegitimate occupation of the White House. But now that he can’t twist their arms into handing him a “victory” on trade, he’s blowing up at all of them, and they’re pushing back in kind.

Even on a domestic political level, Donald Trump and his goons have taken their antics so far that suddenly Paul Ryan has been forced to confirm there was no FBI spy in the Trump campaign, even as Lindsey Graham has found himself defending porn star Stormy Daniels. Trump can’t even keep the peace with his fellow Republicans. But then again, they were never his friends to begin either.

And so, as Donald Trump puts the last of his few remaining chips down on the idea that he can convince spitefully unstable North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un to hand him a victory for no particular reason, what stands out is that Trump truly has no friends – on any level. He’s going into this desperate stunt all alone. Sure, Vladimir Putin is lurking in the shadows of every move that Trump makes. But Putin isn’t his friend either, and he’ll dump Trump if and when he feels he has to. People like Trump don’t have friends – and to succeed without any friends, you’ve got to be a lot smarter than Donald Trump is.