What’s really wrong with Donald Trump
One of the most useful and enduring ideas to emerge from the pop psychology fad of the 1960s was Transactional Analysis, or TA. TA divides the ego-in-action into three types, Parent, Adult and Child. We are said to be in a Parent or Adult or Child state of being when we exhibit certain behaviours.
These three states of being are neither good nor bad in and of themselves, but tools we all employ to negotiate interactions with other human beings. Just as a screwdriver can be used to fix an appliance or scratch a neighbour’s car, they can be used in good ways and not so good ways.
Simplistically, we use our Parent state when we discipline or teach, our Adult state when we discharge our personal and professional responsibilities and our child state when we play. Misuse occurs when the Parent is vindictive or cruel, when the Adult is cold, indifferent or arbitrary, and when the Child is more childish than child-like.
The unloveliest human impulses live in the Parent, and it is the Parent from which we get tyrants and abusers. When the Parent at its worst is combined with the Child at its worst, we get a pouty, whiny, vindictive, hateful monster.
You see where I am going with this. I cannot think of a single instance when the pouty, whiny, vindictive, hateful monster who unlawfully usurped the White House has ever been in an Adult state. Even when Trump is reading a speech from a teleprompter, you can tell that his inner Monster (the Parent at its worst) and inner Brat (the Child at its worst) are bursting to come out and hurt someone for some insult, real or imagined. And with Trump they invariably do come out when he goes off script.
From the standpoint of Transactional Analysis, Trump is the most dangerous possible combination of traits at their worst for a president of the United States. We need an Adult in the White House. Instead we have a mewling, thin-skinned, immature, hateful, vindictive man-baby with more power at his command than anyone else on the face of the earth.
Say what you will about the presidents in my lifetime, from Eisenhower to Biden they mostly transacted the business of the presidency as Adults. Trump never has. I don’t believe he ever will. His Adult is dead, if it existed at all.
Trump is like Anthony from the Twilight Zone episode of “It’s a Good Life,” a Child with far more power than any Parent but without the restraint of a mature Adult to reign him in. The horrors and injustices he visits on the townsfolk he lives among are beyond the reach of nightmares.
Again, Trump is what happens when you combine the worst of the Adult with the worst of the Child and give him vast power to do harm. He will use that power to hurt people because, as a dysfunctional Child and monstrous Adult, it’s the only transaction he understands. And that, brothers and sisters, is what we have to live with.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.