Donald Trump’s Life of Crime: Most Books Have No Idea – These Five Explain It Best

The Economist published a list this month titled “What to Read to Understand Donald Trump,” a list of five “how-to books” from the overflowing library of human volumes that, as the publishers say, “stay at the center of the American politics.” These include the first major book on Trump’s White House, Michael Wolff’s 2018″fire and fury“, and several other classics of this mini-genre: “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for America’s Meaning“ by John Sides, Michel Tesler and Lynn Vavreck; White House Memoirs of John Bolton, “The room where it happened“and two accounts of the end of Trump’s presidency,”Frankly, we won this election,” by Michael C. Bender, and more recently “Thank you for your servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the bid price” by Mark Leibovich.

Taken together, these five Trump World books capture much of the political intrigue, outrageous gossip, and inconsistent policymaking of Trump’s two presidential campaigns and his chaotic administration. But I would say they explain a lot more about the boss’s enablers and his MAGA supporters than about Trump himself, his 75 years of life, or his personal history.

If you want to understand Donald Trump’s personality and his interrelated behavior in business, politics, and crime, I would recommend this alternative list: five other books that provide meaningful and serious examinations of Trump’s socio-psychological makeup and his family, emotional and social development. :

From the point of view of criminology, which is my field, what is particularly interesting in these 10 books by Trump is that, with the exception of those by Bolton, Johnston and Cohen, there are no substantive discussions of Trump’s obvious corruption, or more than cursory examinations of his criminal career in business, politics and government.

Without a less than superficial appreciation or understanding of the nature of the crimes of the powerful, their habitual patterns of lawlessness, and the normalization of these crimes – not to mention the systemic resistance to holding powerful perpetrators accountable – there is a danger palpable that people will not understand that, like other criminals, they are created based on their personal social status and experiences of social identification. And further, that the types of crimes committed by the most powerful offenders also result from their personal biographies, and in particular their experiences with crime control and law enforcement (if any).

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Without this level of understanding of Donald Trump’s etiological journey of criminality and impunity, particularly regarding how he became the most powerful person on earth for four years, most people see it in through a lens of cognitive dissonance. They are likely to view Trump as mentally ill or deeply irrational – an inherently evil individual or some sort of “born criminal”. From this perspective, whatever else Trump may be, he cannot be a “rational” actor.

I would emphatically say that is not true. More importantly, this discourse focused on Trump’s perceived madness, ignorance, or immorality helps to dampen, both socially and legally, more accurate perceptions of his rationality, intentionality, and level of culpability.

Consider Lloyd Green’s book review for Michael Wolff’s third Guardian Trump book, “Landslide: The Last Days of the Trump Presidency.” This is Wolff’s best and “most alarming” book, writes Green, and “says a lot,” especially since “Fire and Fury.” had both “infuriated a president” and “fuelled a publishing boom”.

Wolff’s new book describes Trump’s “anger-filled final days in office,” exemplified by an interview Wolff held in the lobby of Mar-a-Lago. Wolff is simply allowing Trump to rant a “classic Trumpian score-settling exercise,” without even trying to fend off the cascade of lies. As Wolff admits, he was hesitant to interrupt or ask serious questions because he knew the interview would have ended abruptly if he had. So Trump is just babbling nonsense, with no obvious purpose for either man.

As I wrote elsewhere of Wolff’s findings, he “argues unconvincingly that the Donald was too mad” to be truly guilty of plotting a coup or other criminal conduct. Wolff views Trump as experiencing “swings of irrationality and mania” and as “someone who left reality completely behind. Trump was incapable of forming a specific intent, he argues, based on “calculated abuse of power and “coordinated”.

Wolff is not alone. Indeed, the multitude of books documenting Trump’s final days in office tend to agree on this analysis, as do most of the talking heads on cable television, with the obvious exception of those at Fox News. The consensus, more or less, is that Trump’s loss to “Sleepy” Joe Biden broke him, and his fantasies, as captured in the title of “Frankly, we won this election“, are proof that he was seriously mistaken, and not only acting deceived.

Here is a similar take from Kos every day on Trump’s books and election rants:

Losing the election detached him from whatever bits of reality his advisers had yet managed to bind him to, and he rode like a loose balloon with anger management issues. In the end he was (is) wallowing in the delusion, ordering staff to do impossible and/or illegal things, absolutely convinced that it was all a conspiracy and that anyone wasn’t telling him what he was up to. wanted to hear was in the game.

Allow me to strongly disagree and speak from the clinical evidence. Trump has never been attached to reality – but that doesn’t necessarily mean he believes in his own illusions. Likewise, while some of his presidential advisers may have resisted to varying degrees or repelled his more disorderly desires, they never tied him up or straitjacketed him. Some of his own Cabinet appointees saw his behavior as crazy or unstable from the start, and reportedly talked about invoking the 25th Amendment on several occasions – but never did.

For many years, perhaps his entire life, Trump was bipolar, irrational, paranoid, narcissistic and sociopathic. These qualities do not necessarily mean that he is delusional or legally insane, or that he lacks criminal intent. Trump knows as well as anyone, and probably better than most, the differences between “fake news” and legitimate information.

But here’s what’s most important: Trump knows he’s guilty of all the crimes he’s been charged with. He also knows he has no real defense for any of these probable or potential charges, which is why he so constantly seeks to lie, obfuscate, and delay. He also understands that his best defense, at least in the court of public opinion, is violent offense: Ever the master of projection, he accuses his legal accusers of sinister and conspiratorial motives.

Trump feels no empathy for any of the January 6 rioters and doesn’t care about their legal setbacks, judgments or penalties. Whether they are insurgents or FBI agents, Trump is simply using them instrumentally, as he uses everyone else, to satisfy his bottomless narcissism and selfish needs. This is the modus operandi of a sociopath without the psychological ability to identify with either of these two groups, or literally any other, including the “base voters” of the Trump cult.

To put it another way, Trump is deceptive, but not deceived or delusional. Unlike Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Trump doesn’t really believe he won the 2020 election or that it was rigged against him. Although he may post on his social media platform that he “loves” the January 6 rioters, he doesn’t really believe they are “nice” people. He also doesn’t believe for a second that ‘evil’ FBI agents planted classified documents in his Mar-a-Lago office, or that GOP Senate Leader Mitch McConnell is a ‘DEATH WISH’. political or otherwise.

He’s a con man, a performance artist, and a demagogue who understands the value of never publicly giving up on his stories, no matter how absurd or blatantly untrue. He managed to suck Michael Wolff, along with many others, into believing that he was so deranged that he was incapable of forming the intent to stage a coup, let alone stage one. .

Oh good? He was the man who conducted superficial presidential business every day while watching the tube, eating fast food and tweeting 24/7, except when he played at least 27 holeshots. golf a week or that he was on the campaign trail delivering “greatest hits”. ” monologues of sheer nonsense to the faithful whom he regarded with obvious contempt.

In the immortal words attributed to PT Barnum (among others), “There’s a sucker born every minute.” And the former president who was impeached twice and escaped unscathed knows how to spot them.