Victim of his own gaslighting

Trump is not someone else's problem

Is it possible for someone to gaslight himself?

Beyond Donald Trump's fanatical base, how many people seriously believe genocide against white South Africans is occurring? How many believe accepting a Boeing aircraft from Qatar does not violate the Constitution's Emoluments clause? How many believe Harvard is 'coordinating' in some nefarious way with China?

Trump apparently thinks he can win as long as he is never embarrassed. After repeatedly insisting tariffs were paid by the other country, he switched to telling Walmart to "eat the tariffs." This is government according to whim, not policy.

To be sure, bullying and lies have taken him far. Four months into his second term, he has done extensive damage to the federal government despite a steady stream of adverse court rulings. Few congressional Republicans have been willing to stand up to him. Yet he is the object of mockery around the world, to the point where South African President Cyril Ramaphosa drolly apologized for not having a plane to give him.

Trump's mental decline was displayed at West Point in a rambling commencement address that mentioned trophy wives, drag queens and Al Capone, repeated his claim that America is being ripped off by NATO, and criticized diversity programs in front of the diverse graduating class.

The world's most powerful man, even after demanding a North Korea-style military parade for his birthday, cannot stop whining about his personal grievances. He routinely insults journalists who dare to treat him non-worshipfully. Throwing a fit whenever someone calls him out on his endless grifting is no display of strength.

On one hand, he portrays himself as a world-straddling leader. On the other, he often says he has no idea when asked about actions of his own administration, as if he is a random passerby. Which is he?

His motto appears to be, "The buck stops anywhere and everywhere else."

What is worse is that so many regard this as normal. "Oh, that's just Donald." I'm sorry, I thought you had to be at least 35 to be president. Trump acts more like a 4-year-old playing with a loaded gun someone left on the coffee table. Is this the Oops administration?

In fact, what is going on is not an accident. It makes no decent sense to rob millions of their medical care and nutritional assistance while denying that you are doing it and treating them as parasites. By the way, if we are concerned about parasites, what about Elon Musk, who hid behind talk of "government efficiency" while protecting his own business interests with the government and harming competitors?

We should all be embarrassed at Trump's ambush of Ramaphosa in the Oval Office with disinformation about a nonexistent genocide of Afrikaners.

If Trump were seriously concerned about genocide, he should denounce the mass starvation Israel is causing in Gaza. At the very least, it is engaged in ethnic cleansing.

The Associated Press reports that Israeli soldiers have routinely used Palestinians—whom they call mosquitoes—as human shields during the war in Gaza.

The fact that Hamas is a terrorist organization does not make Bibi Netanyahu a good guy. Sometimes one must call a pox on both houses.

Our fealty to our values is tested not when things are easy, but when they are hard.

Trump, untutored in verbal discipline, refers to his political opponents as traitors and terrorists to evade responsibility and feed his angry base. If you reflexively accuse me of antisemitism for condemning Israeli war crimes, aren't you doing the same thing as Trump? Palestinians are a Semitic people too.

Trump's attempt to cancel visas for Harvard's international students has been temporarily blocked by a federal judge. Along with press freedoms, academic freedom is one of the first targets in the fascist playbook. If Trump's professed concern for Jewish student safety were sincere, he would hardly have dined with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and Hitler admirer Kanye West.

Trump and his allies seek to erase the ugly aspects of America's history, which includes not only slavery and Jim Crow but the Trail of Tears and the internment of Japanese Americans in camps during World War II.

We are not so fragile that we will break by confronting our history with honesty instead of hagiography. We do not vindicate our values by invoking immigration status or offensive op-eds instead of race to justify denying people due process.

Our nation's values live or die in us. If we leave evil for others to face down, we are lost.

Richard J. Rosendall is a writer and activist at [email protected].
Copyright © 2025 by Richard J. Rosendall. All rights reserved.