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8 year oldI’m no advice columnist, and normally I wouldn’t use this space for relationship counseling, but here’s a small bit of wisdom that I’ve offered to a few friends over the years and that might be useful to Republicans in Washington.
When you’re deciding whether to plunge into a marriage, don’t ever make the mistake of thinking you’re marrying the person your partner is going to become, once he or she finally grows up or finds that perfect job or stops making meth in the basement. The only person you’re marrying is the one sitting right in front of you, and while some people do improve over time, only a fool would count on it.
On second thought, this advice probably comes too late for the Paul Ryans and Bob Corkers of the world, who were exactly this foolish when they wrapped their arms around Donald Trump and said: “I do.” But you know, they never asked.
You see, Republican leaders saw Trump reaching out for an insider like Paul Manafort – who ran Republican campaigns back when balloon d-rops were considered high-tech – and started using words like “pivot” and “coachable.” They wanted to believe the boorish Trump was like a political Bob Dylan, able to go f-rom freewheelin’ to born-again without missing a beat.
“I can be more presidential than anybody,” Trump promised. I can be a totally faithful husband. You wait.
But several weeks after “Never Trump” started giving way to “Trump, I guess,” this better, more sober-minded Trump was nowhe-re in sight. And then came the meltdown this week, after Trump said the Indiana-born judge in the civil suit against Trump University should recuse himself because he’s of Mexican descent and probably resents that the offspring of his ancestors are now going to be forced to build a giant wall at their own expense.
The problem with this statement isn’t merely its racism. It’s that Trump’s philosophy, if one can call it that, would negate the very idea that is America’s most important contribution to the advancement of humankind – that we are a citizenry defined by shared values, not by inherited identities.
In America, alone among nations, whe-re you’ve been is not the sum of who you are. If Trump isn’t clear on that point (and nothing in his subsequent statements leads me to think he is), then he really has no business speaking to a social studies class, much less leading the free world.
In any event, Republican insiders now resemble Tom Hanks at that moment in “Apollo 13” when he realizes the capsule is adrift and the heat isn’t coming back on. The critical window between Trump’s effective nomination five weeks ago and next month’s convention is closing fast, and far f-rom projecting more gravitas, Trump seems bent on making a fool of every credible Republican who has stepped up to tepidly endorse him.
“I’m with racist!” blared Wednesday’s New York Daily News cover, over a picture of Speaker Ryan pointing to Trump. If you know Ryan at all, you know that had to feel like a horse kick in the solar plexus. But less than a week after endorsing Trump, the party’s elected leader refused to un-endorse him.
Deceived spouses always throw good money after bad. It’s hard to look in the mirror and admit you were had.
I’ll admit: I, too, thought Trump was capable of broadening his appeal. I thought this not because I presumed he had some inner Ronald Reagan lurking under that crass exterior, but because Trump is, if nothing else, a masterful entertainer and diviner of the marketplace, a man with no discernible ideology beyond his own self-promotion.
I assumed he might approach the fall campaign as he would another reality show. I assumed the angry, xenophobic Trump was a persona, soon to be replaced by the reformist, independent Trump. I expected him to re-spawn, like in a video game.
But here’s the thing Ryan and I both should have understood about Trump, and that now seems to me the central fact of his existence: He is man tragically enslaved to his own neediness.
Most politicians are driven, to some significant extent, by insecurity – the need to be loved and to have that love publicly affirmed. (A rare exception, as I’ve written, is Barack Obama, who could stand to crave a little more approval f-rom time to time.)
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