Trump vs Trump

It’s hard make sense of the world right now, isn’t it?

Just over six month ago, Elon Musk and Donald Trump were bosom bussies. Now they’re at loggerheads—though at least they’ve stopped sniping at each other on social media.

Just a month ago, Trump was going to negotiate a permanent peace in the Middle East. A week ago, he dropped bombs on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

How can you make sense of all that? The best advice that I’ve seen recently is , “don’t even try”. I’ll explain why that advice makes sense to me, and what that implies for future events, after a quick review of some of the political chaos of the last six months.

Four months ago, Elon professed his platonic love for Trump:

That love had evaporated by the beginning of June. Much of Musk’s support for Trump came from Ttump’s stated desire to eliminate the government deficit—something which is a very bad idea, but at least Trump and Musk appeared to agree on it. Then Musk revolted over the “Big, Beautiful Bill”, which would increase the deficit substantially—something that Trump no longer seemed concerned with.

Trump alleged that Musk resigned because the BBB eliminated subsidies for electric vehicles:

Musk denied this:

Musk rightly asserted that Trump wouldn’t have won without his help:

Musk even threw in an accusation of pederasty from Trump’s association with Epstein, though that tweet was deleted. The social media hostilities then stopped.

But just as the fight with Musk settled down, Trump went from being the Peace President:

To the War President:

What caused this about face? This is one person’s opinion:

As a country, we are at war, and the man who led us into this war is a corrupt, degraded, ignorant know-nothing, who acted illegally to plunge us into a potentially catastrophic situation, without the consent of Congress, because, despite the fact that he is president of the United States of America, and arguably the most recognized figure on the planet, he wasn’t getting enough attention.

The author is obviously a Trump Hater. But she is also a Trump: Mary Trump, Donald niece. Her explanation for the war with Iran—and all the other craziness of the Trump administration, including the falling out with Musk and the on-again, off-again tariffs—is simply that they’re all driven by Trump’s need for attention.

If you haven't had a relationship with someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, then you might reject this analysis—surely there must be some geopolitical strategy involved? But if you have, as I did a couple of decades ago, then it’s easy to see that Mary Trump is right. What Trump has done, and will continue to do, is still crazy, but it’s also predictable. Trump will disturb any period of apparent tranquility after a crisis by starting another crisis, because that way, the news will be about him.

Mary Trump states that Donald Trump is driven:

by the most primitive impulses that center almost solely around protecting his fragile ego from humiliation (about which he has a pathological terror) and himself from the reality that he is a complete fraud.

We all need some degree of narcissism, to have an identity in the first place, and to be able to look after our interests. But narcissists like Trump split their grandiose narcissism in two, with extreme confidence projected outward to hide extreme inner self-doubt.

The self-image they project is that they are the best at everything, but at the same time, they are internally aware that they are frauds, and they’re terrified of being exposed and humiliated because of it. They crave attention, so that any period of peace, when people aren’t talking about them is, to them, dull. They’re only happy when they are the centre of attention, and they’ll deliberately start a fight to disturb that peace, and put themselves back in the limelight.

When a sane person first gets involved with a narcissist like Trump, they are initially seduced by their apparent confidence. I certainly was with my narcissistic partner two decades ago, and I could easily relate to Musk’s declaration of love for Trump in their early days.

Figure 1:Mary Trump’s book on how her toxic family created Donald Trump. https://www.amazon.nl/-/en/gp/product/B08B9XZWNN

But then the narcissist will do something that totally contradicts that external confidence, when some often trivial event exposes their inner fragility. It is normally expressed in a rage, which is directed at the people who profess love for them.

When you first experience this from a narcissist you’ve fallen in love with, it’s bewildering. Then, your shocked reaction triggers fear in the narcissist that you’ll abandon him (or in my case, her), and the rage is once again replaced with seductive love.

Ultimately, they will often deny that their abuse of you even occurred. They will recount events which you both experienced, with a version of the history that puts them entirely in the right, and you in the wrong. There’s simply no point in trying to correct the record with them, because the only record they’ll accept is one which puts them in the right, even when they were clearly in the wrong. Evidence is irrelevant.

This flip-flopping from love to rage, and rewriting of history so that they are always right, will never end, unless you end the relationship with the narcissist.

In my case, ending the relationship was relatively easy. But how do you end a relationship with the President of the United States? As long as Trump remains President, this flip-flopping will be inescapable. And it will happen with everything from economic policy to the prospect of nuclear war.

That’s where my own experience with a narcissist gives me some idea of what might happen next. You can’t do anything to stop the erratic, love-to-anger swings of a narcissist: you can only end their effect on you by leaving the relationship. But again, how do you end a relationship with the President of the United States?

This has two levels: the global and the personal.

At the global level, nations can only do that by disengaging from the USA, or by exploiting Trump’s weaknesses for their own benefit. Netanyahu appears to have done the latter with Trump and his attack on Iran’s nuclear program.

Mary Trump argues that the catalyst for bombing Iran was not any justified fear of the Iranian program, but the humiliation that Trump felt when the meme “TACO” surfaced: “Trump Always Chickens Out”. He showed it was false by bombing Iran. The real motivation was not to stop Iran from making an atomic bomb, but to get the media to drop the TACO meme and focus on him once more. Mary put it this way:

Only two days later, he ordered the attack on Iran. His allies would have us believe that Donald, a brilliant strategist, was faking us out. Sure. An infinitely more plausible explanation is that, on the one hand, he hates being challenged or contradicted, especially from those who almost always fall in line; therefore, he felt the need to double-down on his threats by carrying them out. On the other hand, Donald is a desperate black hole of need—by changing the narrative, he could make sure the spotlight turned back on him.

Iran did threaten to close the Straits of Hormuz, through which about 20% of the world’s oil is shipped. It hasn’t done so yet, probably because of the harm it would do to Iran’s own economy. China would suffer too—but the two countries could make the Straits less relevant if they built a pipeline from Iran to China. A proposal to build a pipeline between Iran and Pakistan has been around for almost 15 years, and has been comical thus far. But maybe Trump’s threat to Iran, combined with the brief Pakistan-India conflict, in which Pakistan performed much better than expected thanks to Chinese weapons, might lead to this project being revived, and extended by the Chinese. China is already Iran’s biggest trading partner, accounting for 1/3^rd of Iran’s total exports, with oil being about ¼ of that. An Iran-Pakistan-China oil pipeline could guarantee China a source of oil that would be independent of American actions against Iran.

The Iranian regime isn’t particularly fond of China, and vice versa, but becoming more interdependent on each other will reduce the influence that a Trump-led USA has over both of them. Trump could unintentionally create some strange diplomatic bedfellows.

China is doing its best to extricate itself from its relationship with the USA. America is still its biggest trading partner, accounting for 1/8^th of its total exports, but this is down from 1/5^th of China’s exports in 1993. That trend will accelerate because of Trump.

Europe is also aghast at his behaviour, and the volatility of a Trump-led USA might encourage Europe to reluctantly accept stronger ties with the more stable superpower of China.

At the personal level, it was easy for Musk to extricate himself from his role in the Trump administration, because he didn’t have a formal position anyway.

But what about the other people around Trump, especially those, like Vice-President Vance, whom Trump can’t personally get rid of? They can’t walk away from Trump like Musk did without ending their own power. But will they put up with the love-hate relationships they must be experiencing with him forever?

If Trump was winning in the polls, they’d probably hang on. But that’s the opposite of what’s happening. Trump fell into negative approval ratings less than 2 months after he took office, and he’s far below the level of his hated Democrat predecessors.

The negative trend is likely to continue, with his signature policy of being harsh on immigrants (and foreigners) affecting his base badly. The New York Times reports that farms are empty of migrant workers, who fear being deported by ICE if they go to work. Shelves may soon be empty of foodstuffs, and prices might rise as well, cutting into his urban MAGA base as well as undermining his rural strongholds.

Figure 2: The Economist magazine's Trump Approval Tracker https://www.economist.com/interactive/trump-approval-tracker

Will Republicans, who went with Trump as a sure-fire winner, stick with him, if they see annihilation facing them in forthcoming elections? The mid-terms, when 33 Senate and all 435 House seats are up for grabs, are still 16 months away. If Trump’s poll trend continues, then the pressure will be on to get rid of him well before his term expires in 2029.

The negative trend in his approval rating did reverse in his previous term—see Figure 3—but that term didn’t have anything like the Project 2025 turbo-charging his decisions, and nor was he as liberal with Presidential decrees as he has been in this term.

Figure 3: https://www.statista.com/statistics/666113/approval-rate-of-donald-trump-for-the-presidential-job/

If the Trump Eagle becomes the Trump Albatross, many Republicans who tolerated his narcissistic behaviour then, and have endured it to date now, may conclude that he has to go, for the survival of the Republican Party.

Trump won’t go in any way that heaps humiliation on top of him: that’s a given for a narcissist. But I expect that people of power inside the administration are already wondering how they can get rid of him.

The easiest route is one that does humiliate, but behind closed doors: show him the evidence of his alleged activities with Epstein. If there is still evidence of that, then it could be used to persuade Trump to withdraw “voluntarily”—though it’s also feasible that this evidence was used to manipulate him over Israel.

Obviously, I have no special skills to predict the future outcome here, as I can claim to have on more economic issues. But channelling my own experiences with a narcissistic partner, and the actions they led me to undertake to get away, I would not at all be surprised to see Trump be forced do a Nixon, and begrudgingly hand over control to his equivalent of Gerald Ford. We may well enter the 2028 electoral campaign with a President Vance at the helm, desperately trying to steady the Ship of State from Donald’s erratic path, to try to avoid the Republican Party being wiped out.