Portrait of a Psychopath (and not Orban, for a change)

Jane Mayer: Donald Trump’s Ghostwriter Tells It All
The New Yorker July 25 2016.

What a shocking article! And yet we all knew it already. It has been there all along in every word Trump mouthed, every grotesque grimace, every vulgar gesture, and the limitless emissions of nasty, mendacious braggadocio and shameless hype. And the utter vacuity.

Schwartz, for all his purported pangs of conscience, is not worthy of sympathy for his part in this lurid lay of lies. He is most Trump-like when he effects remorse for having “made” Trump: No, he took some of Trump’s vile tricks and made them his own, using them to spin a tall tale that would enrich them both. He became a Trump(et). The ghost in the megalomane. It’s no wonder that his confessions are now being channelled by Jane Mayer rather than being told in his own voice. It is indeed his own credibility that he has done in with his self-serving strumpetry. (And yet it’s better that he’s decided to come clean, and now, before the election, rather than after. If (and only if) he is genuinely repenting, his own story has a tinge of tragedy, whereas Trump’s is all heinousness and hubris.)

But at least Schwartz is not running for president of the United States. Surely the most shocking part of all this — and the one that is the most to blame — is this charlatan’s open-eyed, cheering following. Has the US indeed become a Trump nation, ethically and aesthetically blind, oblivious to all this, or an accomplice in it?

Yet the homology with Hungary’s Viktor Orban is loud and clear too: the lies, the hype, the manipulation, the philistinism, the megalomania… the psychopathy. And a fair harbinger of what’s in store in the U.S. if Trump’s tranche of the electorate prevails.