The Presidential Fabulist

The emptiness behind doors — Photo by Filip Kominik on Unsplash

From half a distance, Donald Trump keeps fascinating me. Frightening me mostly, to be honest, but there is also fascination about how he acts, what he does and how he relates. Especially to adversaries. People that do not agree with him one way or the other. Or even risk uttering something that will not align with his beliefs. And a question keep nagging me when I watch Donald Trump speak, or what one might call his eruptions.

Can he actually hear people who disagree with him? Hear what they are saying, and then understand what their words mean?

Again and again, he seems oddly incapable of listening when words arrive from outside the world he is constructing in real time, right there and then. Facts slide off, if they even are registered in the first place. Anger not only appears — it bursts out, just to stop whatever is expressed. And it works, for him. He does not have to listen to whatever it is. As if those were not arguments to consider but disturbances to remove. I guess other words, speaking of other worlds, pose threats, not as for you and me, something uncomfortable that we do not want to deal with, but threats to the very foundations of his idea of himself. His lifeworld. To let these words come near could be fatal, given the discomfort he displays. So, what do you do, if you can and are so inclined? You burst out, stopping the threat mid-air and mid-sentence.

For a long time, I thought of this simply as lying and manipulation; a conman doing his thing. But lying assumes something stable underneath. A shared reality. Something we agree upon. But I do not think there is anything there. Instead, I think it is just emptiness, or a chaotic blur. Somehow a void that cannot be discerned. Nothing… and thus possibly the notion of death. That there is nothing there waiting for him (except global condemnation for those who are lucky to outlive him, if that would count). Of course that must be very frightening.

So, what does he do? Well, he speaks a world into being, for him. His world, the way he wants it to be, and it appears in front of him as he speaks. A win against Iran… again (multiply with x for latest update). And it is continuous, as he moves through the world, without considering facts or other ways of looking at things than those he himself can imagine. Everything, just to avoid the void, his emptiness, so to speak.

More practically, the statements come first, often improvised along familiar lines. His reality follows. Or is expected to, judging from the way his mind seems to work. Yesterday’s claim can disappear if today requires another one. Or the next sentence. Consistency matters less than momentum. Certainty matters more than memory. Clutter doesn’t matter. And that is because the void must be filled. A constant uttering of words, because without them there is no world. There is nothing.

Thus, we can also understand what is at work when he fills his social accounts with tantrums, again and again and again. He just fills the void, in desperate attempts to evade the insight that death is there waiting. If you were a German philosopher, you might call this his Weltangst, which sounds much grander than the English existential anxiety. Trump would like that, as a side note. And because of that angst we must put up with his idiocies, in lack of a word strong enough, but thinking about it this way it gives at least me a pinch of satisfaction knowing he most probably suffers a great deal alone, badly, when the doors are shut behind him and he loses his breath.

So, the world seems to be remade as he speaks, and speech itself becomes reality. At least his reality. The reality for the rest of us is of little concern as it has no value. The world will be redone with yet other words soon, so what does reality matter?

And if someone lives inside a world of their own making, disturbance becomes difficult to tolerate. Institutions built around verification (courts, universities, scientific agencies, journalists, election officials) become something more than opposition. They become threats. Not because they disagree, but because they insist on another reality. They have a voice and their utterances are competing for that public space where words are expressed. So, the threat of Weltangst is not only in silence. It is also the words of others, and if you have the power, why would you tolerate them? Of course you would not. You use your power to shut them down. Whatever criticism that shutting down provokes does not matter, because in a moment you can fill the space again and again with your own ideas, your own words, your own reality, even though they rest on nothing that even come close to some kind of truth. But then, truth does not matter either. Not in your imagination. In your reality, the void is constantly filled with whatever is needed in the moment.

There should be a word for this, his position and what that position does, and I struggle to find one. Fabulist is a good one, but standing just as it is it is not enough, and I started to expand on that thought. Maybe there are different stages, levels of severity, or something similar, that could help us understand the position and what it does to the rest of the world? This is what I came up with.

At ground level you have the private fabulist (PF1). A person who lives at the outskirts of a social order, possibly the lowest level, just managing a personal life without any mayor influence on others. That is quite harmless, so we need to move forward.

Moving up the social order you might have the positioned fabulist (PF2). It is a person who works within relations to others and can have a limited mandate to influence other people. Here you find ordinary conmen and people who do harm to society but especially to those who come within their vicinity. The harm is directly related to personal contact within that social order that surrounds them.

But then we have the top of the social order. Here you will find the fabulist who is not just positioned but has influence beyond personal social contacts. He or she works within a system and bends that system towards the ideas he or she advances. If that person comes to the ultimate level, the power becomes really disturbing, and that is what I right now call the presidential fabulist (PF3).

Here we find Trump, at the level of a presidential fabulist. He is not only president of a country, but also in the sense of inhabiting the fullest and most powerful expression of the type. Someone with the authority not merely to tell stories, but to inflict harm on others at a scale far beyond personal reach, including waging war and destroying whatever good there is in the world — just to please himself and, possibly, keep the fear of the void in check.

I do not know if these stages hold at all, scientifically speaking, but to me they serve as a reference in order to differentiate between levels of, let’s be frank, madness. They also put into perspective the harm that can be done if we allow fabulists to not only have societal positions in general but also ultimate positions with way too much power for someone who cannot understand the world in any other terms than those he or she utters.

Here my ideas stop. I do not know how to handle these types, presidential fabulists in general and specifically Donald Trump, and it seems like many are at a loss in doing this as well. So, even if the stages can help us understand something a bit better, they cannot really help us with one of today’s most pressing questions: How should we handle a presidential fabulist? How do we shut that door permanently?