Trump's Alaska debacle couldn't have gone any worse, or any better

I continue to think people are overcomplicating Donald Trump's relationship with murderous Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. It's certainly possible that Putin has "leverage" over Trump, in the same way that twenty other foreign governments likely have leverage; Trump is a simple man, even simpler than simple, and all it takes to have leverage over the man is to have something that he wants.

But the dynamic between Trump and Putin comes from the simpleness of the man, not the leverage. Trump is, unquestionably, a malignant narcissist. There's simply no argument to be made about that; he's a textbook example of the condition. He is me-obsessed to the point of social dysfunction, incapable of empathy, sociopathic in his every relationship.

I can't imagine there's any adult American who has not, at one time or another, been obliged to deal with a similarly toxic coworker or boss. These are not rare traits, and the only thing that sets Trump apart from the others is that he pegs the needle in the severity of the conditions and yet grew up too rich and too privileged to suffer from any of the usual consequences.

The world exists for Donald Trump. That is the conceit that lies at the center of the man's brain; every other neuron is tied to that one, and every decision made is made by that one, and the photons his eyes see and the sounds his ears hear and the smells he smells are all filtered and re-interpreted so that they either match the conceit or, if that is not possible, shoved off into the great bin of Things That Are Probably Conspiracies.

I know this sounds ridiculous, and I have no way to convince you it is true. But I am quite certain that Trump believes himself to be the only real person in a world populated, Truman Show-style, solely with props and actors there to provide ambiance as he glides from hobby to impulse to whim to compulsion. Put him in a situation where he is not the sole agent—one where other individuals have power to bend the plot themselves, regardless of what he himself might want—and he struggles to function.

That is when he breaks. He breaks, and since he cannot comprehend what is going on his brain has to spend a great deal of time circuitously re-re-interpreting what happened until it can settle on a new version where he is again the main character and everyone else is living their lives to either support him or obstruct him.

To Trump, those are the only two sorts of people. He sorts the world according to who likes him and who does not, defined solely as "willing to do what I want" and "refusing to do what I want."

And, as Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, and nearly every Republican officeholder of note can tell you, the distinctions are purely situational. There's nothing you might have done to him in the past that you can't fix by groveling in the present. There's no level of past sycophancy that will save you if you refuse to do something he wants now.

Think back to past toxic relationships you yourself have endured—that one positively malevolent co-worker or boss, the one you will remember forever. Most individuals who fit under the umbrella of "toxic" have very, very distinct social patterns.

1. They tend to be horribly abusive to people they either have power over (subordinates) or who have no power over them (service workers, for example.)
2. They tend to bow and scrape meticulously, and often ostentatiously, to people who have power over them (supervisors) or who they are seeking favors from (coworkers of equal rank.)

I've probably referenced the story a dozen times over the years, but my own example would be meetings I once had with a middlingly famous Hollywood film producer who was infamous for his abuse of all those around him. When my team went into his offices, you could hear a pin drop—nobody spoke. The first words the producer's aide told us before the meeting was a nearly teary-eyed plea to please try very hard not to piss the important person off. The producer came in, was an absolute ass to everybody he made contact with, and stormed off again to the visible relief of everyone else in the room, who apparently thought that counted as the meeting "going well."

We had a second meeting a few weeks or months later, and this meeting included both the producer-asshole and his partner in the project, director James Cameron. And the big-shot producer-asshole spent the whole of the meeting being smiles and sunshine and kissing James Cameron's feet and heaping praise on James Cameron whenever James Cameron asked a question or made a comment and sweet merciful crap, the man came off not as a bigshot producer but as a sex worker desperately trying to score a paid night with James Cameron.

It was nearly hilarious, but when the meeting ended our team was rushed from the building by the same producer-asshole top aide because apparently I had made the mistake of speaking to James Cameron in the meeting and nobody was supposed to actually speak to James Cameron except the producer-asshole himself, so producer-asshole was about one waving-goodbye-to-James-Cameron minute away from a tantrum that was going to shake his little studio-lot bungalow down to its foundations. But don't worry, said the aide. I'll smooth it over, but you need to leave right now.

That's what toxic management looks like, and bless you if you haven't had a dozen similar experiences. The goal of the malignant narcissist is to climb the ranks. They do not see their jobs or relationships as jobs or relationships, but as stepping stones to the next "rank" of job or relationship, repetitively, forever. They crave the attention of the more powerful, and claw towards it, and the moment they get it they harm everyone who got them there while aiming to be more powerful than that.

Malignant narcissists are simple, simple people. All of their cleverness is used up calculating who they need to be nice to and who they can be cruel to, every day, all the time, to the point where they have very little brain left when it comes to understanding things like how tariffs work or who started which wars. Donald Trump is even simpler than that, and his fetish with Putin has always boiled down to a simple calculation.

Putin, a dictator, oligarch, and international crime boss, is in a position to do favors for Trump. Putin has authority that Trump himself envies—no, that Trump has been obsessed with.

Putin is richer than Trump. To Trump, who is obsessed with wealth as the only score by which success can be measured, that makes him better than Trump, and Trump wants desperately to climb to the rank where he, too, is not just scoreboard-toppingly rich but has full authority over laws, life, and death.

Those are the world figures that Trump, even as ostensible U.S. president, invariably fawns over. The North Korean dictator who has both ample beachfront property and the power to brutally murder anyone who offers the slightest insult. Putin, who controls what the press says about him and who regularly kills off those that oppose him either politically or financially. He praised Chinese leader Xi Jinping for his "iron fist," and we have all heard him hump the leg of Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, infamous for an extrajudicial killing spree against "suspected" drug dealers.

All of these people have what Trump himself thinks he ought to have, as the main character of the world: The right to fire, disappear, or murder any human whose presence conflicts with the vision Trump has of his world. They have the thing that Trump's brain has always told him he would have too, if it weren't for the meddling of all the bastards who have refused to give him Emmys, and Oscars, and Nobel Peace Prizes.

What do the leaders of Europe have, in comparison? Regulations that keep him from committing crimes. Bank accounts of hardly any note. Limited power, with parliamentary systems that curb their whims and national press corps that remain both critical and unmurdered.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy is, in Trump's eyes, hardly a person worth mentioning, much less supporting. And this has not a damn thing to do with the war; if Zelenskyy was the president of France, Trump would treat him no better and no worse. Trump does not show contempt for U.S. allies because he has some contorted political reason for loathing them; he treats allied countries with contempt because they have nothing to offer him, personally, and that is as far as his fractured brain ever gets.

But he can't stop slobbering over Putin for the same reason: Putin has engineered what Trump considers to be his own perfect world, Putin has arguably much more power than Trump himself, in that he can commit crimes and murder enemies. Putin is the CEO that Trump has always wanted to be, and like the shittiest coworker you've ever known, Trump doesn't mind setting everything around him on fire if it might help him achieve that.

There are no hidden motives here. There's no secret cleverness on Trump's part. The man is too stupid to be effectively blackmailed, because there's very little evil Trump does that he hasn't himself boasted of at one point or another. If you presume that every waking moment of the man's life is devoted to self-satisfaction and self-aggrandizement no matter how horrific the consequences might be to everyone who is not him, you will never go wrong.

He is not bright. He has no hidden dimensions. He quite obviously has dementia. His family has all but abandoned him for their own self-preservation; now that Ivanka is a billionaire in her own right, thanks to Saudi generosity, she has no particular need to be the interventionist keeping daddy's worst delusions from being acted on.

Trump wants an end to Russia's invasion of Ukraine because he believes people will praise him for achieving it, and by "people" he means the ones he sees on Fox News, not the ones dying in trenches or to Russian bombs. He wanted a military parade because that is what the people he admires have; he wants the military to confront protesters because that is what his favorite dictators would do and he thinks, not without reason, that the power to mold the world entirely to his liking can be reached by following the steps that Putin and others have mapped out for him.

But there is no grand conspiracy behind any of it. He is just a stupid and venal man, one who has risen to power because stupid and venal men have been all the rage in American power circles for some time now.