How a Malignant Narcissist Could Successfully Handle the Coronavirus
By Al Franken, Al Franken's Website
22 August 20
It should be of no surprise that a great majority of the men who have sought
and successfully attained the office of president have been narcissists.
What most Americans would be surprised to learn is that a number of even our
most successful and admired presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, for example,
were themselves archetypal malignant narcissists. It is said that it was
impossible to get through a dinner party without TR somehow working the
conversation to the number of Spaniards he slaughtered "leading" the charge
up San Juan Hill.
And yet Teddy Roosevelt was an enormously successful and consequential
president by anyone's account, especially his own.
Presidential scholars like Michael Beschloss will tell you that the
difference between a successful malignant narcissist like, say, two-term
racist Andrew Jackson, and abject failures like one-term racist James
Buchanan has always come down to the same single factor - intelligence.
The sad fact is that our country's horribly inept and tragic response to
this pandemic could have been avoided by a malignant narcissist of merely
average intelligence. What was needed back in January and February of this
year was a president just smart enough to understand that successfully
handling our greatest crisis since World War II would have assured his
reelection in the fall.
Even the laziest malignant narcissist would have realized that the nation
would rally around a leader who openly acknowledged the enormous gravity of
the pandemic - as many tens of millions of Americans had well before the
president himself finally conceded the obvious. Even just a moderately
intelligent malignant narcissist would then have understood that he should
turn for guidance to science rather than his son-in-law.
All malignant narcissists are completely lacking in empathy, the one quality
that most Americans believe is essential to a successful leader. But those
Americans are dead wrong. Some of our most beloved presidents have been
smart enough to know that fake empathy can be every bit as effective as the
real thing, if not more so. Take, for example, Founding Father Thomas
Jefferson, admired for the noble sentiment he so eloquently expressed in his
Declaration of Independence - "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that
all men are created equal."
We know now, of course, that Jefferson believed no such thing. Our third
president was, in fact, a slaveholder who fathered six children with Sally
Hemings, a human being he enslaved and exploited sexually from the time she
was a fourteen-year-old child. Jefferson's intelligence, eloquence, and fake
empathy - each strategically deployed to disguise his own monstrous
narcissism - have inspired our nation's highest and, as yet, tragically
unfulfilled aspirations.
It is far too late in the game for Donald Trump to feign empathy, though it
is entirely possible that he does not know that. If polling numbers stay
where they are today, a desperate Trump may very well try faking empathy as
an "October Surprise." In my opinion, that tactic would almost certainly
backfire with his most loyal base - angry male xenophobes, themselves
narcissists who believe that other people's misfortunes are always entirely
of their own making.
If I were advising Trump, which I most certainly am not, I would make an
equally radical suggestion, but one that just might work. Fake humility.
Why, you might ask, would fake humility be any more effective than fake
empathy? Throughout history, president after president has shown that
pretending to humbly admit error is a much easier sell than suddenly
feigning empathy for people for whom he has heretofore shown nothing but
utter contempt. Indeed, while many Americans share Trump's complete
inability to put themselves in other people's shoes, almost all do, however,
regret serious mistakes in their own lives. And while they themselves would
never admit their own transgressions to another living soul, they often
admire those who do, whether or not the apologies are sincerely given.
My advice to Trump would be to ask the networks for a half-hour in prime
time from the Oval Office. There, laying on thick the aforementioned fake
humility, he would confess to the American people that he is well aware of
the many tragic, boneheaded mistakes he has regretfully made in his handling
of the pandemic and that he has decided to start relying solely on
scientifically sound advice from people with postgraduate degrees in
medicine and bioscience from fully-accredited universities.
Massive federal funding would soon flow to faster and more accurate testing,
ramped-up contact tracing, and a well-executed protocol for isolating those
who test positive.Patriotic public service announcements would call on all
Americans to wear masks, wash their hands with hot water and soap, and
socially distance from others. Within weeks Americans would begin to see a
sharp decline in infections, hospitalizations, and senseless fatalities. The
cable news channels, always looking to boost ratings, would applaud Trump's
initiatives and excitedly predict that the presidential race would soon
tighten to a dead heat.
Trump's only hope is to stop listening to the sad losers who have been
advising him so disastrously. Now is his last chance to prove to Americans
that he is the latest in a line of savvy malignant narcissists whom the most
respected presidential historians consider to be among our greatest
presidents - Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, and, yes,
George Washington.
The only question now is whether Donald Trump is smart enough to take my
advice. I think he is!