By Hal Brown
The drawing below is what caught my attention in The Washington Post (subscription article) this morning:
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| Top caption: "Reporters inside the courtroom noted that Trump seemed disengaged with those around him during the arraignment. (Jane Rosenberg/Reuters)" Bottom: two screen grabs from when cameras were allowed in the courtroom. Click image above to enlarge. In the article there's another sketch by a different artist (click image to enlarge):  Many journalists have speculated on what they thought Trump felt during his arraignment. Of course they don't know. They are basing assumptions based on what a normal person would feel. Of all the images from the video coverage this is only one shows Trump outwardly expressing what one can reasonably construe as a feeling:  I wrote about how people are making assumptions that they know, or think they know, how Trump is feeling twice in the past few days.
Today we have non-written speculation in the form of drawings which, unless Trump changed his facial expressions drastically, exaggerate his feelings. All I am attempting to convey is that those writing about or talking about how Trump feels ought to be more precise in using modifiers like "probably" and "a typical person" since Trump has an unusual personality. He doesn't experience his external world the way the vast majority of people do. In this way he is more like the most ardent members of his cult who perceive reality in a distorted, sometime even clinically paranoid way. My own educated guess, as someone who was a psychotherapist for over 40 years, is that Trump is most likely engaging in psychological denial and keeping his anxiety buried (i.e., unconscious), but that for fleeting moments it leaks into awareness. Even if he doesn't actually think about his plight he may not be able to totally control his facial expressions. He's been an actor all of his adult life, a performance artist. He's no Robert DeNiro who is known not only for playing many kinds of characters, from Travis Bickel to Frankenstein's monster, for staying in character even when the cameras aren't rolling. Trump has played two similar public roles: whatever he was supposed to be on "The Apprentice" and, as a politician, the uber-confident self-aggrandizing macho-man. I noted in a previous blog that there is something that Trump can't control. These are his dreams. Whether nightmares or anxiety dreams of being helpless and being harmed, these would show what is in his unconscious mind. Unless he sleeps with Melania (debatable) nobody knows if he wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. --------------------------------------------------------------------   Thanks for reading. Scroll down to make comments and share on social media. The archives and tags are on the bottom.  |
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