Trumping Honesty

Donald Trump just fired FBI director Jim Comey. And despite Trump’s own tweets attempting to cast this as some kind of selfless defense of Hillary (and valiant exposure of liberal hypocrisy), it is clearly anything but.

Dems have been complaining for months & months about Dir. Comey. Now that he has been fired they PRETEND to be aggrieved. Phony hypocrites!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 10, 2017

There’s the spin – a corrupt and treasonous President trying to tweet his way out of an obvious coverup attempt, as he fires the man in charge of investigating his own administration.

How the flip did we get here?

Donald Trump is fake news – we all know this. At the core of his being is a deep-seated falsehood that then permeates everything else he says and does. This is the trait of narcissists; driven by their own aggrandizement as the ultimate good, there is no such thing as truth. Relentless self-exaltation defines their reality. Neverending manipulation keeps the world revolving around their fragile ego.

The narcissist’s entire life is a post-truth existence, their entire worldview a wildly spun web of alternative facts.

The truth is not in them.

While watching CNN last night I heard statistics about a key Trumpian demographic – white, non-college educated males – responding in ever-increasing numbers that they do not believe Trump is honest or trustworthy. Those of us who have opposed Trump from the beginning, college educated or not, issue a resounding, “No duh.” It doesn’t take a degree to see. But still, this growing distrust of Trump is good.

Because there is nothing trustworthy about a narcissistic fool.

I have known a few pathological liars in my lifetime, one of them being a family member and church leader who emotionally and spiritually manipulated me and others for years. He was a dry drunk who never pursued recovery to a place of true healing. He replaced addiction to substances with addiction to spiritual obsessions and authoritarian control; and it destroyed our relationship in the end.

As I watch Donald Trump make a mockery of the very notion of honesty, in ways that seem to exponentially build as each week of his nascent administration passes, I can only lament the destruction he has wrought in his own life, in the lives of so many around him, and, now, in the lives of countless American citizens and people the world over. We are those who worship a Messiah who declared himself to be the truth, who insisted the truth would set his followers free. Let’s remember that every time this man ups the ante on his embodiment of the lie.

Trumping honesty may let him tweet his way through a couple more controversies, but it won’t be long before he’s trapped by his own confounding and ridiculous web.