A Black Hole of Need

That's no way to live

This is not a big crowd.

When I was 16, my friends and I saw the movie Arthur with Dudley Moore so many times we basically had it memorized. In fact, when we went to the see it, we sometimes recited the dialogue out loud, which as you can imagine, everybody else who was there to see the movie really appreciated, especially if we’d broken into our parents' liquor cabinets first.

I've been thinking about one scene in Arthur in particular. It’s at the beginning of the movie, and in it, Arthur, who is very drunk, brings the prostitute he’s hired to the Plaza Hotel for drinks. On the way to their table, they run into his aunt and uncle.

He introduces his companion as a princess from a very small country in the West Indies. The reason I've been thinking about that scene is because of crowd sizes. Any reasonable person, anybody with an ounce of maturity, anybody with any understanding of how politics works in this country, knows that crowd size has absolutely nothing to do with what happens on election day—which brings us to Donald.

As you’re probably aware, Donald has been equating his crowd sizes with his electoral power, even with his worth as a human being. By the same token, he’s denigrated anybody who he claims can’t draw big crowds—as he accused Pres. Biden of being unable to do in 2020 even though we were in the middle of a global pandemic. We know that was one of his biggest criticisms against President Biden before he started attacking President Biden for being three years older than he was.

Well, things have changed, haven't they? In the three weeks since Vice President Kamala Harris has taken Biden’s place at the top of the Democratic ticket, this whole election has been turned on its head. In terms of the rallies—and the size, energy, and enthusiasm of the crowds—it's been a 180-degree turn. Donald isn't exactly handling it well. At his so-called “press conference” last week, he actually claimed, contrary to all available evidence, including the evidence we could see with our own eyes, that his crowd sizes continue to be the biggest ever in history.

He even invoked January 6th, and said with a straight face, that there were more people there—if not more, on that day then there were for Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Let's ignore for the moment, just how insulting and disgraceful it is that he dared to compare Martin Luther King's just profound speech about race in America to Donald’s inciting of an insurrection and focus on a lie so egregious and easily disprovable that it borders on the delusions—the crowd sizes.

One reason Donald continues to perpetuate such ridiculous, easy-to-fact-check lies, is because he's desperate. He can’t he fill seats anymore. His ramblings are boring and repetitive; he's been saying the same thing over and over for almost ten years and when he’s not talking about darkness and division, he’s talking about himself—how poorly he’s been treated, how unfair it all is. He has no positive vision and he has nothing to offer in terms of policy.

The real problem, though, is that there's somebody who actually is drawing massive crowds—and that's his opponent, a strong Black woman named Kamala Harris. Her crowds are literally rocking the rafters. And she's beating him. Worse, she's beating him in his own game and according to the metrics that most matter him.

So, why is crowd size so important to Donald, as if he believes it’s a measure of one's worth? Well, it turns out it's because Donald doesn't have any sense of self-worth at all. I've often described him as a black hole of need. He constantly needs to be complimented. He constantly needs to be reassured. But the light of those compliments or the reassurances immediately gets sucked in and disappears. In order for him to be propped up, the flow would need to be constant. It is never enough. And he needs these external supports because he can't do it himself.

When Donald was a young child, his mother, my grandmother, was very ill. For about a year, starting when Donald was two and a half, he didn't have a primary caregiver because she was physically and emotionally unavailable to him. There was nobody there to do the essential parenting that children at that extremely crucial developmental period need. Toddlers need to be seen; they need to be soothed. He didn't get any of that, not only because my grandmother wasn't there for him, but because the person who replaced her, my grandfather, was a straight up textbook sociopath. My grandfather had absolutely no interest in nurturing children. He only cared about other human beings, including his own children, to the extent that they could be of use to him. Those are the circumstances in which Donald grew up, which as you can imagine, created some serious problems for him. He was never able to construct his own sense of self-worth,

And to get through it, he developed very rigid defenses against the world—against his loneliness, against the fact that there was nobody to soothe him. As time passed, the only way he could get his father's attention was to be hyperbolic. He had to be the best, the greatest, the smartest, the toughest—whatever it was his father required of him.

The problem for Donald was that on an unconscious level, he knew that none of what he presented himself to be was true. He knew that none of what he told people about who he was had any validity. When you see him bragging about his crowd sizes, lying about the polls, undercutting vice President Harris's numbers, it's because when he was a very young child, there was nobody who cared about him telling him that he was worth anything. And that is a tragedy. We should have compassion for that child. But we have to accept that this man is a monster who means all of us harm. Remember, crowd sizes are completely irrelevant unless you're so desperate to prove that you mean something, you're willing to lie about them.

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