Frankenstein's Monster

And he who causes the darkness

Photo Credit: Getty Images

I’ve been thinking recently, and it’s a fairly depressing thought, that my first book, Too Much and Never Enough, that was publiched in July of 2020, could just as easily have been published for the first time this coming summer and the information in it would still be relevant. Perhaps it would be even more relevant because, much like the summer of 2020, we find ourselves on a knife’s edge, and there is no way to know on which side of that knife we are going to fall.

I have also been thinking about something I explored in that book: why Donald is the way he is, why he is so enamored with authoritarian dictatorial monsters, why he is so damaged, so needy, and so grasping. The first of those is probably the easiest to answer. My grandfather was a patriarchal authoritarian sociopath. But something happened recently that had me thinking about the other issues about Donald’s neediness, his grasping nature, his unending thirst for recognition.

Last week, the president of FIFA, (International Federation of Association Football), Gianni Infantino, gave Donald a fabricated and meaningless honor for reasons that should be obvious. Becuase Donald keeps murdering people on boats in the Caribbean Sea and starving children, he will always be ineligible for the Nobel Peace Prize that he so desperately craves. So the powers that be at FIFA came up with the “FIFA Peace Prize.” When Infantino bestowed Donald with the prize saying, “This is your peace prize. There is also a beautiful medal for you that you can wear everywhere you want to go,” Donald grabbed the medal and said:

I’m going to wear it right now. This is truly one of the great honors of my life.

Desperate to be loved; unloveable.

If Donald had any self-awareness at all, which of course he does not, he’d be embarrassed and ashamed. He would know what we know—that he is being mocked. So the question remains, why does Donald need even meaningless gestures like that to make him feel better about himself? I don’t typically go around quoting myself, but this incident reminded me of something I wrote in the introduction to my first book which I think still has some explanatory power. I also think it’s an analysis we can build on.

A quick preface: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley wrote Frankenstein, one of the great novels of the nineteenth century which, In 1994, Kenneth Branagh turned into a film. , There’s a quote in the movie that isn’t in the book. Frankenstein’s monster says:

I do know that for the sympathy of one living being, I would make peace with all. I have love in me, the likes of which you can scarcely imagine, and rage, the likes of which you would not believe. If I cannot satisfy the one, I will indulge the other.

After referencing that quote, Charles Pierce wrote in Esquire Magazine,

[Donald Trump] doesn’t plague himself with doubt about what he’s creating around him. He’s proud of his monster. He glories in its anger and its destruction, and while he cannot imagine its love, he believes with all his heart in its rage. He is Frankenstein without conscience.

Here is what I wrote:

That could more accurately have been said about Donald’s father, my grandfather, Fred, with this crucial difference. Fred’s monster, the only child of his who mattered to him, would ultimately be rendered unlovable by the very nature of Fred’s preference for him. In the end, there would be no love for Donald at all, just his agonizing thirsting for it.

We are here because the one thing Donald most desperately needs, and has never gotten, and will never get because of how damaged and depraved his own father rendered him, is love.

That is why Donald constantly needs more of everything else, believing that that will somehow fill the void. More money, more power, a bigger ballroom, more fake medals, more fake prizes, more fake honors. Maybe, he desperately hopes, someday that void will be filled. Maybe receiving more compliments, having more people grovel and degrade and debase themselves for him will finally make him feel whole.

On some very dark level, Donald knows that’s impossible because as much as my grandfather wanted to convince Donald, and his other children, and his grandchildren that money is the only thing that matters, it can stand in for everything else, that isn’t true and never can be. Nothing can replace kindness, empathy, or compassion. Nothing, certainly, can replace love. In his most terrified moments, Donald knows that. And all of us are paying the price for that knowledge.