The Little Trump That Lives Inside Us All (Especially Rob Reiner)

The practice of hypocrisy and self-deception has conditioned us to bypass inconvenient truths. We stuff them deep inside of ourselves so that we never have to acknowledge them. External examples of these uncomfortable truths about ourselves cause us to overreact, provoke in us an emotional and irrational response. Attacking external examples of our own hidden flaws/sins/darkness is our way of protecting our own secrets so that we will not have to acknowledge and come to grips with them.

We develop unexamined truths when we decide to conform to society’s norms and rules, judging acceptance and approval of authority to be preferable to listening to our own impulses and desires. We deem the external aspect of ourselves, our image, to be more important than the internal part of ourselves, our soul. Our soul becomes a basement in which we think we can store all our unpleasantness and pretend it doesn’t exist rather than the source of ultimate beauty and goodness, which it is always striving to be. Our deepest self wants nothing more than to express itself honestly. To do so, it must negotiate the obstacles the external world presents. It must learn to express itself honestly in healthy ways that do not damage the deepest selves of all the other humans and creatures on this planet.

This is a difficult journey. The much easier path to take is to present an artificial image of ourselves. We simply accept the outside world’s opinions and beliefs in order to fit in. We spend our energies on prettifying the image of us that the outside world sees. But in doing so, we create shadows in our spiritual and psychic basements we are forced to hide from others and from ourselves. In our attempts to deny our shadows, we lash out in ugly ways when external examples of our shadow come too close to reminding us what we do not wish to admit exists in ourselves.

I believe Donald Trump is one of those triggers for many. I believe that within those with the most irrational and emotional reactions to Trump there is a little Trump they have chosen to ignore. This little Trump inside them exists because they want it to exist. This little Trump permits them to focus on their external accomplishments rather than their internal yearnings. This little Trump inside of them is eternally seeking external validation the way Trump must have sought the attention and approval of his father.

For the typical VBNMW (Vote Blue No Matter Who) Democrat, the father figure is replaced by broader forces, what psychiatrist Erich Fromm called “anonymous authority.” For them, education was not a process to sharpen and strengthen their internal self but a way to please authority. The drive to get good grades (and hence gain external approval/reward) became the motivating factor. Questioning narratives, expressing unpopular but honestly-held convictions, was not the path to approval and external success. Ingesting the facts and the attitudes of the accepted experts, was.

Education, however, goes far beyond the classroom. The media that shapes for us our cultural values is the true anonymous authority for anyone seeking external validation at the cost of their soul. Deviating from the beliefs the media espouse would be anathema for them in the same way deviating from the patriarchal values of his father would be for Trump. More than anything, media narratives are what the anti-Trump forces are trying to defend. The fear that grips the VBNMW crowd the most is that everything America holds dear will be destroyed, and the truth is that everything America holds most dear are the narratives the media have created for us (part of that narrative — ironically and paradoxically — is that Trump the businessman was a role model and poster boy for the American Dream). The lesser threat posed by Trump is to the belief that an education system that stresses wrote learning, obedience, and conformity of beliefs (political correctness) yields a superior sort of human being.

The one political issue Democratic voters could legitimately hate Trump for — his stance on abortion — is itself not central to who he is as a human being but a performative stance he took to win over the religious right. Who among us believes Trump hasn’t paid for an abortion for a stripper or two in his time? The man has no moral convictions on the issue, on any issue. Mike Pence is a much more fitting representative of the anti-abortion right, but the hatred for him is not nearly as intense. In fact, when Pence says something negative about Trump, the VBNMW crowd can grow rather fond of Pence. While more representative of what Democratic voters truly despise, he lacks the qualities that trigger their shadow.

Otherwise, Trump is scarcely distinguishable from a typical Democrat politician save for the performative actions in which Democrats engage. It is true that Trump will never be found taking a knee while wearing Kente cloth to honor George Floyd. Yet when it comes to actual policies, his policy on immigration is nearly identical to that of Democrats, his belligerence abroad indistinguishable, his indifference to the destruction done by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico mirrors Joe Biden’s “no comment” regarding Maui’s fires. It is merely that Trump’s overt behavior digs at the façade of Democrats and threatens to reveal the little Trump inside.

I think of the liberals most obsessed with Donald Trump and I can come up with no better example than Rob Reiner. It is hard to imagine anybody being more obsessed with Donald Trump (or anything, for that matter) not sitting in a padded cell somewhere. But far from babbling his monomaniacal utterances to no one, Reiner reveals his shadow — his little Trump — to over two million followers on Twitter. Hardly a tweet of his can be found that does not reveal this perverse connection to Trump. On the surface, one could hardly imagine two men being more opposite than Rob Reiner and Donald Trump. Or so he would have you believe.

But who is Rob Reiner, really? He is the son of a wealthy and successful man, just like Trump. Rob Reiner followed in his father’s footsteps, just like Trump did. Reiner had a difficult time not just rising from his father’s shadow but getting his father’s approval, just like Trump did. He discussed such matters on the Howard Stern show (Trump too appeared on Stern’s show, but even he was not announced by a porn star who was actually in the process of performing fellatio).

We all know the famous quote from Donald Trump: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” Rob Reiner well understood that sentiment. When he was 14 years old, he grabbed Mary Tyler Moore’s ass. Imagine the sense of entitlement you would have to have to do such a thing. At the age of fourteen. Imagine the objectification of women you would have to feel to treat a woman like that. Not merely grab the ass of someone you did not know and therefore could more easily objectify, but grab the ass of a star of the show your father worked on. One of the more famous, beloved, and empowered women of the time. And when it was revealed to his father, his father’s response was to say “Don’t do it again” with a smile on his face. Did he learn anything from the incident?

Like Trump, the nepotism did not end with Rob Reiner himself. His son Nick wrote the screenplay for Reiner’s movie “Being Charlie.” From the transcripts from Reiner’s appearance on Howard Stern’s show: “And while he hasn’t licked his addiction by any means, he’s now focused on joining the family business. ‘What else am I going to do?’ Nick said. ‘I’ve got a GED, I don’t have any college education, I did a lot of drugs and why not show business?’”

Lastly, Reiner’s group he tends to hang out with appears to be less than ethnically diverse. Just like Trump. It’s hard to recall a single person of color in the movies I’m familiar with: This Is Spinal Tap, When Harry Met Sally, A Few Good Men. Heck, you’d think one of the kids in Stand By Me could have at least been Hispanic. Even the Spaniard in The Princess Bride is played by the decidedly non-swarthy Mandy Patinkin. When a Black man finally appeared in a Reiner-directed movie, it was of course Morgan Freeman, whom I have often referred to as the White person’s Black person.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike Donald Trump, despise him even. He is a nakedly greedy, selfish person wallowing in his excesses, flashing his wealth as though it made him better than others. He believes since he went to a good school and has managed to achieve financial success that he must also be intelligent, even moral. He accuses others of wrongdoing while believing he should never be held accountable himself. He believes that just by right of birth he is entitled to more than others. In this way, he is symbolic of all Americans. Republicans embrace it, Democrats deny it, but it is there. And thus, their little Trump is obvious to everyone but themselves.