President Donald Trump with reporters, Elon Musk and X Æ A-Xii in the White House Oval Office on February 11, 2025. Photo: The White House (Wikimedia Commons)

Musk and Trump: A morbid spectacle

The spectacle of two billionaires – let’s call them M’ump — wanting more and more money and power is mortifying. No matter how much they have, it’s not enough. Their press conference in the Oval Office a couple of weeks ago — an old man slumped at the Resolute Desk, and a younger one posing, strutting and spouting inanities — could have been filmed in a crack house. Their addiction was showing. How many viewers averted their eyes in embarrassment?

M’ump has a disease, many psychologists argue, called “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” (NPD). The narcissist, according to well recognized symptomology, strives to demonstrate his superiority. He insists he is smarter, stronger, funnier, and better at sex than anyone else. He wants to be richer and more powerful too, and sometimes – as in the case of M’ump – he is. But that superiority produces no lasting satisfaction. To get his narcissistic fix, he must diminish, even destroy others, the better to affirm himself. At war with the world, he is a stranger to love, except self-love. But without a regular dose of adoration or fear, even that emotion is cribbed. When a person with NPD is furnished weapons or powerful institutions, he becomes dangerous, even deadly. Driven by motives both apparent and obscure, M’ump has forced hundreds of thousands into hiding or onto unemployment lines. His narcissistic impulses may soon kill thousand and endanger millions.

M’ump seems like an alien from Mars, but in fact, he is familiar, or at least his characteristic mentality is — greed. Everybody knows someone greedy; we’re greedy ourselves sometimes. The difference between us and M’ump is the duration and scale of avarice: M’ump is always and colossally greedy — morbidly greedy. But recognition of his greed........

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