October 10 Friday roundup

For the anniversary of Degenerate Art this week, the podcast episode revisits the most critical snippets of episodes from across the last year, then looks at where we are, what likely lies ahead, and what we can do about it. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. If you’d like to check out the linked material or the written post from Tuesday, you can read it here.

Today, I’ll describe my mother’s relationship to Donald Trump. Since I’m not a fan of the president, it would be nice to imagine that my mother and Donald Trump have nothing in common. But over the last several years, she’s spent a lot of time talking about their connections, and I do think they’re worth considering—though not necessarily in the way she’s done so.

Almost exactly a year apart in age, they were born in very different corners of the U.S. Trump is a native of New York City, perhaps the only place in the world where it was possible to become who he is. My mother, born in the middle of West Virginia and raised by her grandparents, tried to get away from her roots her whole life, repeatedly being pulled by circumstance back to her home state only to escape again—to Illinois, Rhode Island, Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. She, too, remained shaped by the geography of birth.

They’ve both had three spouses each. And as she fell completely into dementia years ago, my mother came to believe she’d also had a romantic connection to the president. Their parallel sorties into delusional states has struck me again and again.

She told me she’d been engaged to Trump when they were teenagers, but never married. She claimed to be Trump’s campaign manager for Ohio, and at other points, Michigan. When she aimed to subtly (in her mind) threaten an officer of the court, my mother suggested she could personally bring down the wrath of Donald Trump on whomever she wanted, indicating the woman’s job might be at sake. So in some uncomfortable ways, though Laura Loomer never pierced my mother’s consciousness, my mother was in 2020 picturing herself in more or less the role that Laura Loomer has now.

Unlike Trump, my mother was competent in her work—she just kept abandoning her ambitious plans in favor of the next husband. It was a different kind of failure than Trump’s, and she wasn’t wealthy or privileged enough to fail upward.

Oddly enough, they each worked in television, at least for a time. Decades before the persona of Donald Trump was created by television producers, my mother was a noon news anchor and afternoon interviewer for our local station, WTAP.

My mother always believed she was the smartest person in the room, with the possible exception of her own children. And she was bright enough—certainly more insightful and quicker than the president.

As with Trump, I think some background grievance lingered in the wake of her time on TV, a feeling that she hadn’t gotten the full acknowledgment she deserved. Being on-air talent gave her a sense of importance, but also of being trapped in my hometown, that she never got a chance to move up to a bigger market like my uncle, who went from our hometown radio station to Pittsburgh then to New York.

When she was younger, my mother never would have found someone like Trump worthy of her attention or her respect. She was a big believer in appearances and proper behavior. (As a messy bohemian type from an early age, I was a great disappointment to her on this front.)

Still, despite being invested in social formalities, she felt civilization was precarious. Which made her eminently vulnerable to alarmist propaganda. And though she could see through the crassness of her Amway friends and glimpsed the lack of thought from any number of Republican politicians and Fox News announcers, relentless panic about civilization being under attack touched a nerve.

Long before dementia took her, she’d bought into a sense of everything she cherished being endangered: herself, her kids, the country. She always wanted to buy a few acres in the hills somewhere to build a small cabin and compound, just in case.

Dementia has a way of knocking down barriers that people kept in place when they were in their right(er) minds. And so it was that as her undiagnosed dementia deepened, she became enamored with Donald Trump.

Not every strange thing she said was about the president. When she could still drive and would only occasionally get lost, she went to a branch of her bank in another state (the better to avoid her third husband finding out) and tried to sell their house. When that last husband lay dying of cancer, she insisted he get up and walk, claiming the doctors had said he would be fine if he just got more exercise. She believed the realtor whose face was visible on yard signs all over their subdivision was plotting to do surgery on my mother and steal her home.

As things progressed, she began to speak about Trump more often, and to become more like him: loud, sloppy, and angry. She became the hero of every story she told. She had been, she explained, a world-champion competitive jigsaw puzzler. She’d saved the 1969 moon landing for NASA by making a piece of paper bigger, so they could fit more rows of numbers on it. She had not just worked at Easter Seals, but had founded it.

While we were doing puzzles one evening, I was singing The Talking Heads “Naive Melody.” She grew suddenly angry, saying she had written the song, and they had stolen it from her. The original had been about Jesus, but they made it into a song about prostitutes. Her self-regard and self-importance was exhausting. It was only possible to laugh about it so much.

She would eventually spend more than two years believing she was the queen of England. Hearing her talk one afternoon about her “Uncle Nicky,” I thought she had dredged up from memory a real cousin I’d never met. But it turned out she was talking about Tsar Nicholas II. If a neighbor stood too long in front of the house next door, she panicked that they were an assassin sent to kill her.

Trump’s possible assassins have more corporeal reality, but he’s no less gifted at chronicling imaginary injustices and making everything about himself. My mother was no more satisfied with where she ended up in life than Donald Trump, for whom being the most powerful person on the planet is still somehow not sufficient. It is not possible to placate them for long.

There were pleasant moments during the time she lived with me, but the price for them was generally to do nothing at all that might contradict her wild thinking or paranoid worldview. She might say your dinner was poisoned, and try to take it away. Near the end of her time in my house, she began to cruelly pick on one of her own grandchildren.

Deeply hostile to anything she saw as a challenge, she would turn absolutely cold on a dime. If she felt threatened, the tears or suffering of a family member would not affect her in the least. To be around her for long, you had to not just let her live inside her world, you had to enter that world and defer to her aggression and moods.

When I look at Sharpiegate or claims of immigrants “eating the dogs,” I see my mother’s panicked insistence that things that seem real to her are real for everyone, whether any proof for them exists or not. Everyone has to pretend Trump won the golf tournament, that he’s wise or smart. Of course he deserves the Nobel Peace Prize.

It was traumatic to have her in the house with my kids. We treated her gently because she was my mother, because she was unwilling to take any medication for anxiety or depression, though we were trying to get her the help she needed. But there’s no excuse for doing these things for a president so that he can continue to hold office.

Does Trump have dementia? I’m struck by the parallel ways he and my mother have of interacting with the world, even the expressions on their face, and the vacancy they so often project.

If they’re both delusional in similar ways now, it’s impossible from the outside for me to know whether the president shares any part of my mother’s Alzheimer’s. I’m not a doctor, and even if I were, he’s still not my patient.

Furthermore, weren’t they always like this? Yes, but now more and more so, in an accelerating fashion.

My mother is still alive, and recognizes me when I visit. She’s in a wheelchair these days and has become less of a danger to herself and others. It’s uncommon for her to speak a full coherent sentence anymore. Once in a great while, the name “Donald” might appear in a slurry of words.

But there are hundreds of people around the president who speak of him the same way that my mother did, who wish to attach themselves to his delusion, the better to further their own. No matter whether it’s due to Alzheimer’s, narcissism, greed, or all of the above, affirming him in his illness and corruption offers them something they want.

He’s managed to enforce his delusion, whatever its origins, on his party, on the entire federal government, on universities, businesses, and news networks. But it’s not enough. He wants the country, and the world.

Yet my mother is two steps ahead of him in this game, and I’ve seen what comes next. It does not get better; it’s not a fever that can break on its own. Whatever the cause, placation is a temporary cure. The trajectory he’s on can only be broken by medical treatment, by physical decline, and by isolation from the ability to do harm.

 Your paid subscriptions support my work.