You must keep my kitsch forever!

     Occasionally, an unrepentant Trumpie will write in, their message plopping into the Spam filter, because they've been writing for years, and at some point I blocked them.

     Being a curious sort, I sometimes click on their email, just to see what they have to say, even though, almost inevitable, it is, "Aha! More Trump derangement syndrome! You HATE him!!!!"
     And if I am feeling energetic, I might send a link to this 2018 column, "Hate Donald Trump? No way. It's more a sense of luftschlossmoddermüde," where I explain that I certainly don't hate him, and for an obvious reason: he's beneath hatred. "Honestly, if Americans elected a dog as president, would you hate the dog?" Then coin a compound German word to describe the weary disgust he engenders, in me and I'm sure in many others.
     The column spends quite a while pulling the matter apart. Then, last week, the realization hit me after Trump took an unusual step: it's even more complicated than that.
     I have sympathy for Donald Trump.
     Truly. I really do. Bear with me. He's so wounded, so needy, so fragile. I started to feel that certain tingle of pity in 2018 when I drove downstate to Granite City to watch him reopen a blast furnace.
     I remember some readers being shocked by my lede sentence:
     " Donald Trump is a charming man, and people like him."
     But it was true. He was charming. The guys at U.S. Steel loved him.
     "... he knows how to relate to an audience, to feed their sense of being menaced by outsiders, of being betrayed by a government too stupid to live in the real world, like they do. Fifty-three minutes of praise, exaggeration and braggadocio, sprinkled with half-truths, non-truths and the occasional fact tucked in for variety's sake."
     And ... for want of a better word, vulnerable. Maybe even "broken." I wrote:

     You could feel Trump’s neediness.
    “How am I doing?" he asked, and the crowd roared.

     He had been president for over a year, yet had point out that he was getting all this attention.

    "Look at the cameras! It’s like the Academy Awards.”

     He reached out to the gathered steelworkers, who came in on their days off to be there with him.

    But hearing him, I better understood his appeal. He has a vulnerable charm, at times a humanity. He pandered shamelessly to his audience.“We need steel,” he said.        “We need steel plants. And to see an old, big monster plant like this re-opening — that is an honor. I look at the faces of you people; I could be one of you. I like you guys. I could be one of you.”

    Yeah, if steelworkers were rich real estate developer spawn who were born on third base and thought they hit a triple.
    That sense came back a few days ago when he made the Oval Office a National Historic Monument, so nobody could ever change it. A truly unhinged act. The whole White House is already a National Historic Monument, and that didn't stop him from impulsively tearing down the entire East Wing. And now he thinks the cheap Home Depot shiny gold-colored tat he's stuck up over all the walls, the line of gold loving cups, are going to be preserved past the first day his successor is in office? 
     That IS delusional. He goes around destroying what others have created, to further his own self-assigned glory, then panics at the prospect that others who follow will do the same to him.

     Actually, pressed on the issue, Trump admitted that the designation wouldn't preserve the decor. He pretended he's trying to keep anyone from, oh I don't know, making the Oval Office into the Hexagonal Office. When really, he's pleading: "Don't forget me."

     If only we could...

     And yet, that sense that so clearly motivates him as he defaces Washington piecemeal, to leave his mark, I ... actually get that.
     Looking around my own office. At all the books, all the beloved mementos, prints and familial stuff, I can't help but relate to him. Nobody's going to want this. Not the boys. Being a journalist of minuscule reputation — to borrow Chekhov's spot-on phrase — sure won't do it. No museum here. Someday, maybe someday soon, this is all stripped out, send Goodwill bound, or trashed, the house no doubt torn down to make way for another white farmhouse on steroids.

    To think otherwise is pure ego. And truly, when the entire arc of the Trump era finally reaches its crashing bottom most point, that is what will stand out — as always. Enormous self-regard, the great engine of history. You need some vanity to get out of bed in the morning. But be saddled with a little too much and suddenly you are Joe Biden thinking, "Heck, maybe I will run again." And far too much, you end up Donald Trump.  A monster. Blinded by it. Made stupid by it. Completely undone. 

     Though never forget, the poison that ruined him — that ruins guys like Elon Musk who accomplish something great and then make that leap to decide that, therefore, a) they are great and b) everyone else is shit — is found, diluted, in every vein. I have more than is healthy. And probably you do too.