Donald Trump's Desperate Need To Be Loved

Donald Trump spent every day of his long campaign for the presidency demonizing Hillary Clinton and calling her a criminal.

He vowed that one of his first acts if he was elected would be to appoint a special prosecutor to go after her and jail her.

While his rabid supporters chanted "lock her up, lock her up."

But yesterday while having lunch at the New York Times, Trump seemed to change his mind.



And now he says he won't go after Clinton.

President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Tuesday that he had no intention of pressing for an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server or the financial operations of her family’s foundation, dropping the “lock her up” pledge that became a rallying cry for his campaign for the White House. 

“I don’t want to hurt the Clintons, I really don’t,” Mr. Trump said during the interview. “She went through a lot and suffered greatly in many different ways, and I am not looking to hurt them at all. The campaign was vicious.”

And needless to say over at Breitbart, the home of Trump's "alt-right" guru Steve Bannon, they're not happy. 








Because they want her head on a platter, or a stick...



And if their orange Messiah doesn't deliver it, they'll soon be demanding HIS head.

But what I found most interesting about his visit to the New York Times, was how Trump can switch so easily from the monstrous Mr Hyde to an almost kinder gentler Dr Jekyll...



Which can only be explained, as Frank Bruni who got to witness his transformation yesterday points out, by his compulsive need or consuming demand to be loved. 

“I’m going to get you to write some good stuff about me,” Donald Trump said. 

It’s entirely possible. I keep an open mind. But I’m decided on this much: Winning the most powerful office in the world did nothing to diminish his epic ache for adoration or outsize need to tell everyone how much he deserves it.

Which as I pointed out the other day, probably comes from the way he was treated as a boy by his brutish father Fred...



But it does explain why Trump will say anything to bask in the roar of the adoring mob. And how he can change or tone down his message to try to get others to love him.

For Trump, bragging is like breathing: continuous, spontaneous. He wants nothing more than for his audience to be impressed. And when his audience is a group of people, like us, who haven’t clapped the way he’d like? He sands down his edges. Modulates his voice. Bends.

And for progressives in the U.S. it does raise an interesting question about how he should be treated.

That was perhaps the most interesting part of the meeting, the one that makes his presidency such a question mark. Will he tilt in whatever direction, and toward whichever constituency, is the surest source of applause? Is our best hope for the best Trump to be so fantastically adulatory when he’s reasonable that he’s motivated to stay on that course, lest the adulation wane?

Should they give him the love he craves so desperately to try to keep him as reasonable as he can be, and as far away from the nuclear button as possible?

Or should he be greeted by boos everywhere he goes, like he was yesterday by the public in the lobby of the New York Times?



As for me, I'm with Bernie Sanders. I think progressives should encourage the leathery orange to do things like scrapping the TPP. 

While making it clear that the bigotry he has incited will earn him no love at all...


Could love trump hate AND Trump? Maybe. He is that vulnerable.

But only as long as everyone remembers that if he can be the good Dr Jekyll one day.

He can be the monstrous Mr Hyde the other...