As Donald Trump continues trying to burn down the world around him, he resembles nothing so much as an addict who does not know, or does not care, that he has a serious problem that is destroying him.
Trump is a rage addict. He is powerless against his need to lash out at any person or group that he feels is not paying him the proper deference and respect.
Example: despite the fact that his attempts to resurrect the Clinton scandals of the 90s fell flat with all but the most delusional right-wing paranoiacs, Trump is vowing to continue this self-destructive tactic:
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump -- who invited Bill Clinton's accusers to the second presidential debate -- threatened to continue personal attacks against the Clintons if additional recordings of the real estate mogul are made public.
“If they want to release more tapes saying inappropriate things, we’ll continue to talk about Bill and Hillary Clinton doing inappropriate things,” said Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, referring to the release of recorded audio last week showing him making comments about groping women in 2005.
Trump is so addled by rage that he probably doesn’t realize he just confirmed that there are, in fact, more recordings of him saying “inappropriate things.”
As he careens toward rock bottom, rage addict Trump is being enabled, rather than helped, by those closest to him. What he needs is an intervention. What he is getting is encouragement to descend even further into his addiction:
Trump’s blistering method is being orchestrated by Stephen K. Bannon, the campaign’s chief executive and former head of the acerbic conservative website Breitbart, who has become a near-omnipresent counselor at Trump’s side. He has urged Trump not to worry about any cleavage in party ranks and instead to target Clinton.
This reminds me of a story about Sam Kinison that Howard Stern tells in his memoir “Private Parts.” Kinison, passed over for a Grammy in 1991, was scheduled to present an award later during the evening. Stern says Kinison was so angry over what he believed was a conspiracy to deny him the proper recognition, that he wanted to ruin the broadcast:
“Oh, man! Tonight I’m going to tell those motherfuckers off!!” Sam growled. His sycophantic entourage, which usually consisted of about twenty people, egged him on. Owing to his out-of-control coke problem Sam had just blown a movie deal with Columbia and cost the studio five million dollars. No one in Hollywood wanted to do business with him. He had a shot at a series with Fox, but they had to make sure he was in control. They were on the fence about the deal and if they saw a crazed, coked-up, rambling drunk Kinison at the Grammy’s he would have destroyed his career permanently.
He really wanted to get off the road, and the Fox deal was his way out, but these misfit hangers-on all around him were reinforcing his destructive behavior.
I really cared about him, so I pulled Sam and his manager Trudy over to the side. She had been pleading with him not to do it, but he wouldn’t listen to her.
“Let me tell you something, Sam,” I said. “You want my advice? Just go up tonight and read those stupid fucking cards the way they want you to. If you want to still be the showbiz outlaw and not do business with Fox, then tell them to fuck off. But you say you want to get back in the movies. You want that? Read the cards straight.”
His manager turned to me and said, “Thank you, because everyone here is telling him to go up there and trash the place.”
In the end, Kinison read the cards straight. Even a coked-out, amped-up, rage-drunk Sam Kinison could be reasoned with. Donald Trump? Not so much.
There must be people close to Trump pleading with him to resist his inclination to trash the 2016 presidential election the way Sam Kinison wanted to trash the Grammys in 1991. His adult children, if no one else, would probably like to see him retain some measure of dignity. But if those voices exist, he is not listening to them. He is listening to the misfit hangers-on encouraging him to indulge his rage addiction. He’s so far gone, he probably wouldn’t even listen to Howard Stern.