In Netfix’s wonderful, House of Cards, the character of
Frank Underwood, brilliantly played by Kevin Spacey, is a fabulous monster. However, it is also fair to say that
Underwood is one of literature’s traditional, ‘understandable’, psychopaths. He does terrible things but we understand his
reasoning. There is a purpose. His appalling deeds are carried out in the
service of comprehensible aims. There is
logic.
That is not the case with President Trump. Oceans
of ink have been spilled in efforts to make sense of Trump’s bizarre
behaviour. My view is that his actions
can only be explained in terms of psychopathy. Not an Underwood-like, ‘rational’ and
literary psychopathy, but a real world psychopathy developing from an
unfettered, childlike need for desire fulfilment. Like a baby, Trump has wants. He wants things and he wants them now. Poor
impulse control is a key psychopathic trait, as is vanity and overbearing
egotism.
In these terms it is difficult to see Underwood as a true
psychopath. He is too rational for that. His acts of evil are the means to an end,
rather than the end in themselves. They
are the rational acts of a man with a plan, albeit a man untethered from any
considerations of morality. Underwood is
essentially a triangulating, Blairite character.
As has been observed many times, he has much in common with Richard III. Richard didn’t have the princes in the tower
killed because he liked killing children. He did it to consolidate power. It was the act of a rational, if ruthlessly
amoral, man. That’s Underwood. Trump isn’t like that. He acts spontaneously on immediate impulse,
like a baby wanting milk. For instance,
his hair-raising tweets serve no discernible purpose other than to make him personally
feel bigger and more important. When the
President of the United States of America starts tweeting about a news
presenter’s cosmetic surgery, logic is not part of the equation. Trump’s sociopathic tendencies manifest in
childish, impulsive blurts of wild emotion.
He acts like a mafia don, intimidating president Xi of China by boasting
of his on-going attack on Syria over chocolate cake. That is manifestly not normal. He’s like a dysfunctional child, playing at
being the president. He is a Caligula
for our time.
TELEVISIONLAND’S protagonist, Vince Poll, although he works
in tv rather than politics, is much more like Donald Trump than Frank
Underwood. Like Trump, Vince’s actions
are impulsive and spontaneous. Like
Trump, he succeeds against all expectations, including his own. Like Trump, Vince is a freak. Underwood is an understandable expression of
our system when all moral boundries are removed.
Trump and Vince Poll don’t acknowledge that any system exists at all, and
if it does, they don’t believe it applies to them. Just
as Trump would say that taxes are only for poor people, so he and Vince Poll
feel that systems are only for little people.
Size matters here. Although Trump is a physically large man,
albeit, one with unusually small ‘hands’, he acts like a small person
overcompensating for a lack of stature by, to coin a phrase, ‘bigging himself
up’. Vince is very short, only five foot
two in his elevator shoes. As such Vince’s
stature feeds directly into his psychopathic behaviour. He envies the tall, strapping actors who
claim life’s bounty as if it were their God given right. He wants, just as Trump wants, all the treasures and pleasures they have
and he means to get them, by any means necessary.
Vince Poll kills, but not in the way Underwood kills, there
is rarely a greater purpose in Vince’s murders.
Vince kills because he likes
it. Killing is what he wants.
The act gratifies his needy ego but more than that, he finds murder pleasurable for its own
sake. In his mind, murder validates his existence. As such, Vince is an expression of the self-serving,
Trumpian paradigm of our fame-obsessed,
reality tv age. It’s all about him.
Vince is a legend in his own lunchtime. Vince
is not a Blairite character and he is nothing like Richard III. Vince has more in common with Iago in Othello. As Coleridge said in uncomprehending exasperation,
Iago exhibited, ‘the motive hunting of a motiveless malignancy’. Coleridge didn’t understand psychopathy but
three centuries before Freud, Shakespeare did.
Iago and Vince Poll are, though fictional characters, both evidently
more intelligent than Trump, however they both share with the president the overriding
childish need for immediate ego fulfilment and personal satisfaction,
especially and essentially at the expense of others. For them to feel big, others must be diminished. Vince Poll may not be capable of Iago’s long
term planning, however another character in TELEVISIONLAND is (no spoilers, you’ll
have to read the book to discover their identity). In the end Underwood is a bureaucrat. However, although Trump may not be a murderer,
he and Vince Poll exhibit true psychopathy, unburdened by social constraint, morality,
decency or any sense of decorum.
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