I honestly believe that Donald Trump is a deeply unhappy man. It’s been pointed out many times that he doesn’t laugh. He does smile sometimes, but more often he is grimacing.

See this analysis of Trump’s facial expressions. Very often he has a “puckered chin,” which the analyst explains this way:

The presence of this additional facial expression is quite significant because people often pull their chins in when they feel threatened “it’s a way of tensing the chin in anticipation of being symbolically punched in the face. The fact that a puckered chin features in so many of Trump’s zipped smiles suggests that he frequently feels threatened.

Conor Friedersdorf wrote last March that Trump has “an alarming relationship with trivial slights,” and since then we’ve seen so much more evidence of the sucking black hole of neediness in the depths of his soul. He must feel threatened a lot.

It appears to have really have angered him that his big moment — being inaugurated President of the United States — was dissed as not being quite as joyous or well-attended as other inaugurations. He’s like a bridezilla whose wedding was dissed. Of course, you have to have an outsize ego to even attempt to run for POTUS. But any emotionally normal person would have shrugged that off and focused on the job.

People are calling this calculated; he is undermining the credibility of the press in order to be able to establish a totalitarian regime. And there’s probably some truth to that. But it’s not the whole truth. He’s way too obvious and ham-handed about it. I sincerely believe it was important for Trump to believe he is more adored, more popular, more wonderful than Barack Obama, and I don’t doubt that the reports about the underwhelming inaugural turnout enraged him.

Again, this is not an isolated incident. There is a long and well-publicized pattern of his being unable to let go of even petty slights. And this bears a closer look.

Donald Trump, to me, has always been just a character who lived in the margins of popular culture somewhere, and I can’t say I’ve paid much attention to him in the past. But on reflection, it occurred to me that he’s not a man who really fits in anywhere. In spite of his wealth he seems to be only peripheral to New York City’s social elite. And I doubt he’s often if ever been invited to the exclusive soirées on Martha’s Vineyard.

He plays a Captain of Industry on teevee, but is he really part of the multinational corporate elite network? I doubt that, too. I can’t imagine that when Exxon or Nestlé or HSBC need a new high-level executive, that anyone has ever considered Donald Trump even for a second. Before this year, I doubt they’ve taken him all that seriously except as a second-tier businessman who owns hotels and golf resorts they may sometimes frequent. And has he ever mixed with the global elite crowd at Davos? I don’t think so.

And then there’s the intellectual Harvard/Princeton/Yale elite. Um, no.

In spite of being internationally famous as a Rich Guy, then, to the elite of the elite he’s always been the crass, nouveau riche kid from middle-class Queens.

One suspects this bugs him. He so obviously has an incessant craving for respect and even adulation. Frank Bruni wrote last March,

After Donald Trump asked voters at a recent rally to raise their hands heavenward in a pledge of fealty to him, a few commentators frothed at the gesture’s supposed evocation of a Nazi salute.

That wasn’t my take. As much as Trump appalls me, I don’t assign him control over the precise arcs of his supporters’ arms.

I was and am transfixed by something else: the scope and intensity of his hunger for adulation. It’s bottomless, topless, endless, insatiable. He gazed upon a teeming arena of admirers and neither their presence nor their numbers was quite enough.

He ached for an extra exhibition of their ardor. He had to issue a command and revel in their obeisance. I’m surprised only that he didn’t ask them to kneel or genuflect, but that could still come.

He plays to the masses because they cheer him, but it’s telling he is drawing heavily from the ranks of the Vulture Capitalism and Masters of the Universe crowds to fill his cabinet. These are the people he considers his peers, even if many of them kept him at arm’s length in the past. And now he rules them. This should be sweet!

But even after he got everything he could ever possibly want, it’s not enough. He still has no peace. People dissed his inauguration! He needed some love, so he goes to the CIA headquarters to talk to employees. “Probably almost everybody in this room voted for me but I will not ask you to raise your hands if you did but I guarantee a big portion because we’re all on the same wavelength,” Trump said. Translation: You love me. I know you love me.  #Sad!

Without ever having paid much attention to government policy, he’s now in charge of it. And he’s going to screw up and piss a lot of people off. His crude attempts to intimidate the press may (I hope) push at least a portion of it to criticize him even more.

His raging neediness can never be satiated, although I predict that he will make frequent rally appearances around the country to get his fix.

Now, here comes the sermon portion. In Buddhist terms Trump is what’s called an asura. This is a Sanskrit word translated as “titan” or “jealous god.” In Buddhist mythology, the asuras lived in a realm of wealth and power, but no matter how privileged they become they are seething with jealousy for what anyone else has. This can be understood as a mental or psychological state.

Iconography shows a massive tree growing out of the asura realm, but its blossoms and fruit are in the deva realm where the superior, not-jealous gods live. This makes the asuras crazy; they are perpetually assaulting the elite deva realm, but they never succeed in getting in.

It’s certainly the case that most high-level politicians and corporate leaders have a lot of asura traits. But you’d have a hard time finding anybody who more openly embodies asura qualities than Donald Trump. And he seems to already have a foot in the next realm, where asuras are reborn: the realm of pretas or hungry ghosts.

Hungry ghosts are miserable creatures with huge, empty stomachs, but they also have tiny mouths and soda-straw necks. Although they are ravenously hungry they cannot eat, and when they do manage to take in food it turns into fire or blood or pus in their mouths. Drug addicts are common modern-day examples of hungry ghosts.

So this is the doom of an asura; they crave more and more and more and cannot be satisfied. The crowds are never big enough; the gold is never bright enough. Even their gourmet food becomes tasteless (rather like the food in Trump Grill, I understand).

Back to Frank Bruni:

Commentators keep marveling at the way he “dominates” or “owns” almost every news cycle, as if what he says and does are all plotted in advance and part of some sophisticated, disciplined political strategy.

But is he executing a plan or surrendering to a jones? Brilliant or just fruitfully pathological? He mints fresh insults to monopolize the spotlight, but that’s most likely a spontaneous reaction to how cold and lonely he becomes whenever it starts to recede. Maybe he’s a multimedia mastermind, maybe just a publicity glutton. There’s a difference.

His media savvy may be more instinctual than calculated, I suspect, in which case he’s likely to make a lot of mistakes now that he’s in a completely new role.

There’s only one measure for Trump: more. More products bearing his brand. More buildings blaring his name. He’s a modern-day Midas, with a vain twist. Everything he touches turns to Trump.

He insists on that. Craves it. No reassurance sustains him for too long; no validation suffices. That would be as true of Trump the president as it is of Trump the candidate, and it would dictate the terms and the tempo of a reign from which this country would not soon recover.

He’s going to make a show of fulfilling his campaign pledges to make life better for those white working-class voters, but because he knows bupkis about government and policy, ultimately he will fail. And while the most hateful and racist among them will stick with him through thick and thin, many others will be disillusioned and stop going to his rallies. And he’s going to be facing a degree of derision and ridicule he has never known before and probably doesn’t expect.

He’s achieved the highest achievement on the planet, and it won’t be enough to make him happy. This is going to be very ugly, and very messy.

(As a side note, didja ever notice that the words miserable and miser share the same root? The Latin miser is an adjective meaning “unhappy, wretched, pitiable, in distress,” Hence, miserable. Miser as a noun for someone who hoards money originated in the 16th century, presumably because such people are unhappy, wretched, pitiable and in distress.)

Update: See also “He’s never going to admit he’s wrong in front of everyone”: President Trump’s aides are worried about his behavior

This White House presser happened today, and it is more than disturbing.

I take it Hair Führer is angry that people are dissing his inauguration because of the subdued size of the crowd. Very likely the YUGE demonstrations today really rubbed it in.

So Press Secretary Sean Spicer called in the reporters and, surrounded by blown up photographs of yesterday’s crowd, he argued that Trump’s inauguration WAS TOO the most bigly attended inauguration EVER. Actual quote: “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration. Period. Both in person and around the globe.” And, of course, it wasn’t.

But it gets worse. Spicer is clearly angry. He is practically sputtering. HOW DARE the press even suggest Trump’s inauguration was not as well attended as other inaugurations! Spicer is also upset because a Time magazine reporter tweeted, erroneously, that Trump had removed the bust of Martin Luther King from the oval office. This was part of a pool report, so it got picked up in a few places before it was corrected.

However, whether Spicer’s clear distress is coming from righteous anger or something else is hard to tell. Maybe he’s angry that he’s being forced to have this ridiculous presser. Or, maybe Spicer is rattled because Dear Leader heaped some blistering verbal abuse on him about allowing the media to get away with actual reporting.

And at the end, he actually issues a threat. The Trump Administration will “hold the press accountable” — his very words — for reports that displease Dear Leader. Whether the penalties will be a stockade or walking on hot coals or something else, we do not yet know.

If Trump is getting this worked up over trivialities like this, a real crisis is going to blow his fuses. I can see him curled up in a fetal position in his gilded bathroom somewhere while Spicer and Ivanka make excuses for him to the media.

Spicer also talks about a brief visit Trump made today to CIA headquarters. That was bizarre, also. There was an open invitation to CIA employees to attend, and the 400 who showed up cheered and clapped a lot. But not everyone was happy. Politico reports:

Standing on hallowed ground at the Langley headquarters, in front of the wall of stars carved into marble to represent each of the 117 CIA agents who have died in service to the country, Trump lashed out at his critics, boasted of his appearances on magazine covers and exaggerated about the size of the crowd at his inauguration.

He also hinted at loosening rules on torture put in place under President Barack Obama, promised to wipe “radical Islamic terrorism… off the face of the earth” and pledged his full backing to the CIA.

“I am so behind you,“ Trump said, adding, “You’re gonna get so much backing. Maybe you’re gonna say, please, don’t give us so much backing, Mr. President, please, we don’t need that much backing.”

However, not everyone was pleased.

“The proper way to do it was wait for [incoming CIA director Mike] Pompeo to get confirmed, to do it on a weekday, to do it for the larger CIA population but to make it private and answer questions,” one former CIA officer said. “This was a waste of time.”

“Former CIA Dir Brennan is deeply saddened and angered at Trump’s despicable display of self-aggrandizement in front of CIA’s Memorial Wall of Agency heroes. Brennan says that Trump should be ashamed of himself,” Brennan’s former deputy chief of staff, Nick Shapiro, said on Twitter.

Talking Points Memo reports also:

It was a strange juxtaposition: a President, standing before the memorial wall at the CIA that honors the lives lost by agency officers as he talked about crowd size and his intelligence. According to the pool report, there were about 400 CIA employees at the agency Saturday. At first, the cheering came from across the crowd, but the pooler noted that as the speech continued, the senior officials in the front grew “subdued.”

“Probably almost everybody in this room voted for me but I will not ask you to raise your hands if you did but I guarantee a big portion because we’re all on the same wavelength,” Trump said.

And, Trump basically just talked about himself.

It seemed at every turn, Trump would pivot to himself. As he talked about his choice to lead the CIA Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS), Trump noted that he himself was smart.

“I met him and I said, he is so good. Number one in his class at West Point. I know a lot about West Point, and I’m a person that very strongly believes in academics. In fact, every time I say I had an uncle who was a great professor at M.I.T. for 35 years, who did a fantastic job in so many ways,” Trump said. “He was an academic genius, and then they say, there’s Donald Trump, an intellectual, trust me, I’m like a smart person.”

Then, when he talked about wanting to help America win again, he noted how young he felt.

“When I was young and I feel young, I feel like I’m 30, 35, 39, somebody said, ‘Are you young? I said, ‘I think I’m young.’ You know, I was stopping when we were in the final month of the campaign, four stops, five stops, seven stops. Speeches, speeches, in front of 25,000, 35,000 people, 15,000, 19,000, from stop to stop,” Trump said. ” I feel young. When I was young, we were always winning things in this country. Would win with trade. Would win with wars. And at a certain age, I remember hearing from one of my instructors the United States has never lost a war. And then after that, it’s like, we haven’t won anything.”

Who does this? (See TPM for the video.)

George W. Bush didn’t know what he was doing, either, but as the son of a president he understood the protocols. He knew how to go through the motions properly. Trump can’t even do that.

I’ve got about three sermons crowding into my head demanding to be written. So let’s start with the easy one.

Yesterday, I understand, in a nearby community there was a big (by local standards) pro-Trump rally and prayer service by the county courthouse. I wasn’t there, so I can’t comment on what happened. But given that Washington County has a per capita income of $16,095 (per Wikipedia), I’m going to assume most of the attendees were poor as dirt. It’s also safe to assume they were very conservative and very white.

This is the Bible Belt. People will tell you they are “Bible believing Christians” even if they don’t know Leviticus from Thessalonians and only attend church for weddings and baptisms. But they hold the ideal of the dominance of Christianity in high regard, and identify as Christian, even if they don’t practice the religion themselves. Conservative Christianity has a big presence here, and I’m told some of the local preachers actually campaigned for Trump.

Many already have reviled conservative Christians for embracing Trump. He would seem to be a repudiation of everything they say they stand for, like, um, morality. He’s sleazy, vulgar, dishonest, promiscuous, and he built gambling casinos, for pity’s sake. But this article by Michael Wear, an evangelical who headed religious outreach for President Obama’s re-election campaign, explains it pretty well. (It was published in November but I’m just now seeing it.)

In the 2016 presidential election, 81 percent of these voters — voters that Democrats only remember exist every four years — voted for Donald Trump, and only 16 percent supported Clinton, well below the level of support of white evangelicals for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, when he won 26 and 21 percent of white evangelical votes respectively. …

… First, it’s a disturbing fact that safe harbors in white evangelical culture for an acceptance of or willingness to overlook racism, misogyny, xenophobia and anti-Semitism still exist. These tendencies do not wholly define evangelicalism; nor do they summarize all white evangelical support for Trump. But they still plague evangelical communities, and it is the responsibility of evangelicals who supported the winning candidate to be open to these conversations for the unity of the church. …

… But there are also ordinary political explanations for how white evangelicals voted. Trump’s message to evangelicals was that the challenges they face require a suspension of their values in politics — that it is now time to stop playing nice and start busting heads and disrupting the entire system. For evangelicals who feel embattled, isolated and marginalized by the onslaught of cultural change from sexual liberation to same-sex marriage to the coarsening of culture, Trump promised that he would relieve the pressure. Perhaps many of the 81 percent of white evangelicals who supported Trump were uncomfortable with his approach to winning, but there was an even firmer sense that they could not afford to keep losing.

My sermon to the white evangelicals is this — before you voted, you should have reviewed Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:15-20.

“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.” [New International Version]

There’s a lot of stuff in the Bible open to many interpretations, but this is pretty much a dead-on warning to the faithful to not do what they just did — judge a leader by his promises rather than by the effects of his life. (Notice I don’t say “deeds” but “effects”; impressive resumes don’t necessarily mean beneficial results.) Although Trump owns some successful hotels, his actual record as a businessman is, um, mixed. It could be said he’s not really a brilliant businessman; he just plays one on teevee. His record as a humanitarian is worse. And then there’s the vulgar language, the infidelity and divorces, the fraud, the stiffing of contractors, the ties to the mob, etc., etc. And that’s just the stuff we know about. And he’s not displayed even a whiff of remorse or contrition about any of it. The effects of his life are mostly that he’s made a ton of money for himself and left a lot of human wreckage behind.

Oh, and remember when the Mouth of Sauron, a.k.a. Kellyanne Conway, told us to ignore what comes out of Trump’s mouth?

“You have to listen to what the president-elect has said about that. Why don’t you believe him? Why is everything taken at face value?” she asked anchor Chris Cuomo. “You can’t give him the benefit of the doubt on this and he’s telling you what was in his heart? You always want to go by what’s come out of his mouth rather than look at what’s in his heart.”

In Matthew 15:11, Jesus said, “What goes into someone’s mouth does not defile them, but what comes out of their mouth, that is what defiles them.”

So if Jesus was right, no good can come from a Trump Administration. The man is corrupt to his core. The effects of his presidency are likely to be terrible. And if this also isn’t a classic example of “making a deal with the devil,” I don’t know what is.

History shows us that whenever religious power and political power join forces, both become corrupted. And I think we’re seeing the high-water mark of the corruption of conservative evangelicalism in America; it’s the fundie equivalent of Catholicism during the time of the Borgias. They’ve sold out everything, including the Gospels, for the sake of political power.

Back to Michael Wear:

Trump’s outreach to religious people consisted of telling them he was the only one who could save them and the country from what was coming — terrorism, a loss of religious freedom, the ratification of abortion as a moral good — and that he would offer them not just protection, but power. His message was to affirm conservative Christians’ sense of isolation and vulnerability, and to offer himself as the only way out. The debate line Trump used to deflect from his “Access Hollywood” comments was not new. He used it at Liberty University:

…We’re going to protect Christianity, and I can say that. I don’t have to be politically correct. We’re going to protect it. You know, and I asked Jerry [Falwell Jr.] and I asked some of the folks because I hear this is a major theme right here, but II Corinthians, 3:17, that’s the whole ball game. Where the spirit of the lord, right, where the spirit of the lord is, there is liberty, and here there is Liberty College, but Liberty University, but it is so true. You know, when you think — and that’s really — is that the one? Is that the one you like? I think that’s the one you like because I loved it, and it’s so representative of what’s taken place. But we are going to protect Christianity. And if you look what’s going on throughout the world, you look at Syria where if you’re Christian, they’re chopping off heads. You look at the different places, and Christianity, it’s under siege.

This helps us understand how a majority of Trump’s voters could question his temperament and fitness for office, and still think he’s the man for the job.

Even if evangelicals’ morality was on the losing side of the culture, which Trump’s candidacy was a walking reminder that it was, they could be protected through a more forceful exertion of power. This explains Trump’s unusual focus on the Johnson Amendment — a provision banning the endorsement of candidates from the pulpit or through the use of church resources. I have been involved in religion and politics for a decade now, and I had never before heard any mainstream religious leader prioritize the Johnson Amendment. Only a quarter of evangelicals believe an endorsement from the pulpit would be appropriate. Yet, Trump went around the country putting the repeal of the Johnson Amendment at the forefront of his outreach.

Trump’s money mostly came about because his father gave him a lot of it, but his fame came about because he is a master salesman. He’s really good at sniffing out what people want and offering to help them get it.

However, he also has a long history of breaking promises once the deal is done. A lot of his fortune came about because he gets away with stiffing people. And he has absolutely no compunction about doing this; as long as he gets what he wants, there’s no problem.  For example:

Trump’s promises are of the say-anything variety familiar to anyone who paid attention to Trump University:

The ads for his university were classic Donald Trump — Trump stares into the camera and proclaims:

“We’re going to have professors and adjunct professors that are absolutely terrific people, terrific brains, successful. We are going to have the best of the best… and these are people that are handpicked by me.”

… [But in] Trump’s own deposition [in] December [2015], Trump failed to recognize the name of a single presenter or teacher at his real estate seminars. He also confirmed he had nothing to do with the selection process of instructors who taught at the school’s events or mentors for the school’s “Gold Elite” programs.

A review of Trump University presenters and so-called real estate experts found many with questionable credentials and inflated resumes. Court documents show background-checks conducted during the hiring process could not determine whether some instructors even graduated high school.

He may follow through on his promise about the Johnson Amendment, or he may have forgotten about it already. But I can pretty much guarantee that those folks who rallied at the Washington County courthouse aren’t going to see a lick of benefit from a Trump Administration. It’s much more likely that their sorry, poverty-filled lives are about to get worse.

And considering that the state’s newly elected governor is the machine-gunning former Navy Seal who posed as the Ultimate Conservative, they aren’t going to get any help from the state, either. It probably won’t shock you to learn that one of his first acts was to drain tens of millions of dollars out of the budget for the state’s colleges and universities. Because that’s how wingnuts roll.

I’ve written in the past that people in many parts of the country have legitimate grievances, and that both parties  have ignored the economic stagnation growing in small towns and rural areas. However, Washington County has never amounted to much, frankly. When I was growing up nearby I was told most of the inhabitants were on welfare. Whether that is true I do not know, but it might have been true.

It might still be true, actually. It’s not good farm country, and the area has never attracted much industry. There used to be a lot of surface barite deposits in the vicinity, and in times past the locals made a little money digging it up by hand and selling it. But that’s gone now. I believe the biggest “business” there now is the state maximum security prison. And of course, there’s a big WalMart. And a lot of meth is getting cooked in them thar hills.

So exactly what the folks at the Washington County Courthouse expect Trump to do for them isn’t clear. If government really were to “get out of their lives” they probably wouldn’t survive long. Industry isn’t going to be revitalized here, because it was never here to begin with. I’m not seeing an influx of immigrants in the area, so they can’t complain about illegals taking away the jobs they didn’t have anyway.

I’m sure that between Trump and the state, women will have even less access to abortion and birth control, which they barely have now. Medicaid wasn’t expanded here, so a lot of Washington County residents have no health insurance. And the nearest Planned Parenthood clinic is in St. Louis, about an hour and a half drive away.

Perhaps they are living in fear of being asked to bake cakes for same-sex weddings someday.  But, frankly, this place is so poor that if someone were to open up a gay sex toy factory, the locals would line up for the jobs.

So, in Washington County, it probably does come down to racism and religion. People here aren’t just economically isolated; to a large degree they are culturally and socially isolated as well. The world outside of the Ozarks is alien territory. If anyone wants to study an area where white privilege and class privilege have completely parted company, this is it. And now even Christianity is selling them out.

This will not end well.

I didn’t watch the inauguration, but I did read some of the speech. I imagine that when Trump spouted off about “America first,” a big asterisk appeared over his head with the words “after Russia and Israel.” Am I right?

Stuff to read:

Jonathan Freedland, “Divisive, ungracious, unrepentant: this was Trump unbound.”

Gary Younge, “Trump’s first speech in office was unapologetic appeal to nationalism.”

Josh Marshall, “A Few Thoughts on Entering the Trump Era.”

New York Times, “What We’re Seeing at Trump’s Presidential Inauguration.”

I may add some more if I stumble onto anything good.