President Donald Trump can’t help but make the “same mistake” again and again, undercutting his own thirst for “reverence” and setting himself up for “ridicule” rather than the “intimidation” that he desires. That mistake: “He never stops talking.” And whenever he does, he “trolls” himself by changing his position “from sentence to sentence.”
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This is according to his niece, psychologist Mary L. Trump, who on Monday wrote that the great “irony” to Trump’s second term is that he and his administration routinely undermine his claims. She notes that while sometimes the examples suggest major consequences, like with his election denial claims, sometimes more “bewildering” cases highlight how rapidly he can contradict himself.
Mary Trump raised the example of magnets, writing, “Nobody has spent more time proving they do not understand magnets than Donald Trump. Sometimes magnets are dangerous. Sometimes they do not work. Sometimes they stop working because they get wet. Sometimes they are apparently the key to unimaginable wealth. The rules change from sentence to sentence.”
Here she cites remarks he made at a defense contracting summit on Thursday, in which he complained about ship designs that use “ridiculous” magnetic elevators, claiming the magnets would stop working if touched by water, and that he would only trust magnets if Caterpillar tractors started using them instead of hydraulics. “As though the first explanation were not bewildering enough,” writes Mary Trump, “Donald somehow managed to contradict himself only moments later.”
“I hope you’re going to do magnets,” he said. “Somebody out there, I hope you’re all brilliant people. Magnets. Do magnets. Okay. I’ll tell you how to make money. Do magnets.” He continued in that vein for some time.
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According to Mary Trump, “Only Donald could spend several minutes insisting magnets are a catastrophic engineering failure before pivoting seamlessly into investment advice about the magnet industry. Hydraulics are good. Magnets are terrible. Actually, magnets are the future. Invest in magnets. Avoid magnets. All within the span of a single press conference. It almost feels as though making sense has become optional inside the Trump regime.”
“Then again,” she notes, “perhaps consistency has never really been the point. Donald has spent his entire public life saying whatever serves him in the moment, regardless of whether it contradicts something he said thirty seconds earlier. Logic is irrelevant. Facts are negotiable. Reality is simply another obstacle to be ignored. Unfortunately, that same approach extends well beyond magnets. It now shapes the propaganda ecosystem surrounding Donald, where television hosts, political allies and administration officials spend every day asking Americans to reject what they can plainly see in favor of whatever fantasy Donald happens to be selling at that particular moment.”
While the president often attempts to sell his audience on more serious concepts, like election denial, according to Mary Trump, one only needs to give him a few moments before he’ll make some absurd statement torpedoing his own argument. As she writes, “Fortunately for the rest of us, Donald keeps making the same mistake. He never stops talking. Every press conference, every rally, every interview, every rambling explanation about magnets, elections, or whatever new obsession captures his attention provides another reminder that beneath all the manufactured spectacle is simply a profoundly insecure man who cannot keep his own stories straight.”
The president and his allies, concludes Mary Trump, “desperately want to be feared. They want to project strength, inevitability, and power. Strip away the propaganda, however, and what remains is something considerably less impressive. There is only absurdity. And absurdity deserves exactly what we continue to give it. Not reverence. Not intimidation. Ridicule.”
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