Pathological
Judge Engoron captures the essence of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement
Plenty of pixels will be devoted to deciphering the meaning of the $355 million judgment against Donald Trump that was handed down by a New York judge on Friday—a penalty that, with interest, could exceed $450 million and leave the former president cash poor.
The practical and political fallout will be widely discussed. There are several ramifications and they are consequential:
The judgment pulverizes Trump’s original claim to office as a successful businessman and exposes him as a common criminal.
The judgment is equally devastating to the Trump brand, which Trump spent a lifetime equating with glamor and success.
Trump faces the prospect of having to show the world how little he actually has, especially if he is forced to liquidate assets to cover the fine.
A judge with the authority to make Trump face real-world consequences has told him no—something that has rarely happened in his life—and his reaction is likely to be unhinged.
Trump lost his financial liberty and has been assigned a babysitter to guard his checkbook—not a great look for someone asking to take the reins of the United States. He will be prohibited from conducting business in New York for three years, during which time he will have to report his every financial move to a court-appointed monitor.
To be called out as a fraud who isn’t even allowed to run his own company is heavy political baggage for Trump to carry into November.
And—yes—voters will care.
Not voters in the Trump base—we’ll get to them in a minute—but voters who, upon tuning into the election for the first time in a few months, will be shocked to see a diminished Donald Trump, a tax cheat stripped of the pretext that got voters to take a chance on him in 2016.
Beyond these practical ramifications, the decision offers insight into Trump’s behavior that is commonly ignored or normalized by the press.
Judge Arthur Engoron identifies with great clarity a Trump characteristic that I think explains what’s driving our political instability and making it feel like everything in this country is upside down.
Engoron observes that Trump’s behavior is pathological. Here’s how he put it:
The English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) first declared, “To err is human, to forgive is divine.” Defendants apparently are of a different mind. After some four years of investigation and litigation, the only error (“inadvertent,” of course) that they acknowledge is the tripling of the size of the Trump Tower Penthouse, which cannot be gainsaid. Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological. They are accused only of inflating asset values to make more money. The documents prove this over and over again. This is a venial sin, not a mortal sin. Defendants did not commit murder or arson. They did not rob a bank at gunpoint. Donald Trump is not Bernard Madoff. Yet, defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways. Instead, they adopt a “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” posture that the evidence belies. [emphasis mine]
Engoron is a judge, not a doctor, and he is using pathological in a colloquial sense rather than as a diagnosis.
He appears flabbergasted that, when confronted over and over with hard facts, Trump and his sons retreated to the fortress of what I call fake reality, where the value of their properties is whatever they want it to be at any given time and no one gets to tell them otherwise.
Engoron recognizes this as extreme and unhealthy behavior—what we usually mean by the word pathological.
Not that it’s easy to acknowledge reality when confronted with a cascade of facts telling you that you’ve done something wrong, but to hold tight to an obviously indefensible position before a judge with the power to liquidate your livelihood is to insist—incredibly—that the judge has no power at all. It is the stuff of tantrums.
Of course there is no contrition or remorse. To demand that you set the terms by which the world operates is to see external facts and the law and other people as nothing more than extensions of yourself.
And if it is impossible to see others as anything more than servants for your needs, you never reach the point where you can acknowledge wrongdoing because you believe there is no wrongdoing to acknowledge. You can never recognize that you hurt others. You see no need to ask forgiveness.
Although Engoron didn’t say it, the behavior he observed could also explain the unbreakable bond Trump shares with his supporters. They, too, are invested in denying the outside world. They reject the massive demographic changes taking place in this country and insist on turning back the clock to a time when they feel they were empowered. Trump channels this wish and promises to deliver it to them, even though external reality makes it clear that he can’t.
MAGA rejects political facts the same way Trump rejects financial ones. It owes its existence to a false promise Trump and his enablers present to them as real. But it is no more real than valuing Mar-a-lago at ten times what it’s worth, then holding fast to that claim when confronted with evidence of the lie.
Why do we assume the MAGA base will be unmoved by a court ruling that Trump is a cheat and a fraud, or by a different court’s determination that he is a rapist? Why can we be so certain that Trump could be convicted of a felony and it will not change the votes of his core supporters?
Because they don’t want to believe it. They want to live with Trump in a place where they get to define what’s real.
This, too, could be described as pathological.
Engoron appears to recognize that the world where Trump makes all the rules is a hostile place, devoid of humanity for its inability to allow contrition or forgiveness. We see this hostility reflected in the ugliness at Trump rallies directed toward others who threaten to puncture the promises Trump makes to his loyalists. We saw it on January 6. As the year progresses we will see it again, and it is unnerving.
But on Friday we also saw that the threat can be addressed as long as the outside world refuses to succumb to it.
Last Friday, the judicial system worked as designed. After a lifetime of inflating his worth, cheating taxpayers, and committing fraud with abandon, Trump now confronts the loss of his holdings and constraints on his business that he cannot ignore.
The same fate will befall the MAGA movement if those who are attuned to its dangers mobilize and vote. An unambiguous verdict this November will have the same effect on Trumpism that Engoron’s judgment had on Trump.
The pathology may not be treatable it can be constrained.
Maybe Trump is expecting golden sneaker sales to turn this whole thing in his favor.