Is Donald Trump a Destructive Addict?

Frederick Crist Trump Jr. (Fred Trump Jr.) was born on October 14, 1938. The eldest son of real estate developer, Fred Trump Sr. and Mary Anne MacLeod Trump in Queens, New York City, and the older brother of Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946), and brother of sisters Elizabeth and Maryanne, Fred Trump Jr. became an airline pilot rather than enter his father’s business like his younger brother Donald.

Fred Jr. struggled most of his life with the disease of addiction, largely with alcohol, a condition that contributed to his fatal heart attack at the young age of 43. On several public occasions, Donald Trump related the tragic story of his brother’s life as an alcoholic.

“My brother Fred was substantially older than me,” he remembered. “I had somebody who guided me….and he had a very very tough life. He said to me many many times, ‘just don’t drink, don’t drink,’ and he would add, ‘don’t smoke either.’ And to this day, I’ve never had a drink. I’ve never had a longing for it. I’ve never had an interest in it. And I’ve never had a cigarette.”

Seeing the devastating toll Fred Junior’s alcohol and tobacco dependence had on his life, and taking heed of his guidance, this young brother, Donald, has implied that he has escaped the destructive effects of suffering from an addiction.

But as we know from medical and psychological research, the disease of addiction expresses itself in many ways.

As a definition of “addiction” makes clear: “Addiction is when you have a need or urge to do something or use something, even if it causes harm.” If continued over time, addictions cause long-lasting changes in brain structures thus making the disease of addition as both a brain disorder and as a mental illness.

The types of addiction include “substance addiction” (such as alcohol, drugs, tobacco, food) and “non-substance addition” or “behavioral addition” (such as compulsive shopping, gambling, sex, social media, video games).

The risk of developing an addiction depends on a combination of genetic, environmental, and developmental factors. The more factors a person has, the greater is the chance of developing an addiction.

Signs of an addiction include obsessive thought and compulsive use or engagement in the rewarding stimuli (substances or behaviors) for immediate gratification and increasingly continued use or engagement even after experiencing negative consequences.

Crematomania or Money Addiction

When someone has an unhealthy emotional or mental relationship with money that often leads to obsessive, compulsive, and dangerous behaviors to accumulate money and wealth, one is said to have an addiction sometimes referred to as “money addition,” “disordered money behaviors,” “crematomania,” (from the Greek word for money, χρήματα chrímata), or “avaricious behaviors” (Latin verb, avēre, meaning “to crave”) forming the basis for the word “avaricious” and its definition as “greedy or covetous”).

What Is “Power”?

In a 1968 speech given to striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. defined power as “the ability to achieve purpose and effect change.”

A dictionary definition views “power” (a noun) in general as:

1. “the ability to do or act; capability of doing or accomplishing something.” In this definition, “capacity” is seen as a synonym of “power.”
2. Another definition of “power” is as a “great or marked ability to do or act; strength; might; force. In this definition, “energy” is a synonym.
3. A third definition is “the possession of control or command over people” with the synonyms of authority; influence.
4. A final definition for our purposes here defines “power” as the “political ascendancy or control in the government of a country, state, etc.” by “overthrowing the legal government” with the synonyms sovereignty, rule, sway, ascendancy.

We can place how leaders use their power on a spectrum from “With” on one side to “Over” on the other.

“Power With” refers to a leader or leaders utilizing their power in collaboration to empower those they lead. It involves a mutual appreciation and respect for autonomy in the creation of solutions to accomplish shared goals. For the leaders, getting it right has priority rather than being right.

By contrast, “Power Over” refers to an undemocratic or authoritarian approach where the leader or leaders exert their dominance by dictating the actions to be taken, often using coercion or fear in which power is gained at another’s expense. Leaders give the orders, and they expect to be obeyed without challenge. For the leaders, being right has priority rather than getting it right.

Power as Addiction

History has shown a vast array of leaders and ordinary people who have become addicted to the concept of power. While people are initially attracted to power for many reasons including wanting to promote social change, for personal admiration or validation, to control others, in the accumulation of power, some people acquire a feeling of euphoria or a sense of fulfillment.

Over time, as in all forms of addiction, people develop dependency with a need to maintain and even increase their power. This dependency dominates other aspects of life including personal relationships and previously held values. Addictions generally, and in the case addiction to power leads often to unethical behaviors, isolation, and even to paranoid thoughts that others are coming to take from you what is yours, in other works, that enemies are attempting to take you down due to nothing you have done to incur their wrath.

Enabling the Addict

“Enabler” is the term given to those who fail to act to help addicts in harming themselves and/or others around them. “Passive bystander” or “bad Samaritan” is the name for people who are conscious of bad actions developing around them but fail to intervene.

Enabling and passively standing by take many forms, including literally offering an addict substances or conspiring with an abuser in a sinister plot, contributing to the denial of addicts and aggressors by asserting that they don’t have a problem, to downplaying the seriousness and making excuses for their behaviors, translating for others what the person “really meant,” downright lying, and so on.

How many times have we heard, “He didn’t mean it that way. What he really meant to say was…” and “You are misunderstanding her,” to “I got this black eye by walking into a door.”

Donald John Trump

Though Donald Trump has followed the warning of his elder brother to refrain from addictive substances such as alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, one can make a strong argument by observing his behaviors that he certainly displays the classic signs of addiction, in Trump’s case, of non-substance addictions.

These include money and wealth, power, and sex. He rates his personal value on the amount of wealth and power he can accumulate, and by how many notches he can carve on his bedpost representing his sexual conquests.

Donald Trump’s enablers include members of the Republican Party in the U.S. Congress and Republican politicians in state governments in addition to the six Republican-nominated Supreme Court “Justices” who have relinquished their constitutional roles to serve as separate and co-equal branches of government.

They have, therefore, aided and abetted Donald Trump’s addictive need to consume as much power and grift as he can in his unquenchable appetite to impose a “unitary executive” governmental branch and to act on his compulsive paranoid need to persecute his supposed enemies.

“For of those to whom much is given…”

President-elect John Fitzgerald Kennedy delivered an address on January 9, 1961, to a joint convention of the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In his speech, he presented a touchstone by which history should evaluate a leader.

Beginning with his now famous statement that “For of those to whom much is given, much is required” (paraphrase of Luke 12:48), Kennedy enumerated four essential criteria in assessing a leader:

“And when at some future date the high court of history sits in judgment on each one of us,” he stated, “recording whether in our brief span of service we fulfilled our responsibilities to the state–our success or failure, in whatever office we may hold, will be measured by the answers to four questions:

First, were we truly men of courage…. the courage to resist public pressure, as well as private greed?

Secondly, were we truly men of judgment…. with enough wisdom to know that we did not know, and enough candor to admit it?

Third, were we truly men of integrity….men whom neither financial gain nor political ambition could ever divert from the fulfillment of our sacred trust?

Finally, were we truly men of dedication–with an honor mortgaged to no single individual or group, and compromised by no private obligation or aim, but devoted solely to serving the public good and the national interest?”

I have enough conclusive evidence to rank Donald John Trump as a true danger to our nation and to the world community in his all-consuming lust for material riches and sexual conquests over the common good of the people who trusted him with their vote.

How do you judge him? How do you think history will judge him?