“Megalomania” and Donald Trump

“Megalomaniac” is the new term applied to President Donald Trump by Trump-haters. It’s the latest and greatest form of virtue-signaling. To be SEEN as calling Donald Trump a megalomaniac is to be part of the “in”, sophisticated crowd who “gets it”.

So what’s the actual definition of the term megalomania?

Here’s one:

Definition of megalomania

a mania for great or grandiose performance;  an outburst of wildly extravagant commercial megalomania; or, a delusional mental illness that is marked by feelings of personal omnipotence and grandeur

Unless you know Donald Trump personally, or are his psychiatrist/therapist, you’re really not in a position to speculate. Speculation is valid once he has been in office for a number of years, but he’s only been in office a few months.

Let’s examine what would cause megalomania in any politician—including people like, say, Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. The defining feature of politics today is that you get to spend other people’s money—billions and billions of dollars of it.

It stands to reason that some people who are drawn to this kind of field—the power of spending away significant chucks of the American economy—started out as megalomaniacs. I’d place Hillary Clinton in this category. There’s loads of evidence that she craved power her whole life, and the more power she got, the more she wanted it. Look at how she reacted to losing. It ended everything for her, although I don’t think she’ll ever give up.

It also stands to reason that people who didn’t start out this way become megalomaniacs, once they get drunk on the power of spending other people’s money. This explains Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who started out as an admirer of Ayn Rand, and now is the biggest apologist (and spender) for the $20 trillion-in-debt transfer of wealth state. It also explains most career politician Republicans like Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham and John McCain.

If you’re going to insist that Donald Trump is a megalomaniac, you have to provide evidence. I know many take his bragging style, and his boasting or exaggerated comments, as self-evident proof of his arrogant mania. However, much of what he brags about is based on reality. He went into the business world, with his father’s earnings, and turned them into billions. Nobody took risks for him. He took the risks, and generated a lot of wealth and created jobs in the process. Unlike most conventional pinstriped businessmen, he launched an extremely popular television show that made millions of dollars for years. Even if he acquired pull from politicians at times, and even when he was wrong to do so, that only makes the case for getting government out of the field of business, not intruding into it even more as Democratic Trump critics so often want.

People like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Paul Ryan have created nothing. They generate nothing. They are, quite literally, parasites. I do not mean this with hostility so much as in the full objective sense of the term. Anything they manage to do—even if you consider things like Obamacare great—happens exclusively due to other people’s money, achievements and efforts. What right do they have to feel smug, proud or accomplished about anything? Without others able and willing to produce the wealth—including people like Donald Trump, as well as the average working Joe having money deducted by the government from his paycheck—they’d be lost.

It seems to me that if megalomania is your primary concern, the last thing you’d want is business as usual in Washington DC. Maybe you won’t care for Donald Trump. But what on earth makes you satisfied with the career politician Democrats and Republicans who are the biggest megalomaniacs of all? We know they are, because of the careers they have chosen, and the ruthlessness to which they hold onto their power. If you must psychologize, psychologize them.