Violence is never the answer, but it is often the question. The attempt on former President Donald J. Trump’s life is nothing to celebrate as the taking of a life in anything but self-defense is morally and legally wrong.
But after almost 10 years of vitriol on the campaign trail and in office, he has come to his encounter with karma.
Many misunderstand this Eastern principle, which has found its way into Western thought. They think karma is a comeuppance. They gleefully say it’s a, well, rhymes with “rich.”
But karma has no schadenfreude. It offers no eye for an eye, as implied in “As you sow, so shall you reap,” or “What goes around comes around.” Rather it says that what you put out in the world, returns to you, and it returns to you no matter what you subsequently do to change your course of behavior.
So say you murder someone. You’re convicted, serve your time as an exemplary prisoner and devote the rest of your life to the service of others. That murder will still come back to you. You have to answer for it.
For 10 years in the civic spotlight, Trump has spewed and acted on hate and violence — calling Mexican migrants “rapists”; instigating the Muslim travel ban; putting children on the southern border in cages; placating the white supremacists who marched on Charlottesville; manipulating Volodymyr Zelenskyy to try to get dirt on Hunter Biden; defaming the sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll; cozying up to the world’s autocrats; and, of course, cheerleading the Jan. 6 insurrection, in which his supporters not only invaded the Capitol but sought to hang his Vice President, Mike Pence, while he did nothing.
Now, hate and violence have been returned to him, even if the shooter professed no motive and was your garden-variety bullied lone wolf acting out his pain.
In the book “How to be a Leader” (Princeton University Press), editor Jeffrey Beneker collects the Greek historian-philosopher Plutarch’s essays on the nature of leadership, in which Plutarch talks about the way true leaders use reason and morality to act in service of others. This is what President Joe Biden did in his address to the nation the day after the attempted assassination. It was everything his debate performance wasn’t — at once assured and reassuring, aspirational and inspirational and almost fatherly in the way he whispered both comfort and exhortation to a nation that has grown comfortable in its own isolated groups.
This is in contrast to the narcissist, who has no core identity and thus must fill the Lake Titicaca of need with endless adulation fixes for which the truth is an ever-changing casualty. My fear and sorrow is that the attempted assassination will play to the part of Trump’s narcissism in which he is victim as well as hero, continuing the cycle of vengeance that he has promised in the draconian Project 2025, which he allegedly knows nothing about but said was partly ridiculous (so he does know something about it) and wished well. How can you wish something well when you don’t approve of it? Again, this flies in the face of what Plutarch would call the essential leadership trait of rationality.
As someone who has experienced narcissistic abuse, I can tell you the scars are eternal and forgiveness comes hard. So when the narcissist suffers — which is inevitable, as his or her sense of victimhood is a self-fulfilling prophecy — you might experience moral revulsion at what has transpired, but you won’t feel any compassion. Even as Melania Trump has apparently come to emotional life, we can’t help but remember the jacket she sported saying “I don’t care. Do U?”
Now the stiletto pump is on the other foot. In “The Heiress,” the Ruth and Augustus Goetz play and subsequent movie of Henry James’ novel “Washington Square,” the shy title character is constantly browbeaten by the narcissistic father who can only remember her stunning mother, his late wife. When he tells the daughter — determined to marry a charismatic gold digger the father despises — that her only attractive quality is the money she’ll inherit, it is finally a bridge too far.
Later, as he lies dying, she sits alone. When the housemaid informs her that he is calling for her, all she can say is “Too late.”
For those who suffer narcissistic abuse and live to see the tables turned, the day will come when it will be too late. For those of us who have watched Trump in horror, it already is.