If you’re wondering why the Khan saga has wounded Trump when every other nutty thing he says seems to bounce off him with no impact, Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio (“The Truth About Trump,” 2015) has published his theory on CNN.com. It’s worth reading.
First of all, “Donald Trump Isn’t Crazy,” D’Antonio says.
The word "crazy" conjures up a person who is so plagued by delusions, or perhaps hallucinations, that he makes no sense at all. Consider his success, both before and during his pursuit of the presidency, and it's hard to argue that Trump suffers from such a profoundly distorted view of reality.Trump’s refusal to play by the ordinary rules of social behavior, D’Antonio says, comes directly from his value system:
Trump has, throughout his life, expressed the belief that winning is what matters and losing is a fate to be avoided at all costs.
It is a system of values that has led him to despise other people.
[h]is view of humanity is extremely dark. As he told me, in an interview, "For the most part, you can't respect people because most people aren't worthy of respect."
But unlike the stereotypical misanthropic loner, Trump is a highly gregarious animal. His escapades with women, romantic and sordid, are well known. He surrounds himself with obedient, kowtowing employees. Trump’s character, D’Antonio says, fits the archetype of the alpha wolf.
Alpha wolves use displays of strength to dominate and command in an environment of considerable stress and struggle. Trump, who marks his territory -- buildings, products, aircraft, etc. -- with his name in giant letters, is a dominant male who demands absolute loyalty and considers success the proof of superiority.
Ordinarily, Trump defeats politicians who attack him by bullying them until they treat him with the deference he feels he deserves. He told John McCain, who built his career on his reputation as a POW, that he didn’t respect people who got captured. McCain then meekly endorsed Trump, falling in line behind the alpha wolf. He has threatened to endorse Paul Ryan’s primary opponent as Ryan comes under pressure to renounce Trump.
But when Khizr Khan posed those damning rhetorical questions on stage at the DNC, Trump’s alpha-wolf defense mechanisms failed him.
Trump's usual methods, so effective when used against lifelong politicians, failed to dispatch a man who criticized him, not on political grounds but on the basis of values and morality.
Instead, Khizr Khan appealed to Trump’s humanity and revealed his “black soul,” which D’Antonio describes as Trump’s “real deficiency.”
The man isn't irrational, or insane, but he is trapped in his own drive to prevail by dominating others.The first thing to understand about Khan, which Trump doesn’t get, is that he is not a wolf. Rather than espousing alpha-wolf values, Khan is what D’Antonio terms a “moral animal” who has flushed Trump out into the open, where he is vulnerable and doesn’t know how to react.
Although we are taught to intellectualize elections, believing they should fundamentally be about competing policy ideas, politics is nevertheless a social act and we are social creatures. This makes us susceptible to characters like Trump who seek to compel us to fall in line behind a strong leader. His endless gaffes are ways of getting us to notice him, and that may be part of the reason why they have done him so little harm.
The Khan episode suggests that to win, we must draw on the authority of the “moral animals” among us who can shame even a would-be pack leader.