In his novel “Mother Night,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Ever since President Donald Trump uttered his first offensive statement, his “friends,” colleagues and supporters have tried to defend his character. In the last month, on both “Real Time with Bill Maher” and “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” different guests on the shows have tried spinning the truth behind Trump’s personality. Jeffrey Lord of CNN as well as Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough of MSNBC have all said that Trump, when in private, is a very cordial and gracious man.
But that raises a question — who is the real Donald J. Trump? At first glance, this seems obvious. Donald Trump is Donald Trump. Case closed. But this problem goes much deeper. According to his friends and family, there exists this caring Trump only known to them. But when other people come into contact with Trump, he is usually saying something offensive or lying.
Trump’s supposed “private and caring” personality is not a defense for his actions in public. If anything, it only makes Trump out to be a worse person than he appears to be.
Before I jump into the main argument I want to distinguish, and perhaps defend to make a point, I must clarify the distinction between a person’s private personality and their public personality. A person’s public personality is who he presents himself to be in public. It is the personality everyone sees. In contrast, a person’s private personality is who he is when he is by himself or with close friends or family. For most people, their public and private personalities are the same. But for some people, they live double lives.
However, we can see from our politicians that their public and private personalities are anything but the same. Hillary Clinton got into a lot of trouble when it was leaked that she had said in a speech, “you need both a public and a private position.” Trump criticized her for this at one of the presidential debates.
Here comes the age-old Trump hypocrisy. Although Trump doesn’t have public and private positions (or any positions at all for that matter), he does, according to his friends, have a public and a private personality. We all see the public Trump — the loud mouthed, thin-skinned narcissist.
When his friends say his private personality is generous or caring, they are actually hurting him more than they think. If Trump really is this nice guy in private, why can’t he be that way in public? His friends seem to be admitting that Trump is acting when he does crazy things like call Mexicans “rapists” or calls journalists “enemy of the people.” It seems that Trump, the “anti-politician,” is actually more like the politicians he hates.
When I watch TV shows like “Breaking Bad,” I know Bryan Cranston is not actually like Walter White. He is just acting. The problem with Trump is that his public personality is tied to his private personality. Public Trump and private Trump are the same person to the vast majority of people.
Let’s say I knew someone who went around wearing Jesus T-shirts, and all he ever said was that the Bible is the law of the land. He yells at me for my atheism and he always plays Christian rock whenever he drives around with me. Then one day I find out from his best friend that he is a Buddhist. From all my experience of the person, he is a Christian (and an annoying one at that). Who he is to me is the person he presents to me.
A good person is someone who lives as authentically as possible. They do not have a split personality. Who they present themselves to be is who they are. President Trump’s friends have tried to portray him as someone who he isn’t. If Trump were actually a polite and generous person, he wouldn’t need to have so many people defending him.
