Reptile in the White House

In a recent interview, the NY Times' Maggie Haberman discussed how Trump's experience of human relationship is distinct from typical human experience of relationship. In her opinion and observation (which is deep and long), his relationships are entirely transactional, including those with his children. Loyalty, friendship, common feeling, curiosity, longing, tenderness, and camaraderie, are all lacking from his relationships, replaced instead with a reptilian tit for tat, in which all that matters is what is given for what can be gotten. His internal world is essentially substance-less. There is a void in the place where the resonance of empathy and awe should abide. I've heard this before, but it struck me in a new way this morning, as I was also thinking that this is what makes it possible for him to be so blindly destructive. The same reverence that leads a person to value a copper-red slot canyon in Utah, or the plight of a starving polar bear or the wisdom of a two-state solution or the poem on the Statue of Liberty, or any of the thousand other things he has pillaged and trashed, is connected to the ways in which there is a felt resonance with the beauty they emanate or signify. I believe that Trump lives in a world devoid of a capacity for beauty. He can't be humbled or startled or thrilled by the majesty of anything. If nothing is beautiful in its own right, then there is nothing to fight for except one's own survival. I've been reading recently about a current lack of "ontological density", and how aspects of modern life have leached meaning from our existence. Trump seems like the ultimate symptom of this profound emptiness. He feels no meaning, sees no beauty, honors no god beyond his own self-idolatry. He's a pathetic sentient lizard-man, saddled with the nuclear codes and the most vulnerable decisions in the world.