Mirror, Mirror....

Beg to differ. Her reporting has provided clear and compelling evidence of Trump's diseased mind for years. https://t.co/YWmar4SGsV

— George Conway🌻 (@gtconway3d) September 26, 2022

We could also put that quote in context:

"I love being with her, she's like my psychiatrist," Trump told two aides while sitting for one of three interviews for Haberman's new book "Confidence Man," according to an excerpt published by The Atlantic.

Haberman, a veteran New York reporter who has covered Trump for years, wrote extensively about Trump's time in the White House as well as his origins as a real estate developer.

"I have found myself on the receiving end of the two types of behavior Donald Trump exhibits toward reporters: his relentless desire to hold the media's gaze, and his poison-pen notes and angry statements in response to coverage," Haberman wrote.

"The reality is that he treats everyone like they are his psychiatrists — reporters, government aides, and members of Congress, friends and pseudo-friends and rally attendees and White House staff and customers," she explained. "All present a chance for him to vent or test reactions or gauge how his statements are playing or discover how he is feeling. He works things out in real time in front of all of us."

The leap from metaphor to literal description is cheap; but then, so is pscychoanalyzing a public figure from news reports.  And the desire to bend all such reporting to one's desired end is almost...Trumpian. In context one has to ask: exactly how many people had a duty to warn about their "patient"?

I don't like Trump.  I despise Trump.  But Trump serves to expose the self-centeredness in all of us.  I've pretty much discarded the Christian doctrine of "original sin," at least insofar as it's an essential element of a soteriology.  But the concept of "original sin" has its merits, especially when that original failure is the failure to think first of others rather than of ourselves.  Trump is at the extreme end of that line, so far out there he stands completely alone.  But he is attached to the rest of us through that line; we all have something of that sin in us.

And berating someone else for not being enough like us is exactly the sin in action.

I would argue Ms. Haberman has been warning us of the dangers of Trump for years.  It is up to us to decide, for ourselves, alone, what that danger is, or even whether it is.  No one else can do it for us.  That is the danger of our "original sin."  That is why so many people still think well of Trump, or ever did.  They see a bit of themselves in him, and are attracted.  Conversely, some of us see a bit of ourselves in him, and we want to break the mirror.