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What does Donald Trump talk about when he talks about love? For the man presents himself as being full of it. He is associated with a politics of grievance and retribution that has boiled over at times into violence, most infamously in the attack on the Capitol on January 6th 2021. And yet no other president, or presidential candidate, has so wreathed himself in valentines.
In speeches and blast emails, Mr Trump romances his supporters with constant reminders of his love. Among those for whom he has declared his love over the years are “the Hispanics”, “the Saudis”, “the poorly educated” and officers of the Central Intelligence Agency. His heart often has reasons of which reason would appear to know nothing. Like Titania he has tumbled for the most improbable of creatures (“We fell in love,” he gushed of North Korea’s supreme leader, Kim Jong Un). Like Rihanna he has found love in hopeless places, including the Soviet Union (“you could see it was a country where there was a lot of love”) and even in that crowd on January 6th (“There was a lot of love out there. There was tremendous love”).
Pretty much by definition, presidents are not normal people. But even by their abnormal standard Mr Trump is an unusual character. His detractors like to point out that he had a head start in life as the son of a millionaire real-estate developer. They may not give him enough credit, though, for how through daring, determination and a certain ethical flexibility he willed himself into becoming a billionaire, a flamboyant celebrity, a reality-television star and then the president—how, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, Donald Trump “sprang from his Platonic conception of himself”. His insistence on this conception overwhelmed the scoffers at his candidacy eight years ago, bulldozed most Republicans into believing he did not lose in 2020 and may now persuade Americans to return him to the White House.
Biographers of Mr Trump have recounted how, as he discovered he could dominate and bamboozle others, he acquired some contempt for them as well. Once he became known for his wealth people would claw at him for favours. He marvelled, as a candidate in 2015, how easy it was to woo voters with the slightest gesture.
Wayne Barrett, a New York journalist who was probably the closest student of Mr Trump’s rise, fall and fragile recovery into the early 1990s, writes in “Trump” that people who worked for the mogul longed for him to find love but “did not really believe he had the capacity for it.” Mr Barrett quotes one such person as saying Mr Trump was “unaware of his own tragedy” and then continues, “As they saw it, his deeply ingrained remoteness was so much a part of his unexamined life that he neither understood it nor regretted it.” When one friend, irritated by Mr Trump’s uninterest in his troubles, accused him of being a shallow person, he replied, “That’s one of my strengths.”
The Great Gatsby was laid low by love, but that seems to have little chance of undoing The Donald, as his first wife, Ivana Trump, called him. Outsiders can never know what really goes on inside a marriage, but journalists, lawyers and the participants themselves have rendered some of Mr Trump’s marriages more transparent than most. Ideals of love have not tended to predominate.
“If you don’t marry me you’ll ruin your life,” were the words with which Mr Trump proposed to Ivana, according to her book “Raising Trump”. “Continuing love and affection was not a material part” of their nuptial agreement, read a court filing from Mr Trump as the couple split up. “I was bored when she was walking down the aisle,” Mr Trump later recalled of Marla Maples, the woman for whom he left Ivana. “I kept thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing here?’” Probably no Valentine’s Day card will ever invoke Mr Trump’s advice about how best to behave toward women: “You have to treat ’em like shit.”
Outside his family, Mr Trump did not express much love for the people who helped build his fortune. “Look at those losers,” he remarked to an associate as he watched people gambling in one of his Atlantic City casinos, according to “Confidence Man” by Maggie Haberman.
To Mr Trump, hate could be a virtue. Back in 1989, New York’s mayor, Ed Koch, urged citizens not to have rancour toward five black youths arrested for the rape of a white jogger in Central Park. Mr Trump, then beginning to dabble in politics, took out full-page ads in the four daily New York papers calling for reinstatement of the death penalty and declaring, “I want to hate these murderers and I always will.” The youths served years in prison, but even after they were exonerated Mr Trump would not recant, saying in 2014 that they did “not exactly have the pasts of angels”. (Hate can mean never having to say you’re sorry.)
As president in 2020, Mr Trump attended the National Prayer Breakfast, devoted that year to the theme of “loving your enemy”. “I don’t know if I agree,” he mused, when he stepped behind the lectern. He had recently been impeached for the first time and was not inclined to forgive people he thought of as enemies. “They have done everything possible to destroy us,” he said, “and by so doing, very badly hurt our nation.”
Say that you love me
Mr Trump’s love has limit and conditions. He seems to need to feel appreciated and admired, to feel loved, and then he will complete the transaction by declaring his own affection. “I’ll never stop loving you,” he vowed in a recent mass email seeking donations. “Why? Because you’ve always loved me!” That is a deal his supporters are eager to make. They have their own unmet needs for recognition and affirmation. They know their guy is not perfect; in fact, it seems probable that when their love swears he is made of truth they believe him even though they know he lies. They will not risk his love by doubting him. This codependence has become the strongest force in American politics. ■
The Canary Wharf business district is seen in the distance behind autumnal leaves on October 09, 2024 in London, United Kingdom.
Dan Kitwood | Getty Images News | Getty Images
LONDON — Inflation in the U.K. dropped sharply to 1.7% in September, the Office for National Statistics said Wednesday.
Economists polled by Reuters had expected the headline rate to come in at a higher 1.9% for the month, in the first dip of the print below the Bank of England’s 2% target since April 2021.
Inflation has been hovering around that level for the last four months, and came in at 2.2% in August.
Core inflation, which excludes energy, food, alcohol and tobacco, came in at 3.2% for the month, down from 3.6% in August and below the 3.4% forecast of a Reuters poll.
Price rises in the services sector, the dominant portion of the U.K. economy, eased significantly to 4.9% last month from 5.6% in August, now hitting its lowest rate since May 2022.
Core and services inflation are key watch points for Bank of England policymakers as they mull whether to cut interest rates again at their November meeting.
As of Wednesday morning, market pricing put an 80% probability on a November rate cut ahead of the latest inflation print. Analysts on Tuesday said lower wage growth reported by the ONS this week had supported the case for a cut. The BOE reduced its key rate by 25 basis points in August before holding in September.
Within the broader European region, inflation in the euro zone dipped below the European Central Bank’s 2% target last month, hitting 1.8%, according to the latest data.
This is a breaking news story and will be updated shortly.
FEW REPUBLICAN politicians differ more from Donald Trump than Larry Hogan, the GOP Senate candidate in Maryland. Consider the contrasts between a Trump rally and a Hogan event. Whereas Mr Trump prefers to take the stage and riff in front of packed arenas, Mr Hogan spent a recent Friday night chatting with locals at a waterfront wedding venue in Baltimore County. Mr Hogan’s stump speech, at around ten minutes, felt as long as a single off-script Trump tangent. Mr Trump delights in defying his advisers; Mr Hogan fastidiously sticks to talking points about bipartisanship, good governance and overcoming tough odds. Put another way, Mr Hogan’s campaign is something Mr Trump is rarely accused of being: boring. But it is intriguing.
DEPENDING ON where exactly you find yourself, western Pennsylvania can feel Appalachian, Midwestern, booming or downtrodden. No matter where, however, this part of the state feels like the centre of the American political universe. Since she became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Kamala Harris has visited Western Pennsylvania six times—more often than Philadelphia, on the other side of the state. She will mark her seventh on a trip on October 14th, to the small city of Erie, where Donald Trump also held a rally recently. Democratic grandees flit through Pittsburgh regularly. It is where Ms Harris chose to unveil the details of her economic agenda, and it is where Barack Obama visited on October 10th to deliver encouragement and mild chastisement. “Do not just sit back and hope for the best,” he admonished. “Get off your couch and vote.”
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