Donald Trump and The Imp Of The Perverse

Donald Trump and The Imp Of The Perverse

I've been struggling, for the past year, to understand why the preponderance of President Trump's statements and actions, public and private, seem to be radically destructive and corrosive. I've wondered whether his ultimate goal is to weaken the ability of the US to exert power globally, and to diminish social trust internally. But he doesn't seem to have the focus, personally, to sustain that kind of purposefulness, and the idea feels like a mirror reflection of the crank aspersions that Marco Rubio and others cast without justification on Barack Obama during the 2016 Presidential campaign. Could Trump, then, be guided in this direction by some other agent who holds that agenda? That seems paranoid and far-fetched, but I haven't ruled it out entirely.

Today a phrase from Edgar Allan Poe popped into my head--The Imp Of The Perverse--which may offer a more plausible explanation for the destructive lean ofTrump's actions. To put it plainly, it's an impulse that's not directed towards causing harm (which is the definition of evil), but simply towards doing wrong, and causing chaos. Chaos is Trump's oxygen. There is a tendency on the part of his supporters to imagine that this impulse is strategic. It isn't. It is not disruption and misdirection in service of an agenda. Chaos itself is the agenda. As Poe says:

"Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition as to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable; but, in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible. I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution. Nor will this overwhelming tendency to do wrong for the wrong's sake, admit of analysis, or resolution into ulterior elements. It is a radical, a primitive impulse—elementary."

Poe saw this impulse in himself, and much of his genius was absorbed in following its imaginary traces. Ultimately it destroyed him.

Donald Trump has none of Poe's reflectivity. But he is a remarkable projector of feral impulses, an amplifier of the anti-social id that government at all levels is constituted to repress. This, then, is why Trump's projections, his actions and statements, official and offhand, individually and in aggregate, are concocted first and foremost to sow discord, to damage and hinder the very Constitution that he is sworn to protect. He is The Imp Of The Perverse of our times.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Works_of_the_Late_Edgar_Allan_Poe/Volume_1/The_Imp_of_the_Perverse