We need to become agile to avoid Trump’s road rage

Riding the motorcycle to the office, I found myself assailed by a maddened road rager.

I had slowed a bit to allow a truck to merge into my lane.

Donald Trump has spent the first weeks of his second term as US president in a kind of extended road rage.Credit: AP

It seemed of no account – polite, even. Anyway, a motorcyclist is ill-advised to mess with a truck.

Suddenly, a black Mercedes loomed on my left, squeezing along the bicycle lane, revving and veering towards me.

Its driver was gesticulating wildly and shouting.

It was absurd and later seemed comical: his window was closed and my helmet would have blocked his words anyway, rendering them impotent.

I assume he was hysterical because I had slowed briefly for the truck ahead, causing Mr Black Mercedes to briefly apply the brakes. Why is it always a black Mercedes, by the way?

He swerved towards me a couple more times, hit the accelerator and screeched away, shaking a fist.

Happily, a motorbike is an agile machine. I avoided his attempts at spattering me on the pavement.

Still, there was a moment when the red mist descended on me, too.

I wanted to kick his door in and maybe helmet-butt his window. Hot adrenaline boiled until I reached the office and set about restoring my equilibrium, content I hadn’t antagonised the madman further.

It seems to be a time for the perpetually aggrieved.Credit: Leigh Henningham

It set me thinking about those who live perpetually aggrieved, whose approach to existence is to throw a tantrum and push around those who get in their way.

Increasingly it feels like we are living in a new age of the endlessly furious: thin-skinned egotists so over-inflated with their fragile sense of importance that they are forever threatening to explode.

Consider the world’s current chief sook, Donald Trump.

He has spent the first weeks of his second term as US president in a sort of extended road rage, firing off executive orders and bizarre statements designed variously to seek vengeance on supposed enemies, inflict cruelty on multitudes, enrich his cronies and push sensible-thinking people clean off their bikes across the world.

A pardon here for violent thug insurrectionists; an order there for the banning of cardboard straws, so Americans can suck their bottomless jugs of soda through plastic; a stroke of a pen to end investigations into American businesses indulging in corruption overseas; the end of programs to help diverse minorities to get work; a grand order to deport millions and to imprison tens of thousands of them in concentration camps like Guantanamo Bay on their way.

Elon Musk in the Oval Office of the White House.Credit: AP

Yes, and to demand that Denmark sell Greenland, to insist Gaza be cleared of its people and undergo reconstruction as a new Riviera, to take over the Panama Canal, and to tell Canadians they should become inhabitants of the 51st state of the USA.

We were informed long ago by the literary prince of the jazz age, F. Scott Fitzgerald, that the very rich are different. Elon Musk, Trump’s current underboss, leading hordes of children to dismantle the machinery of US democracy, is the most extreme, rancid proof of it.

But it is not simply riches, or even the naked and dubious pursuit of wealth, that makes Trump different.

He has been called endlessly a narcissist, but it is not altogether satisfactory: narcissists are a dime a dozen in politics.

Trump’s behaviour is more peculiar. He exists vastly detached from any norm of civil behaviour.

John R. MacArthur, the publisher of Harper’s Magazine, offered a compelling explanation in an article published in The Guardian last weekend.

“The investigative psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton once explained to me that Trump is a solipsist, as distinct from the narcissist that he’s often accused of being,” wrote MacArthur.

This judgment, I reflected, had the twin benefits of explaining Trump’s demented nature and of being a concept most likely alien to his understanding.

A narcissist tries to fill a howling emptiness within by self-infatuation, but also by demanding admiration from others.

A solipsist is totally self-absorbed and doesn’t recognise or trust that anything or anybody actually exists or matters outside their own self.

“For Trump the solipsist, the only point of reference is himself, so he makes no attempt even at faking interest in other people, since he can’t really see them from his self-centred position,” MacArthur added.

It seems a plausible explanation for all sorts of Trumpisms, including his description of himself as “a very stable genius” and that bizarre image of him swaying to music, eyes closed, for 40 minutes at one of his campaign rallies, oblivious to his audience.

Solipsism means, of course, that Trump can’t conceive that he can be wrong about anything, or that any form of criticism of him or his actions could be valid.

In 1988, the magazine editor Graydon Carter described Trump in Spy magazine as “a short-fingered vulgarian”. Trump smarted so much and for so long that, unconsciously confirming he was a vulgarian, he told a newspaper more than 20 years later: “My fingers are long and beautiful, as, it has been well documented, are various other parts of my anatomy.”

How does anyone deal with such a being?

This week, Trump decreed he would impose big tariffs on every steel and aluminium producer outside the US.

Anthony Albanese had no choice but to spend 40 minutes on the phone trying to persuade the president that Australia deserves an exemption.

At the time of writing, it wasn’t clear Trump would accede to the request, despite Australia following the US into all of its ill-conceived wars since World War II and shouldering a hefty trade deficit in the US’s favour.

We can be sure Trump will cause pain in other Australian sectors, too, as he withdraws aid from all manner of international organisations.

Truth is, Trump’s a giant road rager.

We can only find ways to get more agile while trying to dodge getting splattered on the pavement before he zooms away to his next victim. Meanwhile, best to avoid either antagonising him or sucking up like Peter Dutton by calling him a “big thinker” and “shrewd”.

The solipsist doesn’t care.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.