Rana Dasgupta in The Yale Review:
During these first nine months of Trump’s second presidency, the question of his personal psychology has dominated the media to a level unprecedented in American political analysis. His need for flattery, his vindictiveness, his compulsion to lie, his worship of money, his misogyny—only through such intimacies, apparently, can we understand the policies of the capitalist superpower under its forty-seventh president.
It is easy to see where the obsession with personality comes from. Since Trump makes such extensive use of the executive order and ignores institutional custom, there is little to constrain his psyche, which therefore, the argument goes, becomes the central political question. But it is too convenient to imagine that America’s present upheaval springs from one man’s head. It is also the result of a deeper process, of which Trump is merely a symptom: the ongoing transformation of the American state.
More here.
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