Two Corinthians Walk Into A Prayer Breakfast...
Donald Trump made the news this morning for turning the National Prayer Breakfast (an official event that is typically bipartisan and non-political) into a campaign rally, touting the lack of conviction in the Senate and telling people to get out to vote on November 3rd.
He also officially disagreed with the tone and theme of the event, taking specific swipes at Mitt Romney and Speaker Pelosi.
The thing I'd like to highlight here...
Okay, obviously Hair Furor has no special regard for the truth and he doesn't need to believe a thing is true in order to say it. But the way that he phrases these complaints is revealing about one of the central truths of his character.
He's not just angry that Romney went against him. In his mind, Romney himself knows he was wrong to do so. What makes Donald think this? The fact that Donald believes it was wrong, believes it so surely and certainly that it feels like knowledge.
And what makes him think that Nancy Pelosi is a hypocrite who would make empty claims about praying for him while not meaning it? Because there's no way that he himself would do any such thing for her, and he makes empty claims about prayer all the time.
Donald does not do well when called upon to imagine a world that exists outside of himself, to see things from another person's point of view or even acknowledge that other points of view exist.
Which also means, effectively, that he has a hard time imagining other people as people.
You can see this in the way he talks about knowledge generally. What he knows (even if it's not true) is stuff everybody knows. Something he doesn't know or care to find out about is something nobody knows. And something he just recently learned is something that nobody knows.
This lack of an awareness of other people as people paradoxically gives him a great quality of confident assurance when he speaks about them, which his followers respond to. Where other people talk around the subject of what's going through their opponents' heads, and offer wishy-washy, mealy-mouthed reasoning and observation about what they think might be motivating them, Donald can simply shoulder his way over to a microphone and make bold, simple declarations: "The coastal elites hate you. They think they're better than you," he says, and he means every word, and he delivers them with the confident assurance of someone who can't imagine any wealthy person from New York, any TV star, any celebrity, any private school alum, not despising each and every single one of them.
To his followers, he sounds like he knows what he's talking about, and to the extent that he's talking about himself, he does.