FROMA HARROP

The older he gets, the bigger the baby. Donald Trump has turned the U.S. government into one giant pacifier to calm his fear of seeming less than all-powerful. Consider those billionaires now dropping bags of gold at his feet, concerned that he would use his presidential powers to hurt them.

Donald Winnicott, a prominent English pediatrician and psychoanalyst, famously wrote that babies have “the illusion of omnipotence.” They think the world revolves around their needs being met.

To reinforce his illusion that he embodies Roman Emperor command, Trump has turned to the cameras to publicly name formerly skeptical, or even just neutral, moguls now paying tribute:

“So Tim Cook (Apple) was here.”

“We do have Jeff Bezos, Amazon, coming in.”

“The top bankers, they’re all calling.”

Reputable political analysts say this executive behavior reflects alarm that Trump might try to sabotage their business and hurt their investors. Anyway, the commentators add, paying a million or two in tribute is “just a rounding error” to these guys.

The analysts are not wrong. More amazing is that they would calmly portray threats toward leading American enterprises –engines of the economy, creators of jobs — as something a normal president would do.

Another word for this is extortion. It’s the mobster message: “If you don’t want trouble, you know what to do.”

Recall during the first term when Trump tried to punish Amazon through higher postal rates and by taking away a $10 billion Pentagon cloud servicing contract. Trump’s motives were not at all hidden. Bezos owned The Washington Post, which was often critical of him.

The nomination of vaccine foe Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head Health and Human Services could be seen as a classic baiting operation. Its intention is also to dare senators, Republicans included, to challenge his choice of this weirdo. If Trump wins, then he’s proven he has them all in a headlock.

The objective isn’t just to get away with things but to send the mob message, “If you don’t want trouble, you know what to do.” And to add, Caligula style, “Let them hate me, so long as they fear me.”

Seeing that Bobby Jr. may be a crackpot too far even for cowed Republicans, Trump could drop the nomination. But that might seem like surrender. Instead, he’s gaslighting the public on what RFK Jr. stands for. It happens that the lawyer helping Bobby choose staff for HHS petitioned the government to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine.

“You’re not going to lose the polio vaccine,” Trump recently told reporters. Big of him. That the public needs that kind of reassurance shows how deep Trump thinks he can take it into the rabbit hole of mind-bending. Until he came along, no one even imagined that an American leader might deny their families protection from a polio epidemic causing paralysis, long-term muscle weakness, fatigue and pain.

But suppose Trump arm-twists the Senate into approving a health official who would “put the public’s health in jeopardy,” according to 75 Nobel laureates. That would be hard to beat as a display of omnipotence. He would again be matching Caligula, who is said to have appointed a horse as a consul.

Uber and its CEO have just contributed a combined $2 million to Trump’s inauguration. What makes this example of executive submission special is that Uber’s chief legal officer, Tony West, is Kamala Harris’ brother-in-law. Uber’s CEO did little to veil his motive. It was his biggest donation ever to a political candidate, he noted, and showed “Uber’s eagerness to work with the incoming administration.”

Babies grow out of the obsessive need to display dominance. Trump hasn’t, and he’s almost 80.

Froma Harrop can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com.