'Fear of death': Trump’s 'psychological' reason for sabotaging the US

On Thursday, a prominent New York Times columnist warned that President Donald Trump’s dictator-like obsession with vanity construction projects poses a real danger to the country. According to Jamelle Bouie, the president’s behavior suggests that if the United States won’t celebrate him the way he desires, he will punish it by inflicting ever-greater harm and refusing to vacate the White House in 2029.

“Donald Trump is obsessed with his ballroom,” says Bouie. “He's also obsessed with building this triumphal arch right by the Lincoln Memorial and across from Arlington National Cemetery. He's being sued for this, of course, by veterans' groups saying that it is harming their ability to enjoy Arlington National Cemetery, where some of the veterans in question hope to be buried. But construction has already begun and there's a pretty good chance that it will make significant headway.”

According to Bouie, “Trump really sees the arch as the monument to himself, the great thing that will cement his legacy as president of the United States and his legacy in Washington, D.C. He feels that by constructing the arch and constructing the ballroom, there will be a permanent ode to his place in American history.” But as Bouie notes, there is no tradition of presidents building monuments to themselves in the United States. Rather in the U.S., you get a monument if the public decides you deserve one, and then it happens by vote of Congress. Trump’s approach, however, is “reminiscent of what you see in dictatorships or authoritarian countries and the like where cults of personality build monuments to the leader.”

While it’s clear that Trump “idolizes and envies” such dictators, says Bouie, “I think there's something else going on here, too, and that is that Donald Trump has a profound and debilitating fear of death.” While death is frightening for most people, notes Bouie, “Trump in particular – who is a purely egotistical being, who in a lot of ways does not really conceptualize the existence of other minds, who ties his self-worth to being known – for Trump in particular, dying constitutes the greatest single bit of existential terror because it constitutes the potential, the possibility that he'll be forgotten. And if there's one thing Donald Trump cannot tolerate, if there is one thing that constitutes the single largest blow to his ego, it is being forgotten.”

In that context, asserts Bouie, “these monuments, this arch, this ballroom, represent his effort to force himself onto historical memory, and to be remembered as he would like to remember himself: as a grand, titanic figure of American history.” Reporters often describe this behavior in terms of presidential legacy, but according to Bouie, “it's not that. It's something more elemental and more psychological than that.” What’s more, says Bouie, it’s “worrisome.”

According to Bouie, Trump's presidency should be considered a “family annihilator” presidency – a term given to those who murder multiple family members and often themselves. His 2024 election, says Bouie, was the beginning of a “revenge tour against the American people themselves for rejecting him in 2020,” and “family annihilator” fits that impulse: the “self-conscious destruction and self-destruction to vindicate one's ego.” And as Bouie warns, he fears that “given the president's desire for a legacy, given his solipsism, given his penchant for destroying things he cannot have, as we get closer to 2028 and 2029, especially if Democrats win Congress in the fall,” “this presidency's going to become all the more self-destructive. And that the energy of the administration is going to turn even more towards just inflicting destruction on the American people, on Washington D.C., on the country.”

Bouie says his greatest concern involves 2029. While he’s less worried that Trump will steal the midterms, as he at this point appears to be shrugging them off, “we have no evidence that Trump is prepared to leave office peacefully. He had one chance to do it before and he refused. And all of our available evidence tells us that Trump will cause a tremendous amount of destruction before he is forced out.” With this in mind, Bouie concludes on a grim note, warning, “ I think it's going to be pretty ugly. How ugly? I don't know. But pretty ugly.”