Trump’s Parade

President Trump wants a “grand military parade”. He saw one on a recent trip to France and now he wants his own parade. Well, why not? It’s not as though we have a national debt that needs paying down. Let’s spend our “excess tax money”, for which we have no other use, on something that is urgently needed by — you know — the president’s ego. Because being the president of the United States of America is just not enough of an ego boost. A grand military parade is just what is needed to fill that large void in the president’s psyche.

The president seems to be on a quest to prove to America and the world that he is a man of transcendent talents. He said that Senator Orrin Hatch called him the greatest president ever — surpassing Washington and Lincoln. He goes to great lengths to convince the public that everything he does is the biggest and the best. He assures us that he’s the most stable, the smartest, the healthiest, and so on. He recently suggested that Congressmen who didn’t applaud his State of the Union speech were “treasonous”. That takes a lot of chutzpah.

But back to the grand military parade. The problem is that a parade won’t fill the void in the president’s psyche. Nothing will. The void in his psyche is a part of the man. I suspect that somewhere in his inner self lurks a nagging doubt that maybe he really isn’t good enough. Maybe he is just a pretender who must constantly convince the world and himself that he’s the real deal. And maybe he can convince some of his admirers that he’s the greatest and best. But given the amount of braggadocio we’ve witnessed from him, it seems he cannot convince himself.