I gave up power of attorney of mum this week and executorship of dad’s will. This is what I was made to sign after I wrote to the lawyer this week saying I no longer wanted to be involved with dad's will or to act as executor. I had been revolted by what I'd seen of the process. Being still tied in to anything to do with Pigface, especially the POA has been so harmful.
I feel forced out, pushed out of it by him, his allies and proxies. Last year social services even wrote to me for him, encouraging me to give up the POA - "had I done it yet?". Dad appointed me to execute his will. Both my parents appointed me as POA. I should be able to and allowed to execute these functions but I've already been threatened by the lawyer for not acting faster. I can't sign off on what I've seen in the process and that would just lead to another standoff against Pigface and the lawyer managing the will, who didn't investigate when he took so much money upon dad's death. I can't take on a lawyer. My physical health has been so affected by the Pigface attacks that I can’t take any more. The reason I’m up so late is I was in so much pain this afternoon I had to go to bed and fell asleep for three hours.
After I signed the papers, I said to my husband, idly, I wonder how Pigface feels which is not what a trauma victim is supposed to do. Part of Trauma 101 is probably: Don't dwell on the feelings, life, or anything else of the perpetrator. Don't feed them. In my mind’s eye I could see him grinning, the way he did as a child when he engineered a situation in which I would lose and he would win. I saw that more than anything he got off on the power hit. That was why, really, he did it. My husband muttered something about Trump. Do you see Pigface in Trump and vice versa? I asked. Like me, he had. But I don’t want to talk about it, he said shortly. Just move on with your life, like you’re doing.
So much for processing. Nevertheless, thus validated I felt relieved. Having been systematically undermined, gaslit, lied about, criticised, I get a pattern response of looking for validation for things that are patently obvious, of defending myself in advance, anticipating attacks etc. Dad was a big blamer, so it probably started then, and Pigface just learned from him and massively upped the ante. But equally, dad didn't allow escape from blame. When I was a child he would whine back at us "not my fault" to mock us out of it.
Trump shares many strategies or behaviours with well known dictators which I also see in the perpetrator. I have no personal axe to grind with Trump. My life has more or less continued unaffected by geopolitics. I’m more astonished by the rhetoric, rudeness and arrogance of someone who seems to live in such a bubble of their own self-importance, in a way that Obama for instance, wasn’t. I sympathise with people from the US. Those few I’ve met seem profoundly embarrassed by the state of their country just now. So these parallels I've seen between Trump and Pigface, a lookalike dictator and a private individual are ones I’ve simply noticed from the rhetoric and the behaviour.
I want to illustrate, using this national example, the kind of behaviours I mean, because it’s in the news, it’s common ground. But my main point is that these same frightening behaviours in dictators and lookalikes happen at the level of some private individuals too and a lot of it is about dominance.
Roughly half Americans see as reprehensible Trump's assertions of dominance through narrative control, and manipulation of both facts and perception to serve his ends. The other half (now about 40% going by poll data on Trump’s approval ratings) see it as “strong” or at least support him despite reservations.
I want to mention this example to illustrate how these characters work, and much of it is about controlling a perception of dominance.
The White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller put in unambiguous and unapologetic terms this month, the doctrine of those who seek power:
"We live in a world, in the real world, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”
I felt a kind of relief at that because it’s a statement of naked power. It’s refreshingly honest from a quarter in which honesty is often hard to come by. Truth from an administration like Trump's is often meaningless or so highly selective that it is effectively meaningless. Truth is not something out there to be discovered, it’s a product to be fabricated.
This statement does ring as truthful on two levels. There is indeed a way of the world in which strength wins certain things: power, status, money, territory. But what isn’t said is what it doesn’t win - and those are things that are valuable to people who may also have other definitions of strength, things that are incomprehensible and meaningless to the other group. It’s interesting that the understanding of values between these groups is a one way, not a two-way street.
The statement is also truthful on the level “as read”: this probably really is the belief of the current administration. They think they lose nothing by stating it and they probably made gains in some quarters.
My relief at this fairly brutal, Hobbesian statement was simply that I could reasonably take it at face value. I don't have to navigate the lies and manipulation of narrative control that commonly accompany regimes that control perception. It’s what Orwell satirised with the ministries in ‘1984’. They demonstrate “doublethink”: the political use of language and propaganda to distort reality. So the Ministry of Truth is actually responsible for the fabrication of lies, the destruction of historical documents, and the rewriting of history to fit current Party narratives. The Ministry of Love is the center of torture, fear, and brainwashing, re-education and execution. Even today, even in Britain, similar doublethink is so common in institutional and political language that we barely even notice it. That’s the idea: making it common, persistent, ubiquitous, mixing it in with other language, normalises something that could be seen as controversial or controlling.
In contrast, when Trump says the US needs to own Greenland for security he’s doing the opposite. He dressing up the reasons. I don't want to divert into the arguments for or against Greenland but the US already can establish as many military bases as they want. It's not about security, it's likely about resources, Trump’s expansionist inclinations and most of all his legacy. The ego of the power-hungry is a huge and bottomless maw. Respect, admiration, is immensely important for them. That is also why dictators love to have their image everywhere. It exerts control, dominance and there’s a kind of omnipresent reification which is common and explicit in the language and behaviour of dictators. "There is and can be no higher power than me" - at least on Earth, at least over my domain.
So the difference between the statements about “having” Greenland versus the naked power statement just tells us that domineering figures or power-hungry administrations may employ different communication strategies. Sometimes they dress up statements in disguise and sometimes they usefully tell is straight - when they can afford to.
There has been a lot of discussion in the news about Europe's response: whether it’s quick enough, that it’s not dominant enough, how Europe should stand up to Trump. All that discussion has done has effectively framed Trump as the dominant figure and Europe as initially too submissive, accepting, too slow to respond, a bit toothless. Is Europe co-ordinated enough? Can it get agreement? It is up to the challenge, really, at the moment? It's like a committee facing a dangerous, rampaging animal.
It would be absurd for Europe to go to war over Greenland. There will probably be some kind of deal but the point is Europe has looked pretty bad, and as though it doesn't have much option. If Trump wanted to take Greenland militarily, he could, probably without real opposition. It’s possible that Greenland never meant anything to him at all. Perhaps there were never intentions there, because even if nothing happens, it made Europe look weak. It’s about Europe and the UK being and looking as though we are on the back foot, and that’s exactly where Trump wants us. And from there, he presses forward on the same line of attack, for a perception of dominance: taking offensive potshots this week at European leaders, Canada, and at British involvement in Afghanistan.
While there is outrage at the behaviour and the arrogance and teenagers of colour in America are terrified their parents aren’t going to make it home from a run-in with ICE, none of it is really about truth or lies. It’s about people seeing an idea of dominance: not even real dominance. Trump hasn’t actually done much. ICE has terrorised plenty of people and arrested some individuals. It's a fear tactic primarily: take a few, make examples and scare a lot. But Trump hasn’t invaded a country or gone to war. He took one president and his wife. He threatened Cuba, which he doesn't need to bother because it's sadly well on the road to perdition. He threatened Colombia but it's just posturing. It’s not about accurately recalling Afghanistan, it’s about creating an idea, a view. It’s marketing, propaganda, spin, whatever you want to call it, but it’s all in that line. Because once you control perception, once you make people afraid , you are closer to getting compliance. Intimidation and threats (Greenland), coercion (global tariffs), flexing (Maduro) are all part of the theatre that lets the character control attention and perception and tighten the grip on whatever it is they want to exploit.
What it’s not about is reality: Trump's approval is falling, his administration has completely stalled. That's probably why he took Maduro, to deflect attention from the problems at home. And he's doing more of the same now: the threats to Colombia and Greenland, these attacks on Europe. It's a well worn strategy of deflection: in this case, to seem important when there are things he doesn't want you to pay attention to in the background.
These behaviours are exactly the same ones the perpetrator of my abuse used. Dominate, grab power, keep power, threaten, intimidate, posture. The abuser knew he needed allies and proxies which Trump with his isolationist strategy doesn't follow. But there was the same constant, demeaning sniping, mis-characterization and undermining of the people you want to look small and obstructive or the problem when. Because when someone does that it's not about telling any truth it's about trying to make yourself look important. It's about controlling the narrative.
But things are starting to backfire: Republicans are turning away or putting the brakes now, dissenting every day. We are seeing people on his side saying, you've gone too far.
I used to see the “empathy gap” as a chasm with a precipice on both sides. I still think it’s a chasm: there are people on one side (“the strong”) who will not stop at doing things that the morality of people on the other side (the “weak” as they’d be characterised) would not let them do. But I see now on the side of the power-motivated that some of them seem to have limits - but perhaps that’s just pragmatic self-preservation.
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