Don’t Worry About Trump. In his own mind he will be OK.

Thinking about Trump’s entrance into the Presidential Race in America in late 2015, coming down the escalator in Trump Tower with Melania at his side, sparked a flashback to a symbolic staircase scene.

I have written a lot about analogies and the staircase analogy I am about to mention may not be perfect as it is about a Hollywood fictional story. Some analogies are often misplaced where one or two elements are similar, but many other elements are not.

The image that came to mind is of the scene from the 1950 Hollywood movie “Sunset Boulevard.” It is the one with Norma Desmond the silent movie superstar who precipitously lost her fame with the introduction of the talkies. She slipped over time into a delusional world as her sole supporter, an ex-husband, sought to protect her by keeping her delusions of stardom alive. As long as they remained in their closed ecosystem, it worked. An accidental intruder into that ecosystem pierced the delusion with a touch of reality by offering to write a script for Norma in a talkie, rekindling the adulation of millions of her silent movie fans.

Back to reality. Trump has been president for 4 tumultuous years. The tumult for the president spiked instead of subsided after the 2020 election which he lost to former VP Joe Biden. Following several very unsuccessful attempts to overturn by hook or crook the 2020 presidential election results. Despite defeat by popular vote and by electoral college vote, Trump’s delusion continued inside his shrinking ecosystem of sycophants and supporters that continued to feed his delusion that the election ha been stolen and that would still become president.

With less than a month left until Trump is officially out of the White House, barring a palace coup that would overthrow America’s democracy, Trump with have to descend another staircase. It won’t be like his triumphal Hollywood escalator ride in Trump Tower. It will not have the pomp and circumstance that surrounds a successful reigning monarch. For the first time he will be descending a staircase of defeat, visible for the whole world to see. Here is the analogy that came to mind.

Norma Desmond had shot and killed her screen writer who lay face down in the mansion’s pool. She had fantasized him to be her devoted lover instead of just a grifter. In the last few minutes of Sunset Boulevard Norma was once again in the spotlight playing a part in her mind on a movie set staged by movie mogul Cecil B. DeMille, surrounded by her fans and flashing cameras, stuck in her own reality.

He will descend the proverbial staircase, as Norma Desmond did, a loser to those around him although believing in his mind, as was in hers as she came down the circular case, he really won the election, giving little consideration to his loss Trump wittingly or unwittingly tried to take down American democracy. He got caught in the process with a loss to Biden by 7,000,000 popular votes and his loss in the electoral college by 74 votes. Trump’s electoral college loss in 2020 was the flip side of what, four years earlier in 2016, he had considered his landslide victory over Hilary Clinton.

The Trump the 2020 election was rigged by the so-called deep state, by the blue states, by the democrats, seditionists all. He now makes decisions to punish friend, foe and Americans alike who failed to speak out after the election on his behalf. He has pardoned loyalists inside his personal political ecosystem. Apparently, no one is safe from his wrath. Much like President Xi or Chairman Mao of China or for that matter any other “wanna-be” autocrat, Trump’s guiding principle remains, “if you are not with me, you are against me.”

The aging Norma Desmond was likely sent to institutional confinement given her mental condition. For his part in this analogy, President Trump will likely go into exile … somewhere, grieving each day about his totally debunked “stolen election.” He will stay revengeful and bitter to the end. Maybe he will end up living in his long-desired Trump Tower in Moscow, though we cannot rule out the possibility of an institution of confinement of some sort. His dysfunctional political reign will end, but not so his political delusion about a “stolen election.”