Éric Blais: Like a wounded animal, Donald Trump retreats to his natural habitat - Toronto Star

When our sense of worth takes a blow in one area, we rarely confront it head on. We retreat to another where we still feel competent.

U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool on Monday in Washington, D.C. 

Éric Blais is president of Headspace Marketing in Toronto and the author of "Normal Nation: How Normalcy Could Play in a Third Québec Referendum."

On the eve of an election his party was about to lose, Donald Trump stood at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial and held up an enlarged photograph of a rusted pipe, then another. For 54 minutes, he delivered his closing argument by speaking about the shade of blue he chose for the bottom of the Reflecting Pool and the new bubblers to fight the war on algae.

For years, anyone who couldn’t fathom how this man reached the White House was said to suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. It was an armchair diagnosis and plenty of his critics have returned the favour, diagnosing him from afar with every disorder in the manual.

I’d rather do what ethologists do. They watch the subject in his habitat for 72 hours and note what he does under stress.

What we observed on Monday is what animal behaviourists call displacement activity. A bird torn between fighting and fleeing will suddenly preen its feathers or peck at the ground. The behaviour has nothing to do with the threat. It’s familiar and that’s why it matters.

Facing a vote the polls said he would lose, over prices and a war in Iran, he skipped a final swing through the key states to talk plumbing. The repair, initially promised in days for about $1.5 million, finished nearly three months late at more than 10 times the estimate.

On Tuesday, voters handed Democrats the House and the Senate.

U.S. President Donald Trump signs the last piece of steel to be used in construction of the White House ballroom during an event on Wednesday in Washington, D.C. 

On Wednesday, his first public appearance took him to a construction site. He spent more than 20 minutes walking reporters through his unfinished White House ballroom, pointing out the Corinthian columns and the bulletproof glass. He signed the last steel beam, a ritual builders call topping out. Only when reporters pressed him did he concede that frustration over Iran played a part.

Claude Steele, a social psychologist, called it self-affirmation. When our sense of worth takes a blow in one area, we rarely confront it head on. We retreat to another where we still feel competent.

Animals on unfamiliar ground mark it. Washington was never Trump’s town. He has treated it the way a developer treats a site he has just acquired. The project list includes gold in the Oval Office, applied by a craftsman flown in from Mar-a-Lago, the Rose Garden paved into a Mar-a-Lago patio, the East Wing torn down for a ballroom, and a triumphal arch on the drawing board.

Trump is remaking the capital in the image of his own properties so it might eventually feel like home.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media during an event at the site of the White House ballroom on Wednesday in Washington, D.C. 

Marks also need names. He floated a Trump Reflecting Pool. When a judge kept his name off the Kennedy Center, he closed the building. He isn’t waiting for successors to give him a Trump Room the way they gave Lincoln a bedroom and Roosevelt a room.

His defenders will say that’s unfair. Presidents are allowed their projects and a man can sign a steel beam and run a country at the same time. Still, you learn what people value from what they choose to talk about on their worst day, and he chose the ballroom.

None of this requires a diagnosis. Most of us do the same when the job in front of us goes badly. We go back to the one we know.

He ran to burnish a brand built on gilded towers. He seemed as surprised as anyone when he won. Then power proved habit-forming. These 72 hours showed what he believes he really is. He’s happiest as the man who builds the things presidents walk through, even if Barack Obama jokes that they look like Saddam Hussein owns a Cheesecake Factory.

The promises are fading with the red MAGA hats. Steel and stone are harder to scrub from the record.

His territorial instincts have never stopped at the Potomac, as Greenland and Canada can attest. Some animals, when threatened, play dead. Don’t count on this one.

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Opinion articles are based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events. More details

Éric Blais is president of Headspace Marketing in Toronto and the author of "Normal Nation: How Normalcy Could Play in a Third Québec Referendum."