Mad Dog can imagine having lunch with President Obama, or with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or with Theodore Roosevelt or even, with President Lincoln.
It's all in imagination, of course. Mad Dog reads lots of biography and history. Really the only stuff Mad Dog reads now--no fiction for Mad Dog.
History and biography are not really "non fiction;" they are not intentionally "fiction," but they are also imaginings.
The only President Mad Dog ever met was President George H.W. Bush, at a party, and as was true of every politician Mad Dog was ever introduced to, it was a shadow dance: you never had the sense you had actually been anything more than a shadow crossing the celebrity's face.
Mad Dog's wife met President Bill Clinton and he focused on her eyes and spoke with her about something she could not remember afterwards, but she said she had sexual fantasies for about a week. THAT, at least, was what most of us would call a "human connection."
But hard as he tries, Mad Dog cannot quite imagine what meeting Trump would be like.
Well, Mad Dog CAN imagine it, because he thinks he grew up knowing guys like Trump.
There was always a boy in one school or another, who wasn't really present, psychologically, among the cohort of students. We, who were a band of brothers, connected by some common experience--a baseball team, or a wrestling team--where we suffered defeats and exulted in victories together, we were important to each other.
But there was always this one guy among us, who was physically present in the group, but not spiritually with us. We weren't important to him. His father, his family might have been important to him, but not us. And somehow, Mad Dog sensed, that boy was alone, even in his family.
In "Band of Brothers" that would have been Lt. Dyke, who asks Lipton about where he comes from, but before Lipton can even answer, Dyke has wandered off, uninterested.
And Mad Dog knew people like that--simply not present, not involved, not part of the group. And part of that was because he was never very good at whatever we were doing. If it was pickup football, he might have had a head to toe uniform, while we wore scraps of a helmet and shoulder pads, whatever we could assemble, but when the ball was snapped, he was just pushed to the ground while the play ran over him. He didn't care, because he wasn't really there, psychologically.
He usually didn't say much, and he was always hunched forward, as if he might be edging into a group where he didn't really belong.
Mad Dog would catch glimpses of characters in films who had glimmers of the essence of this bad seed: Fredo, the hapless Corleone brother, who never had the steel of Michael, or the raw exuberance of Sonny, the brother who flitted on the periphery, the brother who could not even hold his gun well enough to get a shot off as assassins shot his father. He was part of the family, but alone in it.
Or King Joffrey, of Game of Thrones. A poltroon, whose sadism sprang from deep seated cowardice.
Donald J. Trump really, Mad Dog senses, is not interested in being President--he loves gold ornaments, gold embellishments, and he wants to throw parties where he is center of attention and, possibly, adulation. Thus Mar-a-largo and now the Grand Ballroom at the White House.
Mad Dog cannot imagine Donald Trump dreaming about moving a crowd to tears or exultation with rhetoric. Donald Trump would never dream of delivering a Gettysburg Address because Donald Trump could never appreciate what made that speech so great, or what such words could mean to other people.
Trump has never read enough to develop a sense of self--because that comes, at least in part, from a sense of other people.
Would you have the exuberance of a Teddy Roosevelt, the fundamental, grounded decency of a Lincoln, born of a hard life of many sorrows? You cannot really become yourself unless you are willing to examine other people, to try to imagine yourself facing their challenges, imagine how you would like to think you would respond in their place.
Which is not to say Mr. Trump cannot read a room: He knows enough about other people to know what they resent, what buttons can be pushed.
But you cannot really hope to lead other men until you have seen in other men qualities you yourself can only emulate, but never achieve.
Mad Dog could never do what he saw cardiac surgeons do in the operating room. But, if Mad Dog were President, he'd know what qualities he'd be looking for in other people, because, over time, he's collected a full catalogue of things he can see and admire in others.
But Donald Trump has never done, never been able to do that. He looks out from his corner, from his dark table at the Washington Correspondents Dinner, and he does not learn, he only cowers and seethes.
He does not know what good is. He burns with resentment, fear and loathing. He does not, fundamentally, really like other people. And, assuredly, he is no fan of himself.
He thought he had found something good in Jeffrey Epstein, Mad Dog is guessing, but, of course all Donald saw in Epstein was pathology masquerading as confidence, and possibly a sense of what it meant to have a good time.
Jeffrey made Donald feel valued, Mad Dog is thinking. They were "pals." And what "pals" meant Mad Dog must leave to the imagination of the reader.
It might have been like Mo Green and Fredo: Mo Green provided Fredo with a playground, and treated him well, but that did not end well for Mo. And Fredo was left saying, "Well, isn't this swell? I have everything now. So why am I not happy? That is a secret I share with Mo."
It's possible you can never know another man's motivations completely.
But sometimes, you can see enough of a man to know when you are staring through an empty vessel.
