Echoes of Their Minds

Everybody’s talking about him and that’s the way he likes it; there’s nothing more important in his life. Nothing. It vibrates every fiber in his body to know that everybody is talking about him.

As Harry Nilsson sang in his 1969 hit, Everybody’s Talkin’, Everybody’s talkin’ at me/I don’t hear a word they’re sayin’/Only the echoes of my mind.

It is a fitting tribute to Donald Trump who is motivated most by centering everyone’s attention on him. Money, outrages, lying, cheating, stealing, victimhood, violence, threats, sex, politics—all instruments for getting the attention that he craves; affirmation that he is somebody.

This, according to the Mayo Clinic, is a narcissistic personality disorder—people suffering from “an unreasonably high sense of their importance. They need and seek too much attention and want people to admire them.”

Trump clearly exhibits this disorder. As does the industrialist Elon Musk, who appears to think that because of his success building on the thoughts and ideas of those in the automotive and aerospace industries before him that he is the genius that his loyal fans claim him to be.

That is the problem—the Trump and Musk fan bases feed egos that are incapable of regulating behaviors. These two men have become legends in their own minds. When fans think of you in that way, that’s adulation; when you think of yourself that way, it’s dangerous.

Particularly for these two men who are very capable in their chosen pursuits, which impact the nation on so many levels, but see everything through the lens of “it’s about me!”

As Nilsson sang, I'm goin' where the sun keeps shinin'/Through the pourin' rain/Goin' where the weather suits my clothes.

So, you have Trump and his millions of followers who believe that only he could run the country and his single idea, which earns cheers and applause at his rallies, is retribution—jailing political opponents, abolishing courts, executing military leaders and federal employees who don’t show sufficient loyalty to him. This is called dictatorship. It is a serious threat to our democracy.

Trump promises a fascist state – run by him alone – and the abolishment of democracy, the rule of law and the Constitution. If you want to get an idea what that looks like, visit Germany, 1933-1945 or Italy, 1922-1945. Those nations barely survived their one-man fascist rulers.

There’s plenty of dictatorships today to consider – from China to North Korea to Hungary where one-man rule hurts the people and undermines economic progress.

Look at Russia’s Vladimir Putin, a one-man fascist ruler who strives for world conquest through military adventurism. He is destroying his great country and himself as he tries to take Ukraine, a democracy backed by the world’s democracies that is valiantly and fiercely fighting back.

Unfortunately, Putin gets help from an eager Musk, who apparently thinks he understands the geopolitics of the war because fans and the press tell him he’s a genius. As owner of Starlink, a communication satellite system vital to Ukraine’s war effort, Musk behaves as if he is a nation-state, deciding when Ukraine – out-gunned and out-manned, despite its military effectiveness – can and cannot use the comsats to deploy its drone offensives against Russian aggression.

Or Musk deciding to blowup a rocket ship that he and everyone else knew was not ready for its test flight. He claimed that’s how rocketry research works, and he’s right, but back in the 1940s and ‘50s, when rockets were experimental and space flight aspirational. This need to self-explode seems questionable.

However, listening to Musk and his loyal followers, you would think when Space X’s first liquid-fueled rocket reached orbit in 2008 that he was the first man in space. Let’s not forget the prior 60 years when governments put satellites into space, men went to the moon, and a little probe, NASA’s Voyager 1, escaped the solar system to explore deep space.

The United States government has contracts with Musk’s comsat systems and his antics with Putin – deciding to cut off Ukraine because he believed it would lead to nuclear war – means the U.S. needs to revisit this relationship. It has become volatile.

U.S. Special Prosecutor Jack Smith and Fulton County Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis are moving toward bringing Trump to justice for inciting insurrection and organizing a failed coup on Jan. 6, but Trump continues to incite and threaten violence against democratic institutions

And Musk uses X (formerly Twitter), a media platform he seemingly bought on a whim and that he clearly does not understand, to allow disinformation and to opine on matters the users of X are quick to point out are inaccurate or anti-Semitic.

What makes these two men the most dangerous is that neither of them seem remotely aware or concerned about how damaging their behaviors are to democracy and to themselves.

They go about their lives much like the final lines of Nilsson’s song describes: Bankin' off of the northeast winds/Sailin' on summer breeze/And skippin' over the ocean like a stone.

Everybody's talkin' at me.