Donald Trump might be remembered as the opioid president. There are both obvious and not-so-obvious reasons for saying this. One obvious reason is that an opioid epidemic has come to light during Trump’s time in the White House. Another obvious reason is that Trump attempted to appoint the opioid industry’s best friend in Congress, Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.), as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Because these obvious reasons for thinking of Trump as the opioid president are well known already, I’ll focus here on a less immediately obvious reason: Trump is a manifestation of the opiate crisis.
A staple of the literature of addiction is the way that opiates can afford a feeling of success without one’s ever having done what amounts to success.
Consider Thomas DeQuincey, for example, in his celebrated Confessions of an English Opium Eater, “Here was the secret of happiness, about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered; happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat-pocket.”
Or consider this quote from the same work, “The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibilities or aspirations. He wishes and longs as earnestly as ever to realize what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of power to attempt.”
This theme of opiate as substitute for accomplishment — and even for futile attempt to accomplish — recurs through the literature.
The pseudonymous M. Ageyev, in his autobiographical “Novel with Cocaine“ writes that he, “came to see that what counts in life is not the events that surround one but the reflection of those events in one’s consciousness.” ‘Thus, he continues, “a man basking in the aura of his riches will continue to feel himself a millionaire so long as he is unaware that the bank where he keeps his capital has gone under.”
And so, this narrator concludes, “the more time I spent making my way towards [my] cherished goal, the more often I would stretch out on the couch in my dark room and imagine I was what I intended to become.”
Trump is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person,” as Fran Lebowitz puts it, so is he a sort of collective projection — a mere symbol — of what it would be not to be poor, not to be a failed person or nation, not to be a loser.
Trump has forever been the image of such things without being the substance of such things — first in his ghost-written Art of the Deal, then in his reality television career, then as a candidate and now president — and he knows it.
He has refused to release the tax returns, which could reveal the truth of his possible bankruptcy and reliance on oligarchs to keep him financially afloat.
This is what’s most striking in the opioid literature — the frequency with which users report feeling that they can do literally anything, even as if they had already realized every ambition they have hitherto harbored. Indeed the feeling of grandiosity that these writers report when they’re high rings remarkably reminiscent of Trump’s own self-descriptions in speeches, interviews, and the like. Trump is, in this sense, the full public counterpart of that fulfillment whose private expression is opioid use itself.
He is, as sometimes is said of the addict, “an egomaniac with an inferiority complex.”
Where does this leave us? Mr. Ageyev has told us. “What if,” he continues in “Novel with Cocaine” “a tiny speck of cocaine could provide my organism with instantaneous happiness on a scale I had never dreamed of before? Then the need for any event whatever disappeared and, with it, the need for expending great amounts of work, time and energy to bring it about.”
Since the time of Aristotle at latest we’ve known that accomplishment itself is more richly satisfying than the mere feeling of accomplishment. But that is a happiness, in Ageyev’s words, that Americans now seldom know.
For its accomplishment presupposes material prerequisites. It requires real opportunity — an environment in which one can learn, build, work, collaborate, develop and be loved, even when not born to rich parents. What is Trump’s White House offering along these lines? What is it offering at this point but angry and grandiose feelings?
Robert Hockett is a Edward Cornell Professor of Law at Cornell University and senior counsel at Westwood Capital in New York. He is also a Fellow at The Century Foundation.