Yesterday’s Washington Post opinion page included a column by Pulitzer Prize winner Eugene Robinson titled, “Trump’s Obama Envy Is Getting Even Worse.”  According to Robinson, Trump’s green monster was on full display at this weekend’s G7 meeting.  Despite every opportunity to suggest his record eclipsed Obama’s, those damn facts continue to show how the past three years are no match when compared to the previous administration.

• Unemployment fell by 5.3 percent during the Obama years compared to just one percent since Trump took office.
• With the recent Bureau of Labor Statistics revision of job creation in 2018 (500,000 fewer), job growth in the first two Trump years fell even further behind Obama’s last two years.
• Asylum seekers on the southern border were at a 10 year low when Obama left office.  Trump declares they are now at crisis levels.  Who’s fault could that be?
• Despite blaming it on Denmark’s rejection of his offer to buy Greenland, could Trump’s real reason for cancelling the state visit be fear that his reception would pale in comparison to Obama’s when the former president speaks to students and business leaders at Aalborg University in late September?

Not only does Trump’s record of achievement lag behind Obama’s in almost every foreign and domestic category, his obsession with outshining his predecessor is bad politics.  According to Robinson, “Trump is so fixated on trying to erase Obama’s accomplishments that he repeatedly acts against his own interests.”

But there is one thing Robinson missed.  Despite Trump’s lack of knowledge about any issue of consequence, he is the world’s leading repository of trivial information about Barack Obama.  No case proves this point better than Trump’s self-proclamation of being “the chosen one” to take on China.  Some pundits questioned whether Trump, not satisfied by declaring he has done more than any other president, now wants to be the next messiah.

But it is not a messiah complex which triggered this dictum.  Like everything else that drives his raging sense of insecurity, it was an Obama complex.  I have to believe Trump is still thinking about Oprah Winfrey’s campaigning for Obama, especially at a rally in Columbia, South Carolina on December 11, 2007.  Before a crowd of more than 29,000 people, Winfrey shared a story from The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Pittman, who survived slavery and the Civil War, would look at every black child and ask, “Are you the one?  Are you the one?”  On that day, Winfrey told the crowd:

I do believe, I do, today we have the answer to Miss Pittman’s question – it’s a question that the entire nation is asking – is he the one?  South Carolina – I do believe he’s the one.

I guess Trump got tired of waiting for someone to say the same thing about him.   In the midst of Friday’s temper tantrum on the White House lawn, he could have threatened to hold his breath until someone spoke up.  I must admit, to see his face morph from orange to blue, would have been quite a spectacle.  But when you are as narcissistic and impatient as Trump, you don’t wait.  You proclaim yourself “the chosen one.”

Isn’t that what any stable genius would do?  But as Jim Fallows reminds us in his January 2018 article in The Atlantic titled, “How Actual Smart People Talk About Themselves,” anyone who has to call himself a stable genius probably isn’t one.  Which is why when you subtract a self-proclaimed chosen ONE from ONE anointed by someone other than himself, it is not a zero-sum game.  The legitimate ONE is still there as a role model.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP