The Lonely Transactional Perspective Of Donald Trump

As we all know by now, Trump loves to make deals.  He lives his life to make deals, even in situations where other people might question their appropriateness.  Is it appropriate to think in terms of a deal when thinking in terms of forming friendships or getting married?  If friendship or marriage is simply a deal, a transaction, then there is no real communing of souls, no merger of souls.  Granted that among noble and traditional wealthy families in Europe as well as among Asian families, marriage was based on a transaction, and the result was a lot of unhappy husbands and brides.

What about foreign alliances?  Is the relationship between the United States and a country like Canada to be reduced to what products they can offer us and what we can offer them?  And furthermore, in the case of Canada, is the relationship to be reconfigured such that Canada becomes the 51^st state?  In other words, is the best relationship, at least from the point of view of the United States, which in today’s world means from the point of view of Trump, always to be reduced to one of dominance and submission?  From Trump’s point of view, the only meaningful relationships are transactional, and ideally, those transactional relationships should be so constructed that Trump, and by extension, the United States should be the dominant power involved in the transaction.

So, what is missing here?  Trump, in his mind, is basically a free-floating figure floating in an experiential vacuum, lacking the internal grounding, a source of organic stimulation, to be able to reach out and bond with anybody else.  As has been pointed out in the past, Trump basically seems to have had a loveless childhood, a mother who was neglectful for an important part of it, and a hard-hitting bully of a father who was constantly testing him.   It was the father who taught him the notion that in life there were only winners and losers.  This was reinforced by the years he spent in a boarding school where he himself learned how to be a bully.  With all of these experiences, he never learned how to bond with anyone in any of the forms of non-transactional relationships that most of us experience.  And in addition to these personal traumatic experiences that Trump had to live through, there was the reinforcement from the sensory distortion that all of us who live in modern technological society experience, created by covering over more and more sources of organic stimuli in traditional natural environments, created by covering over the models in nature whereby humans are able to learn how to bond with other humans, and animals, and the whole natural world in general.

Now, what is disturbing about having someone like Trump as the most powerful leader in the world is that he inadvertently becomes a model for other world leaders.  Other world leaders increasingly begin to think in transactional terms, at least to the extent that they are forced to think that way in dealing with the United States, who is in most cases their largest trading partner or one of their largest trading partners.  Canada, which used to be known as a country of polite easy-going people, has been transformed into a country of assertive hardened patriotic people.  The election that was just held for prime minister is a perfect indicator of this.  The man who won is a very pro-Canadian politician who feels that Trump has permanently transformed the American-Canadian relationship and that Canada has to become much more self-sufficient.  Carney, the new Canadian Prime Minister, feels that the relationship between these two neighbors can no longer be taken for granted, that there is no longer a foundation of collegial trust here.  Instead, Canada and the United States rather than being two bonded countries, grounded in an atmosphere of friendship and Western democratic values, have instead become two free-floating figures, whose interactions are limited to the exchange of products and services.  And here we are putting aside the whole notion of the United States swallowing up Canada as the 51^st state, an incredibly hostile notion, not at all based on the notions of friendship and Western democratic values.

And now Trump and his men are going through the painstaking process of negotiating individual trade deals with practically every country who has been our trading partner, all because of Trump’s paranoid notion that every country with whom the U.S. has trade relations has been out to rip the U.S. off.  In other words, according to Trump’s vision, the United States has never really had any real bonded friends in the external world.  We have always been a free-floating figure in an experiential vacuum.   The sad truth is that even though this hasn’t been true up until Trump, it looks like it is becoming true because of Trump.

© 2025 Laurence Mesirow