In a world rife with messages encouraging people to act more like jerks, we are lucky to have the expertise of Fox News’ Dr. Keith Ablow. His latest column, the second in a series—one that could be infinite, really, depending on how deep this landfill of fresh hell goes—the television physician gives the loser masses a list of bullet points for how to transform their own sad lives into a more robust and bigly state.
The series is called TRUMPING YOUR LIFE. Its first installment hit the web in mid-April, and the world has undoubtedly been waiting with bated breath until its second piece hit this week. Even though its title actually sounds like a recipe for defeating your life, rather than improving it (but I digress), the author promises that it will teach the masses that fulfilment is within their reach, if only they’d emulate the President. Our famously stable, restrained, and wise President.
Some of Ablow’s advice for how to behave like Trump seems exactly in line with how a man who has called both Rosie O’Donnell and ISIS terrorists “losers” would behave. For example, Ablow suggests people wanting to give their life some TRUMPING interpret resistance as a sign they are doing the right thing.
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Other advice seems plucked from an imaginary alternate world where Donald Trump doesn’t operate as the human embodiment of the Monopoly Man’s id. “Don’t let anyone tell you you’re not good enough to work toward any goal,” Ablow writes, as Trump, kind of. “Just don’t forget the work.”
A Washington Post piece just this weekend described how Donald Trump reportedly demands his national security briefings be given to him in bullet point and graphic form. Don’t forget the work, indeed.
Ablow was once a psychiatrist with an affiliation with Tufts University. Since that relationship dissolved, he now is better known for playing a doctor on TV, devoting most of his public words to appearing on Fox News to diagnose the mental health of celebrities that he does not treat. During his illustrious punditry career, he’s championed the notion that men should be able to veto women’s abortions. He’s declared that President Obama suffers from ongoing abandonment issues due to his upbringing and thus loves Africa more than he loves America. He’s recently speculated on the mental states of Kim Jong-Un, Brad Pitt, and Aaron Hernandez. His belief that transgenderism is a farce means that he is no longer is an APA member. Others in his field have condemned the doctor’s cultural niche, characterizing him as a poor representation of his profession.
I suppose it’s fitting that Ablow has made a temporary pivot away from writing psychiatric diagnosis fanfiction about people he’s never met. Now, he’s giving out advice from a man whom he does not treat, to people whom he does not know.
How did Dr. Ablow come up with such gems of wisdom as “Turn the friction you feel from small minds into fuel for your intentions. Double down.”? Not by sitting down for a series of face-to-face interviews with the President. Not by reviewing any sort of medical records or diagnosis. Not, it appears, by reading anything the President has written or paid Tony Schwartz to write. Instead, Ablow seems to have based this advice series on imagining what advice Trump’s personality would dish out, if his personality could write a column for Fox News online.
“Let yourself be righteously angry when people take you for a weakling, a fool or a fraud,” says Ablow’s Trump advice fanfic.
Let’s hope that advice works out better for a person’s life than it does for the life of a nation. Last week, Donald Trump spent his first foreign trip throwing convention and tradition aside, much to the chagrin of our European allies. His first months in office have been characterized by scandal; despite his claims that he’ll “drain the swamp,” he doesn’t seem to know where the drain is located, much less how to pull the chain. Jobs he allegedly “saved” in a Carrier plant in Indiana are going to be shipped overseas by the end of the year. And who can forget that his actions in the face of an investigation into his campaign’s relationship with Russia has elicited behavior from Trump that has some speculating that his presidency’s days are numbered.
“Sure, Trump is tough and can be moved to anger. But he also seems able to laugh and to love,” Ablow writes.
Scream, Laugh, Love. Coming soon to a mawkish mantle near you, right above the fireplace reserved for burning effigies.
Some of Ablow’s advice for TRUMPING one’s life is downright incoherent. “You have to be willing to extend an olive branch — or two or three — even after wielding a bat,” he writes, unclear about where a person can obtain an olive branch from a tree that has been smashed to smithereens. “But you will be repaid through synergies that might never have developed had you let your ego interfere with the greater good.”
But if it made sense, I suppose it wouldn’t faithfully represent the Trump era.
