'Last Christmas'

It would be difficult to overstate just how unhealthy what Trump is doing to the United States, and the world at large, is for the soul.

The unrelenting demonization of others and the constant search for enemies is an affront to basic human dignity. We do not need leaders who would so divide a people against each other.

All of the great spiritual, religious and humanist traditions of the world preach one basic tenet: love thy neighbor.

It is, in many ways, the central theme of the season we are in now. Love, compassion, and most importantly, tolerance and acceptance of others.

Living in harmony with nature and our fellow beings is more important than consumerism, nationalism or cynicism.

What we celebrate, at its core, is the act of giving; a recognition that the true gift in this life comes from our ability to help and care for others.

We are now living under the erratic rule of a man who does not know empathy or how to proffer compassion, as he only takes and never gives back to this life. He evades justice and seeks to persecute others. Rubbing salt in the wounds of a grieving and shocked nation because he is not capable of anything else. He is a broken man.

A spoiled child who was born a millionaire has allowed millions to suffer; his legacy from the dismantling of USAID alone will be more than most could atone for in a thousand lifetimes.

Demonization and division are all he knows because he operates from a deep well of dysfunction and toxicity. Trump is much more unwell than the media, who seem to be finally coming around to his unfitness to serve, would have you believe.

Their failing is not just an absence of covering Trump properly now, but in refusing to cover his criminality and lack of mental acuity honestly for decades. His wealth and connections made many an editor more afraid of lawyers than of obfuscating the truth or perpetuating a fraud.

Nothing we are witnessing or seeing in his behavior is new.

He was every bit as unwell when he first ran for office in 2016 and every bit the racist fraud with pronounced personality issues when I worked around his family more than a decade ago.

He was always awful. The only thing new about this scenario is how much his dwindling appeal - and further diminishment and disinhibition - is making him acutely more dangerous.

Trump is backed by billionaires and Christofascist organizations willing to promote his bigotry and xenophobia in order to continue to hide their own sins and allow them to manipulate their own flock.

Entire generations are being raised on hate - it has become a way of life in certain parts of the United States. Especially in red states and poorer rural areas where the energy and technology tycoons back America First policies.

Men like Charles Koch or the SCOTUS-owning Harlan Crow seek to exploit the lack of upward mobility, healthcare and educational opportunities so they can continue to expand their toxic industries, while poisoning the people of those regions and stealing their natural resources.

Charles Dickens himself may not have been able to conjure the heartless and exploitative era we are now entering.

We aren’t simply backsliding, we are dismantling decades of progress as a nation. We are forfeiting our hard-won role on the world stage in favor of shortsighted grift and just plain meanness.

Trump is an angry and evil man - and his aberrant personality, addictions and deranged instincts were on full display this week.

It was an ignoble performance in which he seemed to outdo himself for sheer wretchedness and lack of human empathy, mixed with outsized ego.

The naked desperation of a man so needing to appear important, while at the same time so obviously inferior, has never been shown in such stark relief.

His prime time haranguing of Americans by speed-screaming his way through a rant designed to admonish folks for recognizing reality and not playing along with the fantasies of successful leadership and a ‘booming economy’ that Trump and his sycophantic, criminally inept administration have foisted upon us was an embarrassment.

Our nation and its future are in more trouble in this moment than most folks realize. Yelling at people that they should believe his lies over solid facts may work on the ignorant MAGA diehards of his moronic and regressive movement but it damn sure isn’t a strategy to lead this nation.

It was hard to watch Trump’s address and not feel a deep shame and sadness for this country.

On a personal level, it was just like witnessing his behavior in his beauty pageant and reality show days. His bellicose moods and utter unmanageability were well known amongst producers and crew members. He would often cancel at the last minute for shooting days while the weekly episodes were being taped, which had already been adjusted to late afternoon call times to accommodate his lack of a work ethic and active addiction.

Trump has always been essentially incompetent despite endless opportunities and misanthropic despite abundant good luck and countless second chances.

It still surprises me that his shtick works on so many.

His public image is a myth; one that has been propped up and propagated by a media willing to look the other way to make a buck, and a judicial and political system that allows men like him to prosper in their mediocrity.

This week’s revelations in the Vanity Fair piece on Susie Wiles, will come as no surprise to anyone who has worked around the man and seen his entitled behavior. It has long been known to many - and this fact was alluded to by the current White House Chief of Staff and autocrat-enabler in her interview.

Wiles admitted to bearing witness to his awful behavior and attempted to explain it away as an ‘alcoholic’s personality’.

What she seems to have a blindspot for is her own codependent relationship with POTUS and the true nature of his spiritual malady.

She is witnessing and excusing ‘alcoholic insanity’ because she is serving a man who is very much in active addiction (Adderall, benzos…).

I have been in recovery for two decades.

Ironically, twenty years ago this month I spent thirty days at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), part of the National Institutes for Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland.

I participated in a research protocol for a medical research study that could potentially benefit recovery centers nationwide, and in exchange I was introduced to both twelve step recovery based programs and the self-examination and rigorous honesty it would take to maintain long term sobriety.

I was in rehab over the Christmas holiday and it was the best present I ever gave myself.

My fellow patients came from all walks of life. The doctors and staff were some of the most compassionate and knowledgable folks I had ever encountered. I have no doubt they saved my life and those of many others; their funding is of course under siege now, along with the rest of NIH. The fact that it is being carried out by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a man who claims to be in recovery but also still uses mind-altering substances (according to his latest ‘digital affair’-turned gossip novelist; RFK, Jr. being a serial philanderer and lifelong sexual predator himself) is beyond a bitter pill to swallow.

As far as I am concerned NIH is filled with miracle workers and angels - of all the government-funded projects you don’t want to disable, our medical research facilities should be at the top of the list.

There is a lot of sacrifice and bravery made in the name of science that most folks will never see, but will perhaps benefit humanity down the road. You say thanks and you make sure they have all the funding they need to do their important work. That’s the only correct response in a sane and rational world, but what we have is the opposite of that from this administration - who has attacked NIH and it’s leadership for sport, and to appeal to an ignorant and befuddled base that thinks science itself is an enemy.

That is because Trump has set out to destroy our institutions to serve his own purposes and those of a few other bad actors (Putin, Xi, MBS); trying to achieve a multipolar world where a few dictators rule the rest of us and democratic superpowers become a thing of the past.

This destructive philosophy comes with Russian social media micro-targeting (where do you think all those anti-vaxxers came from?) and election interference, as well as the homegrown arm of this strategy which manifests in the unitarian theory, implemented by men like Russell Vought and buttressed by our conservative Supreme Court justices.

We led the world in medical research and innovation: the GOP have systematically dismantled that system via cuts and firings at the federal level and the continued pressure and harassment of universities, to strip them of federal funding and academic freedom.

That kind of travesty may not be as headline-grabbing as some of the more overt acts Trump engages in but its every bit as relevant to our unraveling.

We are not on the path to greatness, we are ceding the very ground that made us great in the first place.

And our best achievements as a nation have always been tempered with the acknowledgement of how much improvement was still needed to reach our full potential, having wasted so many of our riches chasing the wrong things and excluding so many from the full benefits of citizenship and personal achievement.

Equality and inclusion and making sure our vast resources serve the world’s neediest, instead of being funneled into the hands of the world’s richest, should be paramount to any society that calls itself civilized, let alone great.

My family is no stranger to the troubles caused by active addiction and alcoholism. We are not alone in that. I have worked and lived around people who struggled with substance abuse disorder my entire life - and I can tell you unequivocally that Trump is most extreme case of being caught up in the ‘isms’ that I have ever known.

What I am attempting to describe are the ‘character defects’ (as we call our underlying issues in 12 step recovery) that fuels his compulsion to constantly act out.

One might think of drinking or drug use as but a symptom of the underlying issues - self-centered fear, anger, jealousy to name a few - that power the compulsive need to escape or manage our feelings with intoxicants.

We begin to recognize elements of our personality, desires and instincts that have run amok and created a spiritual malady as the real culprits - and they are what we address when we begin to recover. The process of self-discovery - and the willingness to have these traits removed from our psyche - are often referred to as a moral inventory. We undertake these actions so as to take responsibility for our own behavior and to stop blaming others for our perceived wrongs.

This is, in many ways, the heart of the program.

On my last day in rehab in late 2005, a counselor asked me what I was going to do next, as I was about to be released in a few hours. I had participated in a double-blind protocol while I was there - meaning I had potentially been given an experimental drug that was meant to help me detox and/or help me recover from alcoholism or I was given a placebo. Only the pharmacy would know for certain, medical staff were kept unaware until the end of the protocol; the effects of either one would be studied both medically and by daily monitoring of my physical and mental progress.

While I was there I was also introduced to A.A. meetings and we would travel off campus every evening to Washington, DC area recovery meetings. I felt better almost immediately when I finally surrendered to my predicament and embraced the fellowship - and I was coming from a pretty dark place and years of chronic alcohol abuse.

NIH performed two spinal taps, two MRI scans on my brain, and a CRH test where they injected me with cortisol and measured my body’s ability to handle stress while drawing blood every fifteen minutes for hours on end. In spite of it all while my spirits lifted as the combination of daily medication and meetings began to take effect.

I thought I had been given a miracle pill, as I could feel a solution begin to seep into a place that not long before had seemed quite hopeless. My confidence was back when the counselor asked me my next step, ‘Well, I’m gonna go back to Manhattan, gonna call up my doctor, get some more of these pills you’re giving me and try to keep going to these A.A. meetings.’

He abruptly cut me off, ‘Look out the window at the opposite wing, Noel.’

Across the grassy courtyard from the NIAAA unit was the pediatric oncology ward. I had seen the very sweet and very ill children living in that unit on visits with their families over the Christmas holiday.

Most of those children were not getting out of there. They were participating in protocols that would benefit someone else at some point, more than it would perhaps save their own lives. These children were heroes in every way.

This truth was evident. It was in the air. The sacrifice and bravery of so many patients and their families in places like NIH should never be overlooked or underfunded.

(Side note: when Trump was at Walter Reed for COVID treatment in October 2020 his aides brought in MAGA supporters to shout slogans and bang on cowbells all night long to show support for Trump. Hearing these supporters, POTUS forced Secret Service to take him on a brief joy ride to thank them.

They were making all that aggrandizing racket directly across from the oncology wards at NIH, which is next door to Walter Reed. In essence, they were keeping very ill children from getting much needed rest to make a septuagenarian drug-addict feel better about spending a few days in the hospital and getting a treatment unavailable to the rest of us in those pre-vaccine days. When Trump left the hospital he was talked out of wearing a Superman t-shirt under his dress shirt and revealing it for the cameras, but did take the Mark Burnett-produced helicopter ride at sunset along the Potomac and ripped his mask off in dramatic fashion - after wheezing his way up the South Portico of the White House stairs. Hopefully the sick kids finally got some rest after he left.)

We are all indebted to anonymous folks we may never meet or know - that is just how medical science works - progress always comes at a great cost. Our job is to recognize and support those efforts, not turn our backs on it.

The avuncular counselor continued attempting to curtail my cockiness (his name was Barry and he was our favorite, as he would smuggle in half smokes (IYKYK) to us when he was the overnight coordinator), ‘What would the families of those sick children say right now if I were to walk into their room and let them know their child could leave here today - with their fatal disease in full remission - if they were to work 12 steps, if they were to go to daily recovery meetings and get a sponsor and be honest with themselves - do you think they would trade places with you?’

He continued speaking, staring at me intently while the rest of the room fell silent.

‘Because let me tell you something son, you BOTH have fatal diseases, that is ALL we study at NIH via congressional mandate - and the fact is, more people die of your disease than die of cancer, it just comes out in ways we can’t fully measure, like violence, accidents, neglect of other ailments…YOUR medicine IS the twelve steps. I promise you I have seen a hundred ‘miracle’ cures come and go in the last two decades - and the only thing I have seen truly work is vigorously working a program of recovery…’.

When he put it to me like that I finally got it.

My overconfidence was overcome by a sudden humility and awareness - and while my heart broke for the families of all those sick children, I thought about how grateful they would be to have a similar and seemingly simple (though by no means easy - it’s a cunning and baffling disease that requires daily spiritual maintenance and constantly working with others - we keep it by giving it away) solution to what I faced.

How could I do anything else but learn what they were attempting to teach me?

If I had diabetes I wouldn’t think twice about taking insulin but somehow alcoholism has a way of tricking you into thinking you don’t have a disease, or worse, you might be cured and can safely go back to the bottle (you never can).

There is no cure, and steady remission is achieved one day at a time.

I was then informed that he would check with the pharmacy to see if I have an actual prescription and if so he would leave it with my duffel bag on the other side of the locked door when he buzzed me out.

I was being discharged.

A few minutes later I stepped out of the NIAAA unit for the last time, my duffel bag sat on the polished granite floor with a note on top of it.

My name had been crudely scrawled on one of those paper washcloth napkins you find in public restrooms.

It certainly didn’t look like a prescription. I opened it up and the word ‘PLACEBO’ had been written inside in black ink. I stood there amazed. There was no magic pill, my progress had come from my abstention from alcohol, the fellowship and 12 step recovery I had participated in over the course of that month.

It was the beginning of a lifelong journey that is in no way perfect but very much a miracle in my life. I got better when I learned to ask for help.

My nickname for many years in NYC recovery meetings was ‘Placebo Noel’.

I was sober in recovery when I worked on ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ and I believe that is what allowed me tune in to Trump’s obvious triggers and addictions. To see clearly what was really going on and what was underneath his obviously unhealthy behavior.

The crushed Adderall abuse for example, usually came when he had to read publicly from a cue card or teleprompter. He always struggled with reading any word that was three syllables or more; in my armchair diagnosis it stemmed from a childhood learning disability that was never properly addressed, my guess is some type of dyslexia.

Of course, there is no shame in learning disabilities, but in Trump’s case it was probably seen as a weakness, which the family chose to hide rather than treat. They paid others to take his tests and Trump himself hid his school grades from military academy all the way through university (both Fordham and Penn) from the world for his entire adult life.

Suffice it to say the dude is no scholar.

His illiteracy has clearly followed him into adulthood. When you hear him sniffing a lot when he is reading - such as this past week’s address to the nation - that is because he has most likely just snorted Adderall.

I believe the speed makes him feel sharper and more in control of his ability to read, and that this dynamic runs deep in Trump. He uses stimulants to feel in charge and avoid the sloppier elements of addiction he witnessed in both of his brothers’ alcoholism. And in several of his own children’s falling-down-drunk days.

Don Jr. especially was a very loud and obnoxious drunk who got into a ‘Page Six’ type melee after a bout of public intoxication at the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village in 2002.

When I started speaking out about his addictions in 2015, I was trying to warn people that it wasn’t the substances themselves that presented a problem, as much as it was the personality defects underneath them that we needed to fear the most.

You do not want a leader who spends all day thinking about himself and acting out of his own self-centered fear.

That is precisely what led him to ignore the COVID pandemic and lie to the American people in the early days of the global health crisis. Trump’s inability to face reality beyond how it would affect his own personal re-election chances and the economy led directly to the deaths of over one million citizens when all was said and done.

Of course now his administration has completely withdrawn from any medical and scientific acknowledgment of COVID and they not only have demonized Dr. Fauci, another hero of N.I.H., but Trump put a whacked-out anti-vaxxer, RFK, Jr. in charge of Health and Human Services, and they have made the CDC itself a target of their retribution.

A mass shooter even attacked the CDC headquarters earlier this fall and killed a Black police officer - and the crime was never even acknowledged by POTUS because the shooter was a diehard MAGA adherent (and they were also in the midst of their beatification of Charlie Kirk).

As was revealed in the Bob Woodward conversations from late winter 2020, Trump had been fully aware of the deadly nature of the emerging COVID pandemic but chose to downplay and hide that information from the American public to serve his own self-interest.

Even going so far as to keep infected passengers on a cruise ship off shore so their infections wouldn’t ‘double’ his numbers. (‘I like the numbers where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault’.)

The Grand Princess cruise ship incident came in early March 2020, off the coast of San Francisco, and by the end of the month bodies were being stacked into freezer trucks in a desolate and traumatized New York City. Most of the world went into COVID lockdown (sans Florida, of course).

Trump attempted to downplay and deny the most significant public health crisis in our lifetime.

Denial, of course, being a central factor in addiction.

A sober man (both emotionally and physically) does not make those same decisions; in Trump, we have never had sober or sane president.

While it’s true that Donald’s behavior goes well beyond addiction (his malignant narcissism and sexual predation have little to do with the disease of addiction - and his particular deviant behavior goes back to early childhood - a ‘bad seed’ of sorts), his substance abuse most definitely did not make any of it better - and now the progressive nature of the disease is obviously making it all much worse.

His collapsing approval rating only adding to the psychic weight.

Addiction is a disease that only gets worse - and POTUS has a lifetime of being untreated. I doubt he would be capable of the sort of humility and introspection recovery requires, but in no way shape or form should we be forced to endure the consequences of his destructive and aberrant personality.

The problem with having such a man at the helm of a nation as powerful as the U.S.A. is that the fires he starts have the power to consume us all.

He is among the greatest threats this planet faces at the moment - I do not say that lightly or without consideration. It is time to be vigorously honest about the man and his health.

For the good of us all.

Have a safe and blessed holiday.

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