Feeling good about Donald Trump feeling bad

I know that this admission makes me a “bad person” — I’ve been called worse — but I take a considerable amount of consolation in knowing that Donald Trump is not having a good time being president of the United States.

I use the word “consolation” and not the German “Schadenfreude,” finally in vogue, because the feeling I feel is not so much delight in the president’s troubles as it is a feeling of being compensated in some small measure for the great misery that the man has been inflicting on me and hundreds of millions of people around the world each and every day. It’s a case of my misery loving Donald Trump’s company.

I felt a refreshing swell of this sense of justice last week when the New York Times reported that Trump had fumed and “yelled at the television” over remarks his own U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley was making on Face the Nation about plans to impose fresh sanctions on Russia for its support of Syria.

The pleasure of this particular episode of Angry President has to do not only with the fact that Trump was screaming at his TV, but also with the fact that someone in his inner circle had decided to call Maggie Haberman at the New York Times (or one of her colleagues) to let her know of what, in ordinary times, would have been considered to be an embarrassing bit of news about bad Oval Office behavior.

So my compensation was, to some extent, compounded: I was aware that Donald Trump was losing his shit over something that was entirely under his control, and I also realized that Donald Trump would be losing his shit again in short order over leaks about his losing his shit appearing in the news. As they say, “sweet!”

But, I’m sad to say that my pleasure with Donald Trump’s unhappiness is coming to an end.

I’d like to believe that this man’s petulance and anger have a lot to do with the challenges placed on him by being president of the United States. I’m not alone in making this mistake. In the run-up to the 2016 election, a lot of people were saying that Donald Trump would withdraw from the race because he wasn’t having a good time. Even now, there are those who claim he will abandon re-election plans because he finds the job of being president so persistently upsetting.

Yet these wishful thinkers are wrong in the same way that I have been wrong. They imagine that Donald Trump is miserable because he is president. But the fact of the matter is that Donald Trump is miserable because he is Donald Trump. He is a shallow, self-involved thug who would be spending a considerable amount of time enraged and yelling at his TV no matter what his job title was.

And, although I believe that comparisons of Trump with mob bosses are, in many respects, apt, I suspect that Al Capone and John Gotti had a lot better time doing what they did running their crime families, at least before they landed in Federal prison. It would be a genuine consolation, indeed, if Donald Trump shared their fate and winded up behind bars somewhere. That’s probably too much to hope for.

So it looks like I’m going to have to give up on feeling good about Donald Trump feeling bad. Instead, I’ll have to turn my attention to getting more pleasure out of helping to defeat his GOP enablers in the upcoming midterm elections and kicking the Rage Master in Chief out of office come 2020.

Maybe I’m not such a bad person after all.