Trump Lives Totally in the Moment
Sara Robinson September 2, 2026
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In this video, Stephen Marche makes the point that Trump lives totally in the moment, and has the object permanence of a gnat. He doesn't remember what he said two hours ago, and he doesn't expect you to remember it either.
But that said: Conservative brains are wired to be incredibly tenacious at glomming onto old wounds and nursing them until they fester, spread, and rot everything they touch. Consider the case of Fred Trump, who first immigrated from Germany to Seattle, then ended up joining the 1890s Yukon Gold Rush to run a hotel in Whitehorse.
The thing is: Trump didn't last long there. He was running a brothel and card operation, and the Mounties weren't happy with him, so he was basically kicked out of Canada and had to go back to Germany for a while (before they also kicked him out for draft-dodging).
This is the kind of family legend that lodges forever in a brain like Trump's. He may not remember what he said this morning; but he will never forget that Canada was mean to my dad 130 years ago. And now that I have Supreme Cosmic Power, I'm gonna make those sons-of-bitches pay.
What's going on right now with Canada honestly may not be any more complicated than that. Stunning, yes -- but this man has the self-awareness of a nematode, and this would explain a lot.
He's also SO not the only guy in his administration who runs this way. Elon Musk has the same personal resentment against South Africa, which his parents left (also for Canada) under a racist cloud. And this was probably the main reason he gutted USAID, which played a significant role in supporting the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s.
Marco Rubio wants nothing more than to avenge his Cuban parents for what Castro took from them; and this may have factored into why the US went into Venezuela.
Conservative epistemology needs demons; and once it finds meaningful ones, it will hold onto them doggedly for generations. Family grudges are a way of defining solidarity, tribal boundaries, and manhood. Living to avenge your wronged ancestors is noble -- even mythic.
It looks like a pattern -- and that pattern is authoritarian guys carrying huge generational chips on their shoulders, chips loaded onto them by their parents, and which they find life meaning in trying to avenge.
I suspect that once I start looking for this pattern, I'm going to start seeing it everywhere.
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