One factor that truly surprised me was the majority's lack of concern, or at least a lowered priority, in terms of the outsider, the celebrity having his finger on the nuclear arsenal. What bothered me most was how easily it seemed Mr. Trump could be baited. While seeming in some ways to be totally without any kind of sense of shame, at the same time, he seemed extremely proud, or rather, seeming to have a threatened sense of pride that he felt he needed to protect. His frequent tweets that seemed to amount to little more than tit for tat, often resorting to little more than name calling or mere insults. I worried how easily it might be that he could be manipulated by others via his wounded pride to act in ways that might prove with hindsight to be fairly destructive or counter-productive.
I pondered how this seemed to be in contrast with the current president. Though often goaded, e.g. accusations that he was not a U.S. citizen, accusations that he was not Christian, accusations that he did not actually graduate from college, etc., etc., etc. The accusations seemed endless. And yet, time and time again, President Obama seemed to stay above it and avoided taking the bait. As First Lady Michelle Obama stated, "when they go low, you go high."
Yet obviously President Obama has a strong sense of pride as well.
I found myself considering the differences in the pride of each: the lame duck president's, and the president-elect's. And what I think I see is a distinction between pride and dignity. I believe that the difference is in how President Obama seemed to focus on maintaining the dignity of the office, and not getting drawn down to petty personal attacks. It is not that he was oblivious, certainly in watching the videos of the press corps' annual dinner with the president as the key speaker, the president demonstrated a keen sense of humor and ability similar to John Kennedy to use self-deprecation to his advantage -- poking fun at himself while at the same time, never de-grading the office that he held or the country that he lead.
I don't know that the president-elect currently has the ability to poke fun of himself, or that he has enough self-confidence that he can walk away from anything that challenges his sense of self-pride. Hopefully, this will be one of the things that the new president will grow into as he prepares to rise to the challenge required of being the single most powerful person in the world and all of the responsibilities that go with it.
