4/14/25: U.S. [Republican] Sen. Lisa Murkowski told a room full of Alaska nonprofit leaders that the tumult of tariffs, executive orders, court battles, and cuts to federal services under the Trump administration are exceptionally concerning. “We are all afraid,” Murkowski said, taking a long pause. “It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before. And I’ll tell ya, I’m oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.” – Anchorage Daily News

 

At just over six months, the second presidency of Donald J. Trump has been greeted with widespread consternation over the “tumult” that Sen. Murkowski described in April 2025. With minor ups and downs on a daily basis, Trump’s popularity rating is the lowest of any recent chief executive — with the exception of himself in his first term, when it was even lower. Most of the consternation is not just about a rightward political shift in national policy, but a rapid and unsubtle adoption of outright lawlessness, vengeance, and cruelty applied to governance.

No one should be surprised. Trump is the first president ever elected as a convicted felon, as well as carrying a well-documented, lifelong history of criminal charges and allegations. A powerful subtheme of the American ethos has always been “crime does pay,” and Trump is the literal embodiment of that belief and practice. Again and again, his wealth and influence have shielded him from successful prosecutions for the most egregious offenses, from frequent sexual assaults to fraudulent business practices to the blatant use of the White House as a promotional sales and fund-raising platform.

Yet Trump has somehow earned the mostly unquestioning devotion of millions of followers who are apparently drawn by his charisma. I’ve never understood it myself. But I’d guess that Trump’s peculiar brand of charisma owes, in large part, to the restless and unexamined anger he frequently expresses, in the form of ceaseless blaming in multiple directions. Throughout history, other cult leaders have thrived on a similarly dark and troubled appeal.

The purpose of this essay is not to add to the growing catalogue of dangers that Trump represents, nor to suggest a new political strategy to deal with those dangers. There is plenty of reportage and opinion on these issues, and I am far from a political expert. Instead, my focus will be on inner activism. That is, I’m offering some observations about how we think and what we feel about Trump, and how we might usefully change those responses.

Some kind of change in our responses is important because Trump can contaminate our consciousness even if we fervently oppose him. Whenever he makes us fearful, infuriates us, or induces a desire to insult and demean him, we are actually following his lead. No matter what his stated intentions may be, his unconscious motives are to generate exactly such reactions of fear and hostility. That’s because his severely damaged sense of self feeds on those energies, using them to intensify and propagate his inner misery.

While he’s managed to survive and outwardly ‘succeed’ for decades with his toxic anguish, it’s no way to live. And Trump appears to have existed in a state of ego-driven distress, with virtually no inner growth, since childhood. As his psychologist niece Mary L. Trump, PhD, author of two Trump family histories, wrote in Too Much and Never Enough, "It is an epic tragedy of parental failure that my uncle does not understand that he or anybody else has intrinsic worth." That is a psychological and spiritual crisis of the first order — not that uncommon perhaps, but a recipe for fierce inner battles over self-worth. Many of his followers probably experience such inner battles, of which they are largely unaware.

Were he still just an unethical businessman, the external damage done by Trump’s inner warring would be of much less concern. Because he is the American President, he wields an enormous amount of power, literally the power of life-or-death over hundreds of millions, both domestically and abroad. While his power is currently being somewhat blunted by the legislative and judicial branches of the US government and a growing protest movement, he cannot stop himself from trying to throw his excruciating inner pains out of himself and onto the world at large. Thus almost every day seems to bring news of some fresh hell that has sprung forth from Donald Trump’s inner torments and landed on another group of targets.

That he has found spokespeople, appointees, and an acquiescent majority of Republican legislators who collaborate in this pain-wracked, demented governance just adds to the tragedy that continues to befall American democracy. For example, Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, is on record saying this about federal workers: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains… We want to put them in trauma.” Whatever political gain is intended by this motive, it pales beside the sheer malevolence that emanates from it. It is no mere coincidence that an appointee of Trump's would openly threaten trauma for working American citizens.

Thus we are all confronted by the emergency of dealing with a powerful and profoundly pained leader who cannot even recognize his own suffering, much less take responsibility for it. When a person’s psyche is under such tremendous pressure, negative projections are inevitable — and we can assess how bad the pains are by how many people are targeted for that misdirected blaming. In Donald Trump’s case, the targets are countless: immigrants, refugees, racial and social minorities, liberals, journalists, academics, performing artists, Democratic politicians (and any Republicans who dare to disagree with him too assertively). The list is endless and subject to lengthening at any time, depending on who has decided to oppose or criticize him. That’s because another symptom of a severely damaged ego is an utter inability to hear, integrate, or learn from criticism. People are seen simply as enemies or allies — and any allies who waver in their support can rapidly be reclassified as enemies. That has happened with Trump again and again.

While Trump’s sufferings and projections are extreme, their essential nature is not foreign to our shared experience. At some point everyone has felt inwardly damaged and sought someone else to blame for their suffering. In fact, blaming is so common that it seems to be a standard feature of the human condition. Yet in the course of growing up, most people eventually learn that projecting blame is not the most effective way to handle their feelings or achieve their objectives.

Blame can be a recurring temptation unless one has a conscious practice of compassion, directed both within and beyond ourselves. As the American Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron observes:

“In order to have compassion for others, we have to have compassion for ourselves… In particular, to care about other people who are fearful, angry, jealous, overpowered by addictions of all kinds, arrogant, proud, miserly, selfish, mean — you name it — to have compassion and to care for these people, means not to run from the pain of finding these things in ourselves. In fact, one’s whole attitude toward pain can change. Instead of fending it off and hiding from it, one could open one’s heart and allow oneself to feel that pain, feel it as something that will soften and purify us and make us far more loving and kind.”

A technique for healing

An ancient Tibetan Buddhist technique in which Pema Chodron is trained offers a powerful exercise for the development of compassion, called tonglen. As she describes it:

“The tonglen practice is a method for connecting with suffering — ours and that which is all around us — everywhere we go. It is a method for overcoming fear of suffering and for dissolving the tightness of our heart. Primarily it is a method for awakening the compassion that is inherent in all of us, no matter how cruel or cold we might seem to be.

“We begin the practice by taking on the suffering of a person we know to be hurting and who we wish to help. For instance, if you know of a child who is being hurt, you breathe in the wish to take away all the pain and fear of that child. Then, as you breathe out, you send the child happiness, joy or whatever would relieve their pain. This is the core of the practice: breathing in others’ pain so they can be well and have more space to relax and open, and breathing out, sending them relaxation or whatever you feel would bring them relief and happiness….”

Take away the exotic name and esoteric origin, and tonglen can be seen as a disciplined approach to what we commonly call “thoughts and prayers.” These days thoughts-and-prayers are often dismissed as meaningless, i.e., a buzzword that we send to those who are suffering when there’s nothing we can really do to help them (or we don’t actually want to help, but merely want to be seen as offering care).

Yet thoughts and prayers can be powerful if they are focused and sincere. If they amount to nothing more than “so sorry, hope you feel better soon” then they are  pointless. But by using the activist principle of tonglen, we can refresh the power of thoughts and prayers to change how we perceive and respond to suffering of all kinds — including the intensely expressed and destructively shared sufferings of Donald Trump.

Seven pains and opportunities

The following seven pains of Donald Trump — all clearly evidenced by his projections, blaming, and attacks — provide seven opportunities to direct healing thoughts and prayers. This list is not meant to be definitive or exhaustive, but suggestive. Picking up where I leave off, I hope that readers can come up with their own opportunities to heal the interior yet all-too-shared misery of Donald Trump. Even if one doesn’t believe in the extended healing power of such a technique, it provides a state of mind for the practitioner that’s a distinct improvement over exhausting anger, impotent rage, or paralyzing despair.

And when we have a healthier state of mind in the midst of political stress, we can come up with more creative and constructive responses. I’m sometimes puzzled by suggestions of political actions or protests that are promoted as being certain to “enrage” or “infuriate” Trump, because that seems like a questionable achievement. The man already lives in a state of inner rage expressed as fury, and frequently displays that condition. I don’t see any advantage in echoing and reinforcing those destructive energies.

What would be an improvement is finding some way to open the mind and soften the heart of Donald Trump, thus reducing his need to attack through multiple projections. (After all, our ‘Donald Trump problem’ is far larger than the man himself, for the pains he suffers have become literally world-wearying.) Can any of this be achieved with the sincere and conscious exercise of healing thoughts and prayers? Frankly, I don’t know, and I understand that it probably looks doubtful to some. But to the extent that it improves our own state of mind, this inner exercise may provide the basis for a more effective politics. What can happen when we have a higher and more powerful motive than simply infuriating a madman?

Here then are seven obvious and interrelated pains of Donald Trump, and the opportunities that each represents for healing thought and prayer. In the descriptions below, the “THOUGHT” phase can be seen as our recognition and breathing-in of each pain; the “PRAYER” phase is the release and breathing-out of that same pain.

 

An intense and malicious self-hatred

THOUGHT: By your constant blaming, belittling, and persecution of a wide array of perceived enemies, we recognize that you are suffering from a malevolent cancer of self-hatred. Because we’ve all known some self-hatred, we can take that toxic feeling in for a moment, and hold it in peace to be dissolved…

PRAYER: We release you from your habitual need to hate and blame, and offer you a broad and universal compassion to take its place.

A pervasive inner poverty

THOUGHT: Your constant drive to amass more and more wealth, far beyond any rational means to address practical needs, reveals a profound poverty of intrinsic worth felt within. When your only measure of value is money and material status, then you are literally “broke” in heart and spirit. We can take in that poverty to feel it for what it really is, and dissolve it in the light of a generous spirit…

PRAYER: We offer you the healing realization of ‘enoughness’: that your own inner, immaterial spirit far surpasses the benefits of external wealth.

 

 

A long-felt sense of being cheated

THOUGHT: Both your self-hatred and poverty are driven by the conviction that you have always been cruelly cheated, and that you must redress this unfairness by any means necessary. We can breathe in that painful abscess of resentment to relieve you of its poison…

PRAYER: We send you the awareness that kindness and fairness are always within your capacity, and that exercising these qualities of being will heal your view of what others seem to be doing to you.

A habitual fear of truth

THOUGHT: When the world seems to be against you and no one can be trusted, then it can feel necessary to remake the world, moment by moment, into a pained fantasy. Lying becomes the habitual means of trying to shape that fantasy into reality. Because no one is entirely free of self-deception, we can accept your falsehoods with a knowing compassion, washing them in the awareness that only the truth is ultimately healing…

PRAYER: We share with you the courage to face the world as it actually is, and in the process discover your own real strengths and virtues.

A dispiriting addiction to conflict

THOUGHT: Distrusting everyone, seeing all relationships as transactions, and compulsively lying to maintain your fantasy of the world sets you up for frequent  and exhausting experiences of betrayal and disillusionment. You can reach the point where you expect only conflict, yet never see your own hand in it. We can breathe in that great, bitter sorrow for you, and hold it for softening…

PRAYER: We extend to you the truth of human kindness, and trust that it will eventually dissolve the poison of perpetual conflict.

 

An eviscerating sense of powerlessness

THOUGHT: When your inner world is awash in chaos and there seems to be no way to order your thoughts in a useful manner, then the issue of controlling the world around you becomes an obsession. You try to seize power over almost any issue that arises in the course of a day, leading eventually to the unconcealed desire to be a “king.” Yet all this restless conquering is an addictive, exceptionally painful sham. We can share with you the awareness that you are actually made powerless by the need to control — and that a greater power over your own life will be found only by learning surrender…

PRAYER: We support your acceptance of a rock-bottom loss of control, and bless you with the birth and growth of a new motivation within.

 

A deepening inner darkness

THOUGHT: Surrounding yourself with gold & glitz is a desperate, unconscious attempt to shine away a murky, ever-deepening darkness within. The combined effect of your pains creates this darkness, but it cannot be dispersed by a multitude of reflections of external wealth. We can breathe in this darkness for you and graft it to a genuinely healing light…

PRAYER: May you begin to see beyond your conflicted inner darkness, and let all things shine upon you in peace.

The disintegration of Donald Trump

I have long hoped that Donald Trump represents the last, dying gasp of patriarchy. As his crimes mounted and his character degraded over the years, I believed that most people would come to see that his toxic, outdated brand of masculinity did not serve the spirit of America or the needs of humanity. So far I’ve been too optimistic. I have unhappily witnessed his electoral victories over two strong, experienced, and capable women, either one of whom could have laid out a path of humane progress for America. Our culture, it seems, is not yet ready to let go of some old and painfully decrepit attitudes.

Whereas the poisonous effects of Trump’s first presidential term were somewhat blunted by the resistance of people of character within his administration, he seems to have learned from that experience by appointing only loyalists and sycophants to his second administration. The fact that some of his chief lieutenants today vehemently opposed him and his policies not long ago says all that we need to know about their integrity. And we can certainly trust that these are uneasy alliances at best, vulnerable to disruption at any moment.

Now, as evidence of Trump’s mental decline mounts daily, we are finally seeing him disintegrate before our very eyes. The question is how much more damage he will do to America and the world at large before he is retired, willingly or not, from the stage of political power — and then how much damage his successors in kind will do. The emergency he represents calls for effective political activism, of course, but for activism to persist and succeed requires some kind of spiritual resource.

And that’s where an inner, seemingly subtle practice like tonglen can provide a vital energetic boost to political activism. While we resist Trump and his “politics” — which are really just malevolent expressions of his various pains — we can also recognize those pains for what they are and offer forms of healing.

Compared to conventional activism, this may seem like an indirect and paradoxical process. In fact, the idea of this essay was inspired by the paradoxical quote at the beginning, taken from the contemporary transformative discipline known as A Course in Miracles (ACIM). For a while I was mystified by the puzzling suggestion that we should treat those who express “stark insanity and raving madness” with “perfect faith and love and tenderness.” How does one do that? I wondered.

I understood this better in the process of confronting the seven pains listed above within myself. That's when I realized that exercising "faith and love and tenderness" doesn't mean being nice to anyone's ego (mine or Donald Trump's). Faith, love, and tenderness demand a rigorous surrender of the pains we're addicted to (and which actually comprise the self-defensive ego). The Course relentlessly urges its students to step away from the pains of ego to seek our highest intrinsic worth — our Self — by forgiving everyone and everything around us. That's the challenging path of growing beyond the madness of our ego-driven little ‘self’. ACIM’s intense, multi-layered teachings on forgiveness echo the principles of tonglen, particularly the idea expressed by Pema Chodron: that to have compassion for those driven mad by the multiple pains of egotism “means not to run from the pain of finding these things in ourselves.”

When we can face those pains and start surrendering our insane attachments to them, we can learn to regard our own degrees of madness with faith (if not perfect faith), love, and tenderness. Then we can not only live in less pain, but also shine a light on the path to Self for others who have far to travel. That includes anyone who appears to be held totally captive by the painful delusions of ego.

In the nick of time?

As I was nearing the end of several weeks devoted to writing this essay, I kept thinking back to an exchange I had years ago with one of my most important mentors, the late philosophy professor and author Jacob Needleman. We were exploring the philosophical issues of time and love, and I asked him if he had any ideas about why the metaphor of “just in time” is so compelling in our culture. In action and suspense movies, for instance, the bomb is defused or the code is broken with only seconds to spare — never a couple minutes or an hour. Why do we have such a strong sense of a countdown, that we’re only going to avoid catastrophe at the last second? From a philosophical viewpoint, I asked, what happens when “time runs out”?

This was Jerry’s answer: "Off the top of my head I would say that our fear of time running out is a way of expressing the strength of evil. We have a sense that evil is equal to good — Moriarty was always as smart as Holmes — and this results in a major battle within us between these equal and opposed forces. What happens ‘just in time’ is the influx of miraculous, reconciling spiritual energy from above and beyond our inner battlefield.

“Of course it’s not really good and evil in traditional religious terms that are fighting each other; it’s our seeking for the Self and our own resistance to that seeking. Left to our own devices, we’d never resolve the battle. It’s the miracle of spirit coming from out of nowhere that resolves the inner struggle. When the action hero suddenly knows what to do, has an intuitive flash about breaking the code or snipping the right wire on the bomb, that could be taken as a metaphor for the arrival of spiritual insight. Something comes from another level; just as the hero is about to give up on saving himself or the world, the magic of spirit appears. This is what we know will save us in the nick of time.”

In our culture's current countdown toward catastrophe we are witnessing the internal raging of uncontrolled ego, as dramatized by Donald Trump. In our resistance to the chaotic inner war that he foists upon us, it may seem that we’re besieged by evil. We do need to resist that evil by all the means available to us, including nonviolent protest and the smartest possible politics. But in the midst of our nation’s dark night of the soul, we can also invite intuitive flashes and illuminated bursts of insight from a source that can only be called spiritual. May our thoughts and prayers at this time express and share the healing light of the spirit within — the same spirit that, however besieged, glimmers somewhere deep within Donald Trump.

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D. PATRICK MILLER is the author of a dozen print books, half of them published by Hay House, Penguin Random House, Henry Holt, and Hampton Roads Publishing, and the remainder under the Fearless Books imprint. First trained as an investigative journalist, he began writing about spirituality, human potential, and creativity after a seven-year illness initiated his spiritual path. Since that time he has intensively studied A Course in Miracles, American Buddhism, the Enneagram system of personality, Jungian depth psychology, indigenous shamanism, and related fields of contemporary spirituality. As a magazine and online journalist, Patrick has written over 200 articles for Yoga Journal, THE SUN, Elephant Journal online, and many other media including this website. He is also the founder of Fearless Books and Literary Services, and has helped other authors prepare manuscripts for such major publishers as Viking, Doubleday, Crown, Simon & Schuster, Tarcher, Hay House, Hampton Roads, and New World Library. He provides manuscript consultations, editing, Assisted Publishing, and professional representation to published and unpublished authors working in fiction and nonfiction. You can join and support Patrick's current book project, Secrets of the God Within.

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