Trump is about to pay the price for skipping this basic childhood lesson

I feel incredibly fortunate to have understood an essential truth about how to treat people when I was just 6 years old.

It was a week or so after Halloween. My parents had held back most of my good candy that year with the understanding that I’d already had too much sugar on that magical holiday and the day after, and it would be far better and healthier to ration it out. So, seven days later, they turned over the motherlode, and I brought it all to school with me in a brown paper lunch bag.

My friends were positively drooling over it. But as I recall, I told each of them, “This is all mine. I’m not sharing,” even as I purposely held it up to their faces to tempt them. No matter how much they begged and pleaded, I refused to change my selfish little mind.

About a month later, I was devastated to learn that my friend Louis wasn’t inviting me to his birthday party due to my little candy teasing/greed fiasco that he was still upset over. And he told me as much.

I bring this up now because I thought of Louis and the party that never was after Donald Trump tossed his little foot-stomping temper tantrum (one in a series) after finding out America’s NATO allies had all told him to pound sand as he asked for help in Iran.

This is a 79-year-old man who never learned the lesson that most children do at an age when they’re still obsessed with Legos: you reap what you sow. Or to put it another way — do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

It’s also simple common sense, something our president never developed. He could not believe that threatening leaders who not long before were our friends wouldn’t result in their lining up to kiss his ring and do whatever bidding he ordered with a blindly obedient, “Sir yes sir!”

Behavior has consequences. Negative behavior has negative consequences.

You may recall that in January, Trump had his heart set on taking over Greenland, while at the same time threatening the NATO alliance. This little piece of outrage had no precedent and absolutely no reason to occur aside from the fact that he decided he wanted to do it, the costs in enraging our allies be damned.

Trump emerged incensed and confused that every country rejected his plea for military assistance in Iran, feeling ghosted and dissed. He couldn’t imagine why they would abandon America in its hour of need, after all it has done to keep NATO together and help them out.

Let’s put aside for a moment whether the United States has, in fact, done much directly as a NATO ally to protect the alliance aside from serving as a deterrent. The truth is that our allies weren’t rejecting the USA, but merely Trump himself.

This is patently obvious.

Trump, you see, has positively no self-awareness. He craps all over our allies, bullies them ceaselessly, destroys their economies with damaging tariffs, treats them all like dirt…and then expects them to jump to help in a war they were never advised about, much less invited to lend a hand in planning.

This is a president who completely lacks any understanding about diplomacy, respect, unity. All he knows is intimidation and plundering. It seems to shock him to his core that he can’t gain support by screaming insults. Indeed, he wonders why no one wants to be his friend, lacking the ability to differentiate between a sycophant and a comrade.

Treating people like garbage only brings you garbage in return, a key reason why this man’s leadership is on borrowed time. All of his cowed Republican supporters in Congress will turn on him the moment it’s convenient. The same went for members of the European Union. Not a single member has the slightest motivation to want to help Trump out of whatever mess he’s gotten himself into, because its leaders can’t stand the sight of him, much less the scent.

As all of us on the side of sanity have been screaming from day one, at some point character has to matter. A man who has not the thinnest volume of empathy and compassion, who understands only punishment and cruelty and criminal conduct, can survive for a period of time – far too long, in this case – but never fully thrive.

I call your attention to the story that broke on Monday about the State Department’s considering withholding lifesaving assistance to people with H.I.V. in the African nation of Zambia unless it signs a deal to give the United States greater access to its critical minerals (copper in particular).

Put another way, this greed-driven, morally depraved administration is threatening the lives of some 1.3 million people in Zambia who rely on daily H.I.V. treatment to keep them alive, along with tuberculosis and malaria medications.

And what’s the rationale here? To plunder resources from a poverty-stricken nation, which Trump has made clear is a far greater priority than any human life. It is unconscionable on a scale that’s breathtaking.

When this is the kind of policy Trump and his subhuman aides push – the idea that nothing should ever be done out of goodness and decency but must be transactional – he and they shouldn’t be surprised when there’s push-back.

People don’t typically go out of their way to help those who are out only to benefit themselves. They’re far more likely to provide assistance, and to compromise, when civility and integrity are intrinsic to the mix.

When it comes to Trump, there is only vanity, hostility, arrogance, because somehow the concept of mutual benefit bypasses him. Finally, on the cusp of turning 80, he’s finding out that the art of the deal is about more than just taking without giving a thing in return.

Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.