Taking a Peace Prize Given to Someone Else, Doesn't Make DT Madonna.

“Sometimes I sing and dance around the house in my underwear. Doesn’t make me Madonna. Never will.”

Joan Cusack says it perfectly in Working Girl, playing Cynthia alongside Melanie Griffith, Sigourney Weaver, and Harrison Ford. It is funny because it is true. Wanting something, mimicking something, even believing something about yourself does not make it so.

I found myself thinking about that line when I watched Donald Trump’s face as he accepted a Nobel Peace Prize from the woman who won it. The pleasure, the pride, the unmistakable glow of being seen as worthy. He didn’t win. She is not allowed to give it to someone else. He is not a peace prize winner. Never will be.

I tried, honestly, to do the thing I am always telling myself to do, to seek to understand rather than be understood.

I ran a thought experiment. If Meryl Streep handed me one of her Academy Awards because she thought my performance in something or other deserved it, would I feel excited? Proud? Validated?

I could not find it. Not the excitement. Not the pleasure. Not even the pride. All I could locate was embarrassment and the immediate instinct to escape the room.

Then I remembered my daughter at four years old, riding in the Hampton Classic lead line. Four and five year olds are walked around the ring by someone from their barn, showing that they can sit in the saddle. She knew exactly what a blue ribbon meant. First place. If you knew her father, you would understand why she knew. And yes, I am competitive too.

The Hampton Classic gives every child in the lead line a light blue ribbon. Only one child gets the real blue ribbon. The rest get something that looks close enough. I have never agreed with it. In my view, it is never too young to learn about winning and losing. We all will do both many times in our life.

She was thrilled. She said she won. I explained gently that she did not, and why, and I pointed out the pony and rider who actually won. She shook her head, firm and certain, and said no, I have a blue ribbon. I won.

She went home and told everyone she won. I remember thinking how dangerous that felt, how setting a child up to believe that symbols without substance were the same as achievement was a terrible lesson.

My daughter grew up and handles blue ribbons with grace, win or lose. She is a giving member of society and has won many and lost a few.

Donald Trump is like a four year old. And how sick that is. I think he never learned that a blue ribbon unearned is nothing but a piece of fabric.

How hollow and shallow and empty someone must be to fill themselves with something they know is not legitimately theirs. He frightens me in many ways, but perhaps this is the worst one. As long as he can surround himself with things that look like blue ribbons, but are not, he stays calm. Perhaps even his aggression toward Greenland is born from the fact that Norway did not give him the Peace Prize he so clearly believes he deserves, one he did not earn. The man is filled with many things, but peace is not one of them.

So I ask you, Americans, what is wrong with you? How is it that hundreds of millions of you still believe there is something he has to offer you in any way? Or are you like him? So shallow and hollow and empty that hearing things you know are not true is enough to make you feel better for a day? As long as it’s someone else being abused, not you?