“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity, and change. Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.” – Brene Brown.

When I watch President Trump, I always, somewhat narcissistically, think the same thing. He was never permitted and never permitted himself to be vulnerable.

I am learning to do that.

Learning to be vulnerable and share my vulnerability brought me to my good life and saved it.

Donald Trump is afraid of being vulnerable. He can’t see that he would not have to steal an election to win one if he permitted himself to show vulnerability.

He could do all of the things he wants to do and be as loved as he needs and demands to be.

In needing always to appear strong and right, he never gives himself the gift of being wrong and humble. That is what connects us to people. And disconnects him.

Those are the leaders’ people truly love, rather than just cheer and worship.

For me – who could never be elected President of anything – vulnerability seems like truth and feels like courage. Neither of those things is comfortable, but they never feel like weakness.

Trump, for example, has hidden the truth about his taxes for years. He can’t bear to be seen as a man who sometimes failed, who owes a lot of money, like the rest of us. He needs to be invulnerable.

I understand this. When I was broke and owed a lot of money, it was a dread secret that I hid from everyone. I could not bear to be seen that way.

Years later, when Maria and I were forced into bankruptcy, the first thing I did was write about it on my blog. It was as if a thousand pounds of concrete were lifted off of my soul.

When I broke down, I wrote about it every day.

The world did not come to an end.

Strangely, a man so tough and smart as to get to be President of the United States has not learned that vulnerability is an asset. Neither, sadly, do most men in power.

All he had to do was say he owed a lot of money and will need a good long time to pay it back, and think of how much lighter his spirit could have been. It is frightening to lie all the time, it is so hard to keep them all in your head.

There is more than one part of Trump in me, and in many of us – the broken childhood, the cold and critical father, the dread of being seen and known, the horror of appearing vulnerable, the block against listening.

Every time I tried being vulnerable as a child, I regretted it, sometimes profoundly. I paid dearly for it. Men fear it and ridicule it. Young boys laugh at it. My friends ran from it.

Vulnerability matters. Hiding it has consequences. It can even kill.

People who wear masks are thus sissies compared to real men, who take their chances. This is the image of himself that Donald Trump loves the most, the man who is too tough to die.

Life always gets a chuckle out of that.

The real man’s hallmark, the ticket into the club,  is that he is never, ever,  willing to seem vulnerable.

Like President Trump, I learned to put on the mask of invulnerability, but unlike him, I learned what we all must learn at some point in our lives, that when the mask comes off, there are far worse things than being vulnerable.

The most interesting thing about the debate Monday came from watching Trump’s real mask, his face – the powerful man, the righteous man, the angry man.

Not once, at any point, did he permit himself to be unsure, empathetic, wrong, open – all things that to him seem to be symbols of weakness.

Because he can’t imagine vulnerability, he can’t imagine failure.

When he left the debate, it is said, he was jubilant. It wasn’t until the next morning, watching cable TV, that he learned the truth.

Joseph Biden, Jr., a truly humble and aging man, was vulnerable almost every moment. He showed fear, confusion, uncertainty, pain, and when he could, he tried to show empathy.

His “tough” opponent laughed at him, right away, like a schoolboy who wet himself in the schoolyard. But today, when the dust clears, who is stronger?

A very conservative friend called me last night to talk about the debate, and he said, “don’t you think, Katz, that Biden just looked like an old man, somewhat frail and uncertain?”

Yes, absolutely, I said, that is what people like and about him. Like us, he is uncertain and confused and frightened. Someone to trust.

I learned to love and be loved when I allowed my most vulnerable and powerful self to be deeply seen and known. I learned to honor the spiritual connection that grows from living a life of trust, respect, kindness, and affection.

I don’t know if Donald Trump can authentically feel those things; I do know that he doesn’t dare to show them.

He has the gift – if you want to call it that – of making other people feel vulnerable. When he talks about the election and makes it clear he will attempt to win it by any means, he makes people feel vulnerable.

But we are learning that there is no virtue in scaring or taunting people. It is just cruel and small.

To me,  Donald Trump is the farthest thing from scary. He is unauthentic, and thus alarming, but never frightening.  He is a bully. He never seems real to me, even though his power is real.

I never feel vulnerable listening to him or watching him, because I can’t locate his authenticity, his core. I think it was broken a long time ago, damaged perhaps beyond repair.

He is incapable of sincerity.

The person inside that shell is missing.

He is, in this way, not alive to me.

When I was a child, I thought I would grow up and not be vulnerable anymore. But I learned that becoming an adult is about being vulnerable to many more things than a child can imagine.

Vulnerability is a great and wise teacher.

To be alive is to be vulnerable. In this way, Donald Trump is not alive for me; he has become a cartoon character playing a powerful role, he lives more in the realm of Game Of Thrones or a video game – Mortal Kombat comes to mind –  than ruling in modern America.

He can’t love us, his people, and we can’t love him.

And boy, is Donald Trump vulnerable.

This, from Nate Silver’s FiveTwentyEight today: “President Trump’s quest to win a second term is not in good shape.” Biden, the site reports, now has an 80 out of 100 chance of winning the November election.

This doesn’t mean he can’t win, but it is getting less and less likely by the day.

He entered Tuesday night’s debate with roughly a 7- or 8-point deficit in national polls, putting him further behind at this stage of the race than any other candidate since Bob Dole in 1996.

When you love someone, you lay your heart open to them. Joseph Biden, flawed as he is, does this naturally and authentically. Life has made him vulnerable.

I don’t know if he can run a country or not, but if I ever have to have open heart surgery again, I’d love to call him up and talk to him before the operation.

Because he is old and frail and empathetic,  it is possible for people to love him, and he can be loved.

Both men are archetypes – an idea, symbol, character type, an element in a story that repeatedly appears in stories, and that symbolizes something universal in the human experience.

One is terrified of vulnerability; the other wears it like an old shoe.

The author Paulo Coelho wrote that the strongest love is the love that can demonstrate its fragility.

When I was young, I was fragile as a chicken egg; I never accepted my vulnerability.  I never showed it to anyone.

When I understood that being authentic was the path to humanity and acceptance, I was no longer fragile; I learned to be strong.

Life teaches us these lessons one way or another – failure, cancer, the death of a loved one, the loss of work and security, accidents, fires, even the death of dogs. Or a pandemic and the loss of an election, a very public rejection, and humiliation.

Small wonder he would do anything to stop it.

Life opens the door to vulnerability and sets it free.

I watch Donald  Trump’s face more than I listen to his words because our faces and eyes and expressions tell the truth about us, even when our words don’t. A human being is a person made of material things, easily torn and hard to mend.

Mostly I see fear and falseness. He has yet to set himself free; he is an avatar, a version of what other people need him to be and insist that he is. His shell is fragile, like a chickens.

At the debate, I saw it crack.

“Vulnerability,” writes Renee Brown, “is the birthplace of love…It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”

Vulnerability is the only authentic state. Be vulnerable. Bow to it and dance for it. It is my greatest gift to myself, the new goodness that is slowly coming to me.

Why I wondered, can’t I be afraid of Donald Trump, like so many others?

One reason, I think, is that he is so afraid of me.