Trump ridiculed by columnist's plan to reward him with what he wants

New York Times opinion writer Frank Bruni offered an unorthodox solution Monday to what he described as President Donald Trump’s compulsion to “assert his dominance,” proposing a way to exploit what he said was the president’s endless “need for validation.”

“If we keep him busy with award ceremonies and bury him in gleaming trophies, glittering medallions and gaudily framed certificates, he might not be so free or feel so compelled to assert his dominance in other ways, such as stripping poor people of their health insurance, immigrants of their humanity, the judiciary of its integrity, academia of its autonomy, Democrats of winnable congressional districts and America of democracy,” Bruni wrote in an op-ed published Monday in The New York Times.

For well over a decade, Trump has complained about having not received one award or another.

“I should have gotten it,” Trump said in 2016 after his show on NBC “The Apprentice” failed to win the Emmy. He also complained on numerous occasions about not being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Bruni argued that Trump’s “obsession with tributes – or at least with tributes to him” could be harnessed to blunt his policy agenda, suggesting there should be no limit to the awards showered on the president.

“I figure that every second he’s on the Oscars stage is a second he’s not at the Resolute Desk, pursuing or setting some record for executive orders signed,” Bruni wrote. “That’s a big, beautiful trade-off, the likes of which the world has never seen.”

Beyond an Emmy and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination, Bruni floated the idea of presenting Trump with a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony. Furthermore, Bruni proposed – perhaps in jest – that Trump should be presented with a Fields Medal, the highest honor for mathematicians under the age of 40.

“While it’s currently reserved for brainiacs under 40, such norms are for chumps, not Trumps, and matter less than the singular brilliance of this president, whose novel formula for calculating trade imbalances and tariffs captivated economists,” Bruni wrote.

“His analysis of election margins was equally innovative. In 2016, he converted the slenderest of triumphs in the Electoral College and a sizable loss of the popular vote into proof of ‘a historic movement, the likes of which the world has never seen,’ in the words of his own inauguration speech. (Is there a Nobel for self-congratulation?)”