It's not a good thing. I've had so many times where I've conned loved ones into giving me money and looked back at it in a mix of awe and disgust. Thinking about how I turned the very things that should have been reasons NOT to trust me into reasons TO trust me. How I've gotten them to offer money like it was their idea to start with without even having asked for it. How utterly convincing I could lie. How I could use previous lies I'd eventually been caught out on to get people to believe future lies. Twisting everything and anything to my advantage in subtle and profoundly devious ways. And I remember my close friend/running partner and how I'd see him doing exactly the same thing. How we would talk about how to go about manipulating our relatives to get money from them. He was just as good at it as I was. For years we'd run around stealing from people, conning people, doing whatever we had to do to get enough money to score that day.
I felt disgusted with myself, so did he. But we rarely ever talked about it. We both knew it was wrong and that we hated doing it, but that we weren't gonna stop and it hurt to think about all the pain we were bringing into the world. It hurts even more now that I'm trying again to get clean.
Me and most junkies I've known. We are artful, master liars and manipulators. It never ceases to amaze me what people are capable of when they're desperate enough. The profound ingenuity, brilliance, and amorality.
It's nothing to be proud of, it's horrible. Something I'd often feel ashamed of is how I'd developed a very impressive skill for understanding people, reading them and knowing how they felt, knowing what they needed to hear to get them to do what I wanted. And how I could have been using those skills to help people, but I was using it to hustle money for my drug habit.
Anyhow, I don't see Trump as the kind of person to do that. He doesn't get what he wants that way. He uses power to get what he wants. Either negatively by using fear, intimidation, etc. or positively by offering something he can provide. For him it's about having power over people. He strikes me as the kinda person who totally loses it whenever he feels his power isn't absolute. Junkies, especially heroin addicts, I've found they tend to be used to not having any power at all, but tend to be emotionally sensitive, intuitive people. So they use that to get what they want instead.
![:\](https://bluelight.org/xf/BL_Images/Orig_Emoji/wrygrin.gif "wry grin :\")
