I've written before that Trump is forever telling himself a story of his life and his actions that make him look like the righteous hero -- never placing a foot wrong and always being proven right.
The facts -- from Puerto Rico to healthcare to Russia -- tell a very different story, however. And, while Trump has proven an uncanny ability to sell an alternate reality to himself and his supporters, the facts have a funny way of winning out in the long run.
You can only live in a world of your creation for so long before fact-based reality bursts your bubble. The question for Trump is how long he can keep this up.
adjectiveone of the inmates is berserk: frenzied, raving, wild, out of control, amok, on the rampage, frantic, crazy, raging, insane, out of one's mind, hysterical, mad, crazed, maniacal, manic; informal bananas, bonkers, nuts, loco, hyper, postal; vulgar slang batshit.
Friday, Sept. 29, 2017 Midnight Moment of Zen Just watched “Our Souls at Night” on Netflix, staring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda. This is the amazing song they played during a road trip. 88% Rotten Tomatoes. Evening Edition
According to a new Quinnipiac poll, a majority of Americans believe that Donald Trump is unfit to be president. That’s pretty remarkable. But you have to wonder how much higher the number would be if people really knew what’s going on.
For the trouble with Trump isn’t just what he’s doing, but what he isn’t. In his mind, it’s all about him — and while he’s stroking his fragile ego, basic functions of government are being neglected or worse.
Let’s talk about two stories that might seem separate: the deadly neglect of Puerto Rico, and the ongoing sabotage of American health care. What these stories have in common is that millions of Americans are going to suffer, and hundreds if not thousands die, because Trump and his officials are too self-centered to do their jobs.
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But Trump spent days after Maria’s strike tweeting about football players. When he finally got around to saying something about Puerto Rico, it was to blame the territory for its own problems.
The impression one gets is of a massively self-centered individual who can’t bring himself to focus on other people’s needs, even when that’s the core of his job.
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No, A.C.A. sabotage is best seen not as a strategy, but as a tantrum. We can’t repeal Obamacare? Well, then, we’ll screw it up. It’s not about achieving any clear goal, but about salving the president’s damaged self-esteem.
In short, Trump truly is unfit for this or any high office. And the damage caused by his unfitness will just keep growing.
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EXCERPT:
It’s unfortunate that so few of the experts even consider whether the Trumpian behaviors they deem pathological might instead be crafty and calculated.
Words used to describe Trump department. cringe cower, shrink, recoil, shy away, flinch, blench, draw back; shake, tremble, quiver, quail, quake.wince,shudder, squirm, feel embarrassed, feel mortified.
Psychotherapist John Gartner’s “Mad? Bad? Or All of the Above?” takes a stab at this, but for almost all other contributors it’s a blind spot, made all the more glaring because political reporters have done terrific work explaining how Trump’s seemingly crazy behaviors serve his political ends.
To take some examples too recent for the book, were Trump’s speech and tweets demanding the firing of athletes who take a knee during the national anthem “extreme present narcissism,” attempts to whip up his base, or a ploy to distract from the Republicans’ latest failure to repeal Obamacare? Was the “Little Rocket Man” appellation for North Korea’s dictator a sign of Trump’s “pubescent default setting,” red meat for his supporters, or a tactic drawn from the madman theory of leadership?
See my Daily Kos store below
The mad-or-bad conundrum is especially acute when it comes to Trump’s professed (in tweets and speeches) beliefs in conspiracies (Antonin Scalia was murdered; Obama had a Hawaiian official killed to hide his Kenyan birth; Ted Cruz’s father was involved in President Kennedy’s assassination). Is it paranoia, evidence of delusional thinking, or shrewd incitement of the ill-informed and gullible who feel left behind and at the mercy of forces they don’t understand?
The theorizing would be entertaining if the subject were, say, a Shakespearean character and not the man with his finger on the nuclear button. The short chapter by Trump’s “Art of the Deal” ghostwriter Tony Schwartz is so surreal (“facts are whatever Trump deems them to be on any given day” because “his aim is never accuracy; it’s domination”), it should be in an Ionesco play.
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Excerpt:
“So what happens is, this guy falls off right on his face, hits his head and I thought he died,” Trump said. “And you know what I did? I said, ‘Oh my god, that’s disgusting, and I turned away. I couldn’t, you know — he was right in front of me. I turned away, I didn’t want to touch him.”
“He’s bleeding all over the place, I felt terrible, you know,” Trump continued. “Beautiful marble floor, it didn’t look so good. It changed color, it became very red, and you have this poor guy, 80 years old, laying on the floor, conscious, and all of the rich people are turning away, ‘Oh my god, this is terrible, this is disgusting,’ and, you know, they’re turning away, nobody wants to help the guy, and his wife is screaming, she sitting right next to him and she’s screaming.”
He told Stern that some U.S. Marines, whom he said had been given the worst table in the ballroom despite being guests of honor, rushed to the man’s aide as he and the wealthy donors in attendance watched in horror.
“So from the back of the room they come running forward, they grabbed him, they put the blood all over the place, it’s all over their uniforms, they’re taking it, they swipe — they ran him out, they created a stretcher — they call it a human stretcher, their arms out, like five guys on each side,” Trump said. “They ran him out, I never saw it, they ran him out. I was saying, ‘Get that blood cleaned up, it’s disgusting.’”
Trump eventually learned the man had survived, but he admitted that he neglected to check on him.
“I forgot to call, the next day I forgot to call to say, is he OK,” Trump said. “He was OK, it’s just not my thing. I just don’t like looking at blood.”
He told Stern he respected nurses and others in the medical field, but he was disgusted by their work.
“I’m not good for medical,” he said. “In other words, if you, like, cut your finger and there’s blood pouring out, I’m gone.”
It's a great mistake to confuse bad behavior with mental illness. Trump is one of the worst people we could possibly imagine as President, but that doesn't mean he's mentally ill. When we confuse the two, it's a terrible insult to those people who really are mentally ill. They're mostly nice well-meaning people who don't do harm. He's a bad person, not well-meaning, very selfish, who does lots of harm.
It also distracts us. Trump is a terrible political problem for America -- in some ways the greatest threat to democracy that we've had since the Civil War. He is a terrible environmental threat to the whole world. Millions of people can die in the global warming that he's encouraging. What we're seeing with three monster hurricanes in just two weeks, this is just a signal, a warning of what the future can hold. We have billions of people living in low-lying areas that will be in harm’s way, and Trump is doing everything a human being can do to make global warming worse.
If we spend our time thinking about what's his diagnosis, we won't be focusing on what's more important: How do we contain this guy? We have to have Congress, we have to have the courts, the press, and most importantly we have to have the people stand up to Trump and direct us back to national sanity.
EXCERPT:
Dr James Gilligan, of New York University, argued in his contribution to the book that “the issue here is not whether President Donald Trump is mentally ill. It is whether he is dangerous. Dangerousness is not a psychiatric diagnosis.”
Nonetheless, the Amazon.com blurb for The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump says it explores “Trump’s symptoms and potentially relevant diagnoses to find a complex, if also dangerously mad, man”. Its subtitle is 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.
Dr Lee and others who have joined her cause have previously faced criticism for “throwing ethical standards out the window because they cannot accept the [2016 Presidential] election results”, in the words of Connecticut Republican party chairman JR Romano.
In February a leading psychiatrist, Dr Allen Frances, spoke out against “psychiatric name-calling” which he said was “a misguided way of countering Mr Trump’s attack on democracy”.
Weds. Sept. 27, 2017 Chris Hayes:
Evening on MSNBC: Chris Mathews just showed this picture and wondered how much Jill Stein, who I always disliked, might have helped Putin design advertisements used to help Trump. Daily Kos reported on this on Nov. 22, 2016.
Not a link
You may have read reports about Michael Flynn, Trump’s National Security Advisor, turned heads by attending the Russian State owned TV Gala as Putin’s guest and by making semi-regular appearances on Russian TV. www.politico.com/… But, you may be surprised at who was also at the dinner as Putin’s guest, Jill Stein of the Green party. You can see her in the above picture. She admits to meeting with Putin.
Like Michael Flynn, Jill Stein also calls for “collaboration with Putin” and has been criticized for remaining silent on his human right’s violations. www.jill2016.com… americablog.com… Russia’s Green activists allege that she is an “accomplice” with Putin according to Newsweek magazine. www.newsweek.com… Some believe that she was actively working with Putin to help influence our election in favor of Trump by stealing votes away from Hillary.
It is yet another interesting coincidence, in this election of many Russian coincidences with our election, that she was at the same dinner with Trump’s advisor Michael Flynn. "Jill Stein’s Connection to Putin” Daily Kos
While there have surely been American presidents who could be said to be narcissistic, none have shown sociopathic qualities to the degree seen in Trump. Correspondingly, none have been so definitively and so obviously dangerous. Democracy requires respect and protection for multiple points of view, concepts that are incompatible with sociopathy. The need to be seen as superior and a lack of empathy or remorse for harming other people are in fact the signature characteristics of tyrants, who seek the control and destruction of all who oppose them, as well as loyalty to themselves instead of the country they lead.
The paranoia of severe sociopathy creates a profound risk of war, since heads of other nations will inevitably disagree with or challenge the sociopathic leader, who will experience the disagreement as a personal attack, leading to rage reactions and impulsive action to destroy this “enemy.” Trump’s sociopathic characteristics are undeniable and create a profound danger for America.
Dr. Lance Dodes is a training and supervising analyst emeritus at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society.
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Excerpt
President Trump’s mental wellness has been questioned by both healthcare professionals and nearly all of my friends and family since his presidential campaign started. Despite the accusations that he suffers from “narcissistic personality disorder,” “sociopathic tendencies,” and “stunted emotional development,” Trump has declined to affirmatively identify as having been diagnosed with any of these illnesses. His good friend and mentor, Howard Stern, however, did once suggest to him on his radio show that he seek help for his compulsive handwashing habit but Donald Trump shrugged off the well-meaning words.
Ultimately, we will only be sure of Trump’s mental status if and when he is arrested for a crime and forced to undergo an evaluation that will determine whether or not he is fit to stand trial. And if, as Lena Dunham surmises, that verdict is negative, she will be able to say I told you so to all of her haters.
Tuesday, Sept. 26, 2017 Trump Quote of the Day:“I grew up in New York, so I know many people from Puerto Rico,” he boasted. “These are great people.” (Yeah, right, some of his best friends. And I lived in Manhattan in the early sixties and drove through Spanish Harlem several times, saw Westside Story on Broadway, and love Ben E. King singing “There’s a Rose in Spanish Harlem.”) Above: Bill Moyers, former Press Secretary for President Lyndon Johnson, speaks to MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell about Donald Trump's anger and "narcissism" and how it's spilling over to now attacking professional athlete protests.
"This is an alien in the White House," Moyers said about Trump. "We've never had this kind of president."
"We've had bad presidents, we've had vulgar men in the presidency, but we've never had someone who suffers from the kind of malignant narcissism -- All politicians are narcissistic but some of the malignancy of the politicians, the president, do not spread down into the country and the culture. This one is happening very fast, it is almost like a campaign to chill free speech, to use it to divide and polarize the country. He's turned the Oval Office into a... mosh pit of bodily and verbally rhetorical conflict," Moyers said about the president.
Excerpts from “The Fragile, Toxic Masculinity
of Donald Trump >>>
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This is Trump, the violent fantasist who dreams of a physical supremacy he never achieved, and has then spent his life expressing this insecurity and hostility through boardroom bullying and, of course, sexually predatory behavior. He has lived his life in thrall to toxic masculinity, but lacked the ability to prove this “manhood” on the football field, and then dodged the armed forces, never attempting to prove his “manhood” on the battlefield. He has chosen instead to spend a lifetime tearing down the people who have dared stand in his path, and the women who dared to say “no.”
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This is a model of politics—as well as manhood—that threatens Trump’s entire agenda of poisonous, divisive narcissism. Look at the outpouring of comments by NFL players following Trump’s remarks. None of them have sunk to his level. Instead, they share the tone of Seahawk Richard Sherman who said, “The behavior of the President is unacceptable and needs to be addressed. If you do not Condemn this divisive Rhetoric you are Condoning it!!” The cornerback, who is not even 30 years old, is showcasing more adulthood then the 70-year-old president. This is the new reality. And Sherman is absolutely correct. To be silent in the face of this destructive person is to condone his actions. That’s not an option. This president is a child bully, and bullies are emboldened by our silence.
The North Koreans at the meeting
displayed an “encyclopedic” knowledge
of Trump’s tweets, to the extent
that they were able to quote them
back to the Americans present.
Trump’s Alabama tirade may have backfired for now, but don’t forget it’s exactly what his followers want to hear
EXCERPT (emphasis added): Trump's crudeness should not be a surprise: This is a man who has bragged about grabbing unsuspecting women by their genitals, discussed bodily fluids during the 2016 presidential campaign and continually implies that he has a large penis. But one cannot help but notice that he displays more rage toward black men who dare to exercise their First Amendment rights than he does towards neo-Nazis and white supremacists who maim and kill innocent Americans.
Because he is a malignant narcissist, Donald Trump gets angry when he does not receive constant praise. But Trump (and by extension his voters) has a special anger towards black people who are "disrespectful" and "do not know their place." This is, of course, an old attitude among white racists: a deep disdain for "uppity" black people.
Donald Trump thinks Ivanka “looks down on me,” concedes he groped Melania in public and knows his compulsive hand-washing “could be a psychological problem,” according to a new archive of all the conversations he had on air with the Howard Stern Show.
Those comments, along with various eyebrow-raising but predictable vulgarities, can be found in a new, online archive of Trump’s 15 hours of radio banter with the shock jock. In them, he discusses the relative hotness of his wives (and almost every other female celebrity of the moment) and his feelings about his daughter Ivanka, while chortling with Stern’s crew as they joked about who was more “gay,” and whether getting vomited on was more gross than eating food that had been on someone’s anus.
In one September 2004 call, he and Stern were bantering about how Ivana was dating a “blueblood” from Bedminster, New Jersey, and joking about how their kids were more blue blooded than they were. “I think my daughter looks down on me,” Trump admitted. “She said, 'oh my god—”
The two then turned to how much money Trump was going to leave his growing brood (Barron was not yet born). “I’m going to give them Trump Online University,” he said. “And charity gets a lot.”
During the 2016 presidential campaign, Stern refused to re-air any of his conversations with the Republican nominee. “I feel Donald Trump did the show in an effort to be entertaining and have fun with us and I feel like it would be a betrayal to any of our guests if I sat there and played them now where people are attacking him," Stern said on his Sirius XM show.
Excerpt: Lifton: We have a duty to warn on an individual basis if we are treating someone who may be dangerous to herself or to others—a duty to warn people who are in danger from that person. We feel it’s our duty to warn the country about the danger of this president. If we think we have learned something about Donald Trump and his psychology that is dangerous to the country, yes, we have an obligation to say so. That’s why Judith Herman and I wrote our letter to The New York Times. We argue that Trump’s difficult relationship to reality and his inability to respond in an evenhanded way to a crisis renders him unfit to be president, and we asked our elected representative to take steps to remove him from the presidency. While the media focuses on Trump’s racist war with professional sports, let’s not loose sight of the real danger Trump and his particular mental illness poses to world stability:
Excerpts:
(Emphasis added) Mr. Trump’s willingness to casually threaten to annihilate a nuclear-armed foe was yet another reminder of the steep risks inherent in his brute-force approach to diplomacy. His strengths as a politician — the ability to appeal in a visceral way to the impulses of ordinary citizens — are a difficult fit for the meticulous calculations that his own advisers concede are crucial in dealing with Pyongyang.
The disconnect has led to a deep uncertainty about whether Mr. Trump is all talk or actually intends to act. The ambiguity could be strategic, part of an effort to intimidate Mr. Kim and keep him guessing. Or it could reflect a rash impulse by a leader with little foreign policy experience to vent his anger and stoke his supporters’ enthusiasm.
** “The comments give the world the sense that he is increasingly unhinged and unreliable,” said Christopher R. Hill, a former ambassador to South Korea who served Republican and Democratic presidents.
Because he is a malignant narcissist, Donald Trump gets angry when he does not receive constant praise. But Trump (and by extension his voters) has a special anger towards black people who are "disrespectful" and "do not know their place." This is, of course, an old attitude among white racists: a deep disdain for "uppity" black people.
**
Way stop en route from Boston to Portland
Sunday, Sept. 24, 2017 Trump and “ the Knee” — One senior official noted that though some of the president’s outbursts on the issue have seemed “nutty,” this kind of public behavior and feuding on the president’s part are all but expected and “standard.” Another official simply observed that @realDonaldTrump’s NFL-related tantrums were less likely to cause an international incident than tweets about Kim Jong Un. From Daily Beast Duty to Warn (DTW): When you have an out-of-control malignant narcissist taunting N. Korea here’s what to expect:“Trump might not have been aware what is uttered from his mouth, but we will make sure that he bears consequences far beyond his words, far beyond the scope of what he can handle even if he is ready to do so,” North Korea Minister for Foreign Affairs Ri Yong Ho addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations on Sept. 23, with harsh words directed at President Trump. Our go-to DTW psychologist in The Baltimore Sun: QUOTE: “All along I’ve felt, even if it was a hopeless cause, that we still needed to speak out,” Gartner said. “Bearing witness to these things is important. And I think bringing out the truth is important.”
EXCERPTS:
– Put psychologist John Gartner on a couch and ask him about his childhood and one of the first stories he will recall is about his mom, Diana, and a touchstone moment in the fight for women’s rights.
In 1969, Diana Gartner and other leaders of the relatively new National Organization for Women made a reservation at the Oak Room Bar in New York under the name “Dr. Gartner.” The showdown that followed when the women arrived during the establishment’s male-only hours would lead to an early victory for feminism: The storied bar ultimately changed its gender policy.
John Gartner was 10 years old when the incident made headlines.
“It does run in our family to be mavericks,” he said. “Or rebels with a cause.”
These days Gartner is gaining national attention for a cause of his own — and creating a stir in his field — by trying to convince voters that President Donald Trump has a mental illness, and should be removed from his job because of it.
To impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the
dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays
: Stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches,
throwing rocks.
From a small office at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, Gartner has emerged as a leader of a group of mental health professionals called Duty To Warn. The campaign began as an internet petition seeking to remove Trump under the 25th Amendment, which broadly lays out the procedure for booting a president who is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
Gartner is a registered Democrat, and has contributed to Democratic campaigns, including Hillary Clinton’s. But Gartner insists Duty to Warn isn’t a political exercise.
“I didn’t like George Bush, but I never circulated a petition about him,” he said. “I’d be grateful for a President Pence, even though I disagree with everything he believes in. ... He’s conservative, [but] he’s not mentally unstable.”
Gartner says the petition will be sent to each member of Trump’s Cabinet next month.
He acknowledges he’s unlikely to get the kind of quick response his mother received decades ago at the Oak Room Bar.
“All along I’ve felt, even if it was a hopeless cause, that we still needed to speak out,” Gartner said. “Bearing witness to these things is important. And I think bringing out the truth is important.”
Excerpt:
"I just want to thank everybody, the first responders, on behalf of myself, our Vice President—Melania really wanted to be with us," Trump said, somehow forgetting that the Slovenian former model was standing directly to his left in a green shirt and white baseball cap. What?
While the First Lady remained stone-faced this time, there have been plenty of others during which she's acted like she wished her husband would quite literally forget her presence. How many times did we watch the video of Melania appearing to swat Donald's hand away as they walked down the tarmac after arriving in Tel Aviv? And who didn't raise an eyebrow when the Trumps exchanged a stiff handshake after she introduced him at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland last week? We all felt the love in the room when Melania pulled herself away from President Trump as they danced to "My Way" at an Inaugural Ball. Add last week's baffling lapse in basic spatial awareness to the "Sad Melania" meme inspiration.
I got lost somewhere between Boston and Portland and took this as I tried to get back on I-80 (above left)
I assume most of you saw, at the least, the most unhinged portions of Trump’s Alabama exhibition of angry defensive free association. This led me to a Word of the Day for my blog, RAMBLING, from the Washington Post headline this morning. Can you imagine, asking a patient who is upset “tell me how you feel” and hearing this? This latest example of Trump unfettered by a teleprompter speech written by someone else (even the evil Steve Miller) gives us another window into his worsening dysfunction, be it purely psychological or have elements of dementia.
Trump may be giving his fan base pause when he blunders into telling teams who to fire. Many of Trump supporters are NFL fans who put racial animus aside (at least a little bit) when it comes to football superstars like "San Francisco 49ers former player Colin Kaepernick, who took a knee during the national anthem before games last year to protest police brutality and racial injustice”…. From:
If you missed yesterday, scroll down. Several important Duty to Warn items to catch up on.
Friday, Sept. 22, 2017 Evening update:
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” by Bandy Lee et al includes numerous essays by Duty to Warn therapists like me.
Excerpts:
Now, some psychiatrists and other mental-health professionals are shedding long-held norms to argue that Trump’s condition presents risks to the nation and the world. “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” features more than two dozen essays breaking down the president’s perceived traits, which the contributors find consistent with symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder, sociopathy and other maladies. “Collectively with our coauthors, we warn that anyone as mentally unstable as Mr. Trump simply should not be entrusted with the life-and-death powers of the presidency,” Judith Lewis Herman of Harvard Medical School and Bandy X. Lee of the Yale School of Medicine write in the book’s prologue.
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So, depending on which of these books you trust — and their persuasive powers vary considerably — you might conclude that Trump is of unsound mind, or that we’re the deranged ones for electing him, or that America has always been disturbed, with Trump’s presidency just the latest manifestation.
And here’s the really crazy thing: These options are not mutually exclusive.
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Mental illness hardly disqualifies one from the presidency. Abraham Lincoln is thought to have suffered from severe depression, but he held himself together and the union, too. “Equating mental illness with incapacity merely stigmatizes the mentally ill,” clinical psychologist Craig Malkin writes in “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.” But Malkin and other contributors argue that Trump’s behavior — his political statements and actions as well as his interviews, books and social-media activity — suggest more ominous possibilities.
Trump displays signs of “extreme present hedonism,” the tendency to live in the moment without considering consequences, seeking to bolster one’s self-esteem no matter the risk. Or he exhibits “narcissistic personality disorder,” which includes believing you’re better than others, exaggerating your achievements and expecting constant praise. Combine hedonism, narcissism and bullying, and you get “an impulsive, immature, incompetent person who, when in the position of ultimate power, easily slides into the role of the tyrant,” Philip Zimbardo (of the famousStanford prison experiment) and Rosemary Sword write. Others suggest that Trump shows indications of sociopathy, including lack of empathy, absence of guilt and intentional manipulation. Put it all together and you have “malignant narcissism,” which includes antisocial behavior, paranoid traits, even sadism.
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Noon update: Dana Milbank writes "President Trump actually is making us crazy” and gets hate mail Excerpt: From the other side came a similar profusion of responses, in email, on Facebook and from the cesspool known as Twitter, of people wishing me dead. “Hurry up and die already! . . . DO US ALL A FAVOR AND JUST CURL UP AND DIE !!!!!!!!! . . . With any luck at all Milback (sic) will succumb. . . . just see a dr. You know, Dr Kevorkian.” Dozens of Trump supporters delighted in responding by making vulgar references to vaginas, and one wrote to my wife to say it gave him “endless satisfaction” to report that my death is likely.
Then there was somebody under the Twitter handle @deacongfrost: “I HAPPILY KILL YOU.”
I wrote the original piece half in jest, but the response showed something deeper: A large number of people reporting stress-reduced illnesses in the Trump era, and another large number of people so consumed by political disagreement that they desire the death of someone who has different views. Clearly, Trump is causing, or at least aggravating, mental-health problems on both sides.
If Trump’s policy preferences sometimes come out scrambled or inconsistent, well, that’s how most people’s policy preferences come out. If there are plenty of Republican elected officials he doesn’t like, well, that’s also true for most Republican voters. If he appears more enthusiastic about abstract border security than about deporting actual DREAMers, well, that’s what most people’s immigration preferences look like. But Trump’s tribal loyalties are fierce, his worldview is shaped by conservative media, and he never forgets who his true allies are.
This has always been Trump’s secret advantage. His connection with the GOP base runs so deep because he authentically is a member of the GOP base — he’s just the rare base Republican who had the money, celebrity, and media skills to successfully run for president despite never having held elected office.
And Trump continues to be that guy. For all his frustrations with elected Republicans, and for all Kelly’s efforts to bury him in professionalized “decision memos,” Trump still gets his news from Fox News and Breitbart and his own Twitter followers. He still hears about how Obamacare is failing and Democrats are conspiring. Like many voters, Trump often seems less motivated by love of his party than by fear and loathing of the other party. Negative partisanship is the tie that binds. It’s why Trump always comes back to his core politics: He may not love Republicans, but his worldview, and his information sources, is built around fighting Democrats.
Trump has been in the presidency for nine months now, and if there’s anything we’ve learned, it’s that he is who he has always shown himself to be. He’s not changing.
The war of words between the leaders of the U.S. and North Korea has escalated… again. North Korean leader Kim Jong-un threatened to “tame with fire” U.S. President Donald Trump, whom he referred to as “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.”
I took all these photos driving from Boston to Portland from the car window.
Thursday, Sept. 21, 2017 Evening - Breaking Read these and scroll down for the most recent news about Trump’s mental illness.
Excerpt:
SCROLL DOWN FOR EXCERPT
Kim said Trump had “made the most ferocious declaration of a war in history.”
“We will consider with seriousness exercising of a corresponding, highest level of hard-line countermeasure in history,” the statement read.
“Action is the best option in treating the dotard who, hard of hearing, is uttering only what he wants to say,” Kim added, pledging that he would “surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged U. S. dotard with fire.”
In words that echoed Trump’s Tuesday speech, Kim described the U.S. President as a “rogue” and a “gangster.”
The North Korean leader said he had expected Trump to deliver “stereo-typed, prepared remarks a little different from what he used to utter in his office on the spur of the moment,” and that the Korean peninsula has been approaching a “touch-and-go state.”
The North Korean leader said Trump’s remarks about total destruction were “beyond the boundary of threats of regime change or overturn of social system,” claiming that he had considered him a “political layman” and “heretic” when he was a presidential candidate. CONTINUED
Ed Note: Below is my comment to this article. As you see it was the first one online. It will be interesting to see what, if anything, comes of this?
Ri Yong Ho says "highest-level" actions promised by Kim Jong Un may be atmospheric test
Dagyum Ji and Oliver Hotham
September 22nd, 2017
“But such a test format would answer questions about warhead re-entry and credibly demonstrate Pyongyang can without question threaten the continental U.S. with nuclear weapons (a key goal of Pyongyang at this time).”
The DPRK conducted a test of what it claimed was a hydrogen bomb that can be placed on an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) at exactly 1200 Pyongyang time.
Ri Yong Ho was initially due to speak at the United Nations General Assembly on Friday, but the United Nations website now suggests that his speech has been postponed until Saturday.
Tristan Webb, an NK Pro senior analyst, said that it was “difficult to imagine” how the situation may de-escalate without an immediate resumption of talks between the U.S. and North Korea.
“The stakes and heat in this conflict have not been this high since the Korean War,” Webb said. “Kim Jong Un said in July that the DPRK-U.S. showdown was entering its final phase. He appears psychologically prepared for conflict.”
“We urgently need multilateral diplomatic measures to help take some pressure off of this brinksmanship.”
While many are mocking Trump for his latest verbal gaffe, the truth is that the president could be suffering from a serious mental disorder that warrants intervention and treatment
While deeply embarrassing for the United States, President Trump's creation of a new African country 'Nambia' during a luncheon with African leaders in New York is actually extremely worrying. In what could well be another sign of his worsening mental state, Trump appeared to create, or misname an African country. "In Guinea and Nigeria, you fought a horrifying Ebola outbreak," said Trump. "Nambia's health system is increasingly self-sufficient.”
The president went on to compliment "Nambia" again for its healthcare system -- a sign that it wasn't just a slip of the tongue. Trump is either brazenly ignorant about the African continent (a possibility) or he is suffering serious cognitive decline and memory loss.
As a businessman with dealings in multiple countries around the world however, it is unlikely that Trump is not aware of Namibia -- a notion he alluded to during the same luncheon when he told the African leaders that, “I have so many friends going to your countries to get rich.”
Rich people pay particular attention to emerging markets, especially men like Donald Trump who have built their wealth exploiting the lack of regulation in less developed countries (Russia, anyone?). It is more likely that Trump is having a hard time putting coherent sentences together and formulating words he knows correctly.
Excerpt: A House Democrat is slated to appear next month at a gathering of mental health professionals who are questioning President Trump’s fitness for office, adding to a line of lawmakers openly suggesting he is not psychologically able to serve.
A spokeswoman confirmed that Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) is scheduled to speak at a town hall organized by Duty to Warn, a group of mental health professionals calling for Trump’s removal from office under the Constitution’s 25th Amendment because they think he is not psychologically fit.
Raskin is expected to discuss legislation he introduced earlier this year to establish an Oversight Commission on Presidential Capacity that can determine if the president is incapacitated. His bill currently has 31 co-sponsors, all of whom are Democrats.
Under the Constitution’s 25th Amendment, the vice president and a majority of Cabinet members, “or of such other body as Congress may by law provide,” can jointly declare that a president is unfit to serve. Raskin’s bill would create an “other body” as permitted by the 25th Amendment.
(NEW YORK) — President Donald Trump says he's reached a decision on whether to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal — but he won't say what it is.
Board member claimed he spoke
to Trump personally.
Trump was asked several times on Wednesday whether he'd reached a decision. His answer: "I've decided."
And he answered, "I'll let you know," when he was asked for details.
The president made the comments during a meeting in New York with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
Trump — in his U.N. speech on Tuesday — called the 2015 nuclear deal an "embarrassment" to the United States.
The president has until Oct. 15 to certify that Iran is complying with the deal. Under the agreement, Iran has halted nuclear development in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.
Monday, Sept. 18, 2017
He made the cover of Rolling Stone at last!
Excerpt from The Rolling Stone article which includes remarks by one of the founders of Duty to Warn, Dr. John Gartner:
John Gartner, a psychologist who trained residents at Johns Hopkins (ed. note: whose book about Trump just came out today, scroll down), has found a way around both problems (Duty to Warn vs. Goldwater rule). The Goldwater Rule he just ignores, because, he argues, the graveness of the Trump threat renders it quaint. Lots of his colleagues seem to agree, as Gartner has managed to gather more than 62,000 signatures from self-described mental-health professionals attesting that Trump "manifests a serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of president of the United States."
"We're not talking about a gross psychotic disorder," Gartner says. "We're talking about a way in which people with severe personality disorders can regress to what they call transient psychotic states."
Gartner's argument is relatively simple. Add paranoia, sadism and antisocial behavior to narcissistic personality disorder and you have a new diagnosis: "malignant narcissism." Trump, he says, is no paranoid schizophrenic who walks the streets claiming to be the Son of God – no one "so grossly ill" could be elected. However, the president's increasing tendency to obsess over persecution theories – and not just parrot meaningless stupidities like the inaugural crowd story but seemingly believe them – shows that he's crossing a meaningful diagnostic line into psychotic delusions, common among malignant narcissists.
"We're not talking about a gross psychotic disorder," Gartner says. "We're talking about a way in which people with severe personality disorders can regress to what they call transient psychotic states." He adds, "It's a more subtle kind of psychosis, but it goes over the boundary into psychosis.”
The term malignant narcissist is said to have been invented by Holocaust survivor Erich Fromm, who used it to explain Hitler. It's now become a catch-word on the Internet to describe Trump, and almost inevitably – in much the same way that language from the Steele dossier bled from the Internet to pop culture to the rhetoric of elected officials – it has begun to be circulated within the Democratic Party. California Rep. Jackie Speier actually used the term to describe Trump after Charlottesville, in an interview in which she also called him "unhinged" and "unfit."
Us, the U.S., at the U.N. today.
Updated this evening: Some of the words to describe the speech n MSNBC, HuffPost and other liberal media: Combative, rambling, repetitive, loose cannon, undermine the world, bellicosity and swagger, menacing, astounding rhetoric, saber rattling, dark global vision, contradictory signals to rest of world, most atrocious speech ever given by a president,threatening nuclear war from podium of UN very, never had president bluster about using nuclear weapons, a significant speech, defines the Trump Doctrine, will be studied for years, mentions “rocket man”… and this from VOX:perfect distillation of his hyper-nationalist America First worldview adapted for the world stage. Transgressing boundaries, from The Hill.
Trump’s speech was so over-the-top in its saber-rattling that George W. Bush’s former UN advisor John Bolton praised it as the best speech of Trump’s presidency on Fox News. Ambassador Bolton was followed on the right-wing network by Republican Rep Ron DeSantis of Florida who called Trump’s address a “tour de force.”
"This was the international version of draining the swamp,” DeSantis applauded. And Breitbart:
Donald Trump Gives Full-Throated Defense of ‘America First’ in U.N. Speech
Excerpt: “If the righteous many do not confront the wicked few then evil will triumph,” he said. He also had tough words for North Korea in particular, warning that the U.S. will “totally destroy” the regime if attacked.
“Rocket man is on a suicide mission for himself and his regime,” Trump said, referring to North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un.
But balancing his defense of “America First” with outreach to the international community, Trump finished his speech on a conciliatory note, calling for the international community to give a resolute, united message to the world:
So let this be our mission and let this be our message to the world: We will fight together, sacrifice together and stand together for peace, for freedom, for justice, for family, for humanity and for the almighty God who made us all.
(BTW he’s not a rocket man, rocket testing is legal under international law, he’s really missile man - ballistic missiles are not rockets.)
Author of “Evil in Modern Thought” says progressives must not shun the concept, especially when it fits so well. An interview with Susan Neiman, the director of the Einstein Forum and a former professor of philosophy at Yale University as well as Tel Aviv University..”
Excerpts:
DeVega: Terms are important. How do you conceptualize evil?
Neiman: I believe there are two ways to look at evil (or goodness, for that matter). One way concerns a person’s internal makeup, what drives him or her, what values they hold, what goals guide them. We all know people who may genuinely have decent values but are too afraid or lazy to do much about realizing them. But Donald Trump is not one of them. Like many others, I have spent considerable time wondering what goes on in this man’s soul -- I believe in principle that everyone has one. However, it is hard to find evidence of anything close to what we normally mean by the word "soul" relative to Donald Trump.
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DeVega: If we agree that Trump is evil, then what are the obligations of citizens in this moment, specifically, and civil society more generally?
Neiman: First and most importantly, to keep insisting that Trump's behavior in the White House is not normal. America is in a state of emergency. Resistance is crucial. The good news is that citizens’ resistance stopped the Muslim ban and the repeal of Obamacare. We need to remember that the opposition has, so far, prevented Donald Trump from doing as much damage as he wants, and we need to intensify it.
Nonviolent resistance to fascism could even have worked in Germany if more people had dared it earlier -- there was some -- and it is certainly needed in America now. We also need to remember that resistance is taking place all over the country; I was happily surprised to find it in Mississippi, where I just spent five months. This spring, people there were already going out and registering voters to get ready for 2018. I know electoral politics seems boring (except in 2008), but we need to understand that sometimes the best way to resist evil is boring.
Everyone should be focused on the midterm elections, which will be crucial. We could get rid of this particular evil if the Democrats could take back Congress. At this moment in time, preserving the rule of law (and the Supreme Court, and a few other institutions) is more important than anything else. Another crucial lesson from German history: The Nazis would have been stopped if the left-wing parties -- who together won the majority of votes in the 1933 elections -- had been united. Instead, they fought each other. Americans with moral values need to unite around those values, and not let ourselves be divided by differences of race or gender or minor political differences. What we are facing now is not a political problem but a moral one.
Press Release: PR Newswire
Skyhorse Publishing releases a new book to explain what John Gartner, PhD says "is psychologically wrong with Donald Trump."
All I Ever Wanted to Know about Donald Trump I Learned from His Tweets: A Psychological Exploration of the President via Twitter Compiled and edited by Rachel Montgomery; Introduction by John Gartner, PhD
NEW YORK, Sept. 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- As things heat up globally in North Korea and Iran, and with world leaders gathered in his home town this week, many are troubled by Trump's brash behavior, egotism, and disinterest in diplomacy and compromise. Often that fear is amplified by reading what Trump himself writes. All I Ever Wanted to Know about Donald Trump I Learned from His Tweets:A Psychological Exploration of the President via Twitter(Skyhorse Publishing paperback; September 19, 2017; $14.99) provides an eye-opening glimpse into what makes Trump tick . . . and what ticks him off. His tweets have been read, collected, and organized through the first months of his presidency. His tweets demonstrate how he handles adversity and those who resist his bold efforts to make change. How and why have his opinions changed over the years, and what do these changing messages say about him? Psychologist John Gartnerprovides an insightful introduction, contending that Trump exhibits dangerous, narcissistic behavior.
All I Ever Wanted to Know About Donald Trump I Learned from His Tweets: A Psychological Exploration of the President via Twitter - Compiled and edited by Rachel Montgomery; Introduction by John Gartner, PhD - Skyhorse Publishing paperback; September 19, 2017; $14.99
All I Ever Wanted to Know about Donald Trump I Learned from His Tweets is at once a political book, a psychological profile, and an ominous glimpse into our future. As New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer said before Inauguration Day, "With all due respect, America cannot afford a twitter presidency.”
All I Ever Wanted to Know about Donald Trump I Learned from His Tweets: A Psychological Exploration of the President via TwitterCompiled and edited by Rachel Montgomery; Introduction by John Gartner, PhD
Skyhorse Publishing paperback, also available as an e-book | On Sale: September 19, 2017 on Amazon
Is this use (Arpaio) of the pardon power constitutional? In most cases, however controversial, courts should not second-guess the president’s use of the pardon power. But when the Constitution says that the president “shall have Power,” that does not meanunlimited power. It means power that is not inconsistent with other parts of the Constitution.
For example, the Constitution says “Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes,” but that doesn’t mean Congress can tax white people at a different rate than black people. The Constitution says the president “shall have Power” to make treaties, but that doesn’t mean he can make a treaty that abolishes freedom of speech.
The power to pardon is limited by the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee that no person be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” That guarantee requires that courts must be able to issue and enforce injunctions to stop constitutional violations by government officials. Otherwise, compliance with a court order would be optional.
In 1925, the Supreme Court upheld President Calvin Coolidge’s pardon of a speakeasy operator who had violated a court order to stop selling liquor during Prohibition. But the court has not considered a pardon for contempt since 1925. And it has never considered a pardon issued to a ranking government official for disobeying a court order to stop a systemic practice of violating individuals’ constitutional rights.
The framers suggested one solution to the prospect of such abuse. During a Virginia debate over whether to ratify the Constitution, George Mason worried that the president might “pardon crimes which were advised by himself.” James Madison replied that a president who did so could be impeached. Trump’s pardon of Arpaio should trigger congressional hearings on whether it constitutes an impeachable offense.
But it strains logic to suggest that, although a president can be removed from office for an unconstitutional pardon, the pardon itself must be judicially enforced. By pardoning Arpaio for his willful disobedience of a court order to stop violating Arizonans’ constitutional rights, Trump has pulled the republic into uncharted waters. Our best guide home is the Constitution. Washington Post
Evening: Reacting to Rachel
Trump, our malignant narcissistic gift to world diplomacy, struts his stuff at the United Nations:
But why is the United Nations so worried about bureaucracy at a time like this?
President Trump got off to an underwhelming start at the U.N. General Assembly on Monday morning. He sat on a panel flanked by various diplomats, including Ambassador Nikki Haley, who introduced him before he delivered some brief remarks, and it would be charitable to describe the welcoming applause as “light.”
Then came the clunker. Haley had told the assembled that the new American president sees “tremendous potential” in the U.N.—a cold enough slap at an organization that’s been around for 72 years and, for all its flaws, has accomplished quite a bit. But Trump followed that dig with a face-splash of ice water, saying that the real “potential” he saw was “right across the street”—a reference to one of his East Side real-estate projects—and noted that the U.N.’s presence was what gave it such potential.
It is clear that Trump is hero among white supremacists: He panders to them, he is slow to condemn them and when that condemnation manifests, it is often forced and tepid. Trump never seems to be worried about offending anyone except Vladimir Putin and white supremacists.
What does that say about him? How can you take comfort among and make common cause with white supremacists and not assimilate to their sensibilities?
I say that it can’t be done. If you are not completely opposed to white supremacy, you are quietly supporting it. If you continue to draw equivalencies between white supremacists and the people who oppose them — as Trump did once again last week — you have crossed the racial Rubicon and moved beyond quiet support to vocal support. You have made an allegiance and dug a trench in the war of racial hostilities.
(ESPN reporter) Hill may have pushed into the realm of hyperbole with a few of her statements — it was Twitter after all — but I judge the spirit of her assessment to be true.
Either Trump is himself a white supremacist or he is a fan and defender of white supremacists, and I quite honestly am unable to separate the two designations.
Excerpt: Without the qualities that laughter both demonstrates and fosters — a willingness to find common ground, the respect for agreed-upon norms and the awareness that we are all only human — Mr. Trump’s attitude toward the presidency is defined by the one characteristic that remains: a lust for power. And this is perhaps the most troubling thing about what passes for a sense of humor with Mr. Trump. Thanks to the power of the internet, there is proof that our president has indeed laughed at least once. This was during a campaign rally in January, when Mr. Trump’s speech was interrupted by a barking dog. (Ed. note: He’s also the first president in memory that doesn’t have a dog or cat.)
“It’s Hillary!” an audience member shouted. And the candidate tilted his head back, opened his mouth wide and laughed without reservation, quite possibly for the first time in his political life.
This documented incidence of Trump laughter is as illuminating as all the grim smiles that preceded it. For they reveal a president who is constantly, endlessly preoccupied with status. A craving for power isn’t unique to the politician currently holding the Oval Office — on the contrary, it is more or less a requirement for entry into the field. But a craving exclusively for power is. It is not too late to undo the damage our humorless president is causing to American democracy. Democrats (and some Republicans, these days) are already thinking about who might replace him in 2020. And if there is one thing all Americans should be able to agree on, it is this: Whomever we nominate to replace President Trump, it is time to put an easy laugh back on top of the ticket.
Preview of The Trump Doctrine and Reactions that haven’t been deleted from his Twitter account (yet)
North Korea's growing ability to potentially reach the continental United States with a ballistic missile, which could be mounted with a miniature nuclear device, has increased the urgency for the Trump administration. The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, pointed to the world body's two recent votes to impose more severe economic sanctions on the North as signs that the international community is united in its condemnation.
"North Korea is pretty much cut off from the world," she said on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday. But she added that military options remain on the table: "If North Korea keeps on with this reckless behavior and if the U.S. has to defend itself or its allies in any way, North Korea will be destroyed. We don’t want that. We don’t want war. But something is going to have to be done."
Haley defended Trump's use of Twitter to sound off on international affairs, saying the president can "communicate through any form that he wants." But two days ago, she had told reporters that “it's time to be serious” as Trump and his team prepared for their UNGA debut. Excerpt from Washington Post
Your moment of Zen today.
New to halbrown.org? My photos between days follow a theme. Currently it’s photos I took through the car
window when I first drove from Boston to Portland,
Is this how the President is supposed to treat his First Lady? After Melania Trump introduced Donald Trump, instead of hugging her, he shook her hand and told Melania to ‘go sit down.’ Awkward!
The cringe factor is high in this one. It seems Donald Trump, 71, wanted to keep it professional during his appearance at Joint Base Andrews on Sept. 15. As members of the United States Air Force gathered to hear Trump speak, his wife, First Lady Melania Trump, 47, gave a few remarks before introducing him. As Donald walked on stage, he didn’t lean in for a kiss on a cheek or offer up a hug. Instead, he reached out to shake her hand, all business-like. Yes, he did thank her, but the microphone also picked up Trump saying, “You can go sit down.”
While no one was expecting Donald and Melania to make out at the podium (because it would be even more awkward) it was pretty odd to see Trump treat his wife as if she was some random stranger. “Melania…looks like a mannequin when she stands by [Donald] and he just, like, gives her a formal handshake and sh*t,” one onlooker remarked on Twitter. “LMAO so awkward.” Another pointed out that Donald’s behavior was that of a “patronizing asshole” who treated his wife “like a child, and she seems about as lost.” Most people were just a bit befuddled by this awkward encounter, as it didn’t really come across as they were that into each other.
Excerpt: After watching Trump closely for all these months I think it’s clear that when he’s speaking off the cuff in situations like this, he’s being real, even when he’s lying about the details. He obviously truly believes that the neo-Nazis and the KKK in Charlottesville and elsewhere have gotten a bum rap.
Adds money laundering expert.
He’s not trying to make the Antifa protesters equivalent to white supremacists, not really. He thinks they’re worse than white supremacists. He says they’re “bad dudes” and likes to portray them as a sinister threat to society. He thinks the neo-Nazis and the KKK are more legitimate since “good people” march beside them and they are trying to maintain their “cultural heritage.” He sees their point.
The president of the United States refuses to acknowledge, or is too stupid to understand, that these are movements that killed millions of people in a quest to ensure white supremacy over racial and religious minorities. They are evil incarnate. Nobody on earth is worse than they are.
Quote of the Day: “Does anybody listen to women when they speak around here?”
There were 11 people seated around the table in the White House’s Blue Room, debating the future of the “dreamers” over honey sesame crispy beef, when House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) tried to make her point — only to find the men talking over her.
Pelosi’s interjection, first reported by The Post’s Ashley Parker and confirmed by Pelosi’s office, did the trick. “There was, at last, silence, and she was not interrupted again,” Parker wrote. Washington Post
As more is learned about animal intelligence, it is not understood how much of their behavior is learned or inherited in as yet unknown mechanism. Many of the intelligent behaviors are surprising and have been summarized in a series of posts. Please refer to posts on birds,lizards, ants, termites, and elephants. Perhaps, individual bee intelligence is most surprising, with the ability to have symbolic language, abstract symbols, use the most efficient pathways to many flowers, kaleidoscopic memory of five miles of plants, and the ability to tell others about the exact locations from the five miles of travel. But, possibly, the most amazing is their ability to self-medicate. It is certainly reasonable that if bees can do this, many other animals must also. This post will describe what is the most recent research about animal ability to self-medicate and the possible ways they know how to do this.
Theme: Taken form my car on the way across the country
Friday, Sept. 15, 2017 Late: Best answer to Trump’s question “define the alt-right.” It’s important to remember that there are no card-carrying members of the alt-right. It’s not an official organization, and alignment is self-defined. What’s collectively described as the alt-right is a loose coalition of overwhelmingly white male representatives of various online communities, including anti-women “meninists,” gamers, white nationalists, neo-Nazis and their sympathizers, anti-government types, conspiracists, and dudes who’ve just decided that women and people of color are the reason they don’t have dates or C-suite jobs. The alt-right houses all of those groups, but they might not have come together so seamlessly under its big tent were it not for a unifying loathsome cause. From Kali Holloway, AlterNet Evening edition: More on the psychopathology of Trump:
Below are two excerpts from The Loneliest President. If you want to understand what might have made Trump into the man he is, this is worth reading, from this new excellent psycho-history of Trump.
“He was and is a lonely man,” Jack O’Donnell, a former Trump casino executive, told me.
“One of the loneliest people I’ve ever met,” biographer Tim O’Brien said in an interview. “He lacks the emotional and sort of psychological architecture a person needs to build deep relationships with other people.”
It’s been this way always, because he’s always been foundationally, virulently untrusting. “There’s a wall Donald has that he never lets people penetrate,” a former associate told me. Trump has a dark, dour view of humanity. He considers the world “ruthless,” “brutal” and “cruel.” Through this zero-sum, dog-eat-dog lens, friends aren’t friends—there’s no such thing. “They act nice to your face, but underneath they’re out to kill you,” he wrote in his 2007 book, Think Big. “… they want your job, they want your house, they want your money, they want your wife …” Why he’s like this is the subject of vigorous discussion among psychology experts. The deep-seated influence of his formidable father? The wound of the alcohol-fueled death of his more mild-mannered older brother? Simple genetics? Trump is not self-reflective—“I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see,” he told a biographer several years back—but he can be self-aware. And on this front, he’s been quite clear, and remarkably consistent.
“My business is so all-encompassing I don’t really get the pleasure of being with friends that much, frankly,” he said to one interviewer in 1980.
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The first people who really noticed Trump’s tendency to withdraw were his classmates. As a teenager at New York Military Academy, in upstate Cornwall-on-Hudson, he often disappeared into his solo room in the barracks after dinner. “The reason I went in the first place,” Trump himself would say later, “was that I didn’t get along with a lot of people.” Pictures in yearbooks in the library at the school show Trump morphing from a gangly boy to a sturdy young man, but this much didn’t change: Classmate Doug Reichel characterized him to me as “very distant.”
“I don’t know anyone that he was particularly close to,” said Ernie Kirk, a classmate who is now an attorney in Georgia.
“He was so competitive,”according to a former roommate, “that everybody who could come close to him he had to destroy.”
“You just couldn’t be friends with him,” said Sandy McIntosh, who was two years younger but knew him from home, too, because their families both had cabanas at the Atlantic Beach Club on Long Island. Trump wouldn’t laugh at his jokes, or anybody else’s, McIntosh recalled. “And you think of humor as a basic, empathic way that friendships are formed—and he just didn’t.”
If you liked this article, read another new highly recommended article from Common Dreams, below. It’s an interview with one of the most famous living psychiatrists about his analysis ofTrump.
Afternoon edition:
Click above to read
Robert Jay Lifton (born May 16, 1926) is an American psychiatrist and author of numerous influential books. He is chiefly known for his studies of the psychological causes and effects of wars and political violence and for his theory of thought reform. He was an early proponent of the techniques of psychohistory. Read more about him. Excerpt:
Bill Moyers: Some of the descriptions used to describe Trump — narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder, delusional disorder, malignant narcissist — even some have suggested early forms of dementia — are difficult for lay people to grasp. Some experts say that it’s not one thing that’s wrong with him — there are a lot of things wrong with him and together they add up to what one of your colleagues calls “a scary witches brew, a toxic stew.”
Solipsistic reality means that the only reality he’s capable of embracing has to do with his own self and the perception by and protection of his own self. And for a president to be so bound in this isolated solipsistic reality could not be more dangerous for the country and for the world.
— Robert Jay Lifton
Dr. Lifton: I think that’s very accurate. I agree that there’s an all-enveloping destructiveness in his character and in his psychological tendencies. But I’ve focused on what professionally I call solipsistic reality. Solipsistic reality means that the only reality he’s capable of embracing has to do with his own self and the perception by and protection of his own self. And for a president to be so bound in this isolated solipsistic reality could not be more dangerous for the country and for the world. In that sense, he does what psychotics do. Psychotics engage in, or frequently engage in a view of reality based only on the self. He’s not psychotic, but I think ultimately this solipsistic reality will be the source of his removal from the presidency.
Moyers: What’s your take on how he makes increasingly bizarre statements that are contradicted by irrefutable evidence to the contrary, and yet he just keeps on making them? I know some people in your field call this a delusional disorder, a profound loss of contact with external reality.
Lifton: He doesn’t have clear contact with reality, though I’m not sure it qualifies as a bona fide delusion. He needs things to be a certain way even though they aren’t, and that’s one reason he lies. There can also be a conscious manipulative element to it. When he put forward, and politically thrived on, the falsehood of President Obama’s birth in Kenya, outside the United States, he was manipulating that lie as well as undoubtedly believing it in part, at least in a segment of his personality. In my investigations, I’ve found that people can believe and not believe something at the same time, and in his case, he could be very manipulative and be quite gifted at his manipulations. So I think it’s a combination of those.
Moyers: How can someone believe and not believe at the same time?
Lifton: Well, in one part of himself, Trump can know there’s no evidence that Obama was born in any place but Hawaii in the United States. But in another part of himself, he has the need to reject Obama as a president of the United States by asserting that he was born outside of the country. He needs to delegitimate Obama. That’s been a strong need of Trump’s. This is a personal, isolated solipsistic need which can coexist with a recognition that there’s no evidence at all to back it up. I learned about this from some of the false confessions I came upon in my work.
With the ridiculous Filibuster Rule in the Senate, Republicans need 60 votes to pass legislation, rather than 51. Can't get votes, END NOW!
FRIDAY, SEP 15, 2017 04:51 AM PDT
I was also dumbstruck by Schumer apparently
believing that Trump likes him. Hasn’t he
listened to the Duty to Warn therapists
telling him the empathy lacking Trump
only likes people that fawn over him,
or who he can use to his own ends.
Since his inauguration, Trump has chained himself to these characters (Ann Coulter, Rep. Steve King, Steve Bannon, Sean Hannity, Breitbart) deep inside an ideological cave where two-thirds of the American electorate never venture. That political strategy predictably led to a 34-percent approval rating at the start of this month. Now that the president has managed to go a week without aggressively working to provoke more than 200 million Americans, he will be on the receiving side of talk radio’s wrath. But if these political entertainers really believe that Trump’s political base is going to blow apart over a deal most Americans support, they are as clueless about Trump’s political base as Clinton was.
Trump’s superglue hold over his supporters has flummoxed conservative and liberal commentators alike since he first rode down his golden escalator at Trump Tower in 2015. Others declared his political career “over!” after he insulted, variously, Mexicans, John McCain, Megyn Kelly, Fox News, body-shamed women, Access Hollywood viewers and a host of others on his trail to the presidency. But many voters sided with the bellicose celebrity they have known since the 1980s. It’s the personality that keeps them, not the policies.
And that Trump base is not going anywhere now. They are not Coulter’s book-buying base, they are not King’s Republican voting base and they will never be Bannon’s populist base. Trump’s base is Trump’s base, period, and there is nothing that Hannity, Breitbart or King will ever be able to do to change that fact. Trump fans stick with Trump through thick and thin. If you don’t believe me, just ask President Clinton.
Excerpt - a psychological theory of why Trump is the way he is:
Now the president’s chaotic and self-defeating gyrations suggest less method than supposed. It may not be madness, but what we are witnessing bears the hallmarks of disorganized attachment.
Disorganized attachment can result when a child’s primary caregivers are simultaneously a source of safety and danger. Such parents are often abusive, frightened themselves, or operating in a dissociated manner from their own unresolved traumas. What attachment researcher Mary Main describes as the child’s dilemma of “fright without solution” leads to a collapse of strategy. This and other characteristics of disorganized attachment–erratic behavior, hostility, aggression, lack of empathy, problems with trust and truth, an incoherent narrative, and viewing the world as an unsafe place–describe the president.
Trump grew up amid material indulgence and emotional harshness. His father, notoriously demanding, critical, and controlling, mercilessly targeted vulnerability. The young Donald Trump, already constitutionally inclined toward aggression, so thoroughly identified with the aggressor that he was sent away to military school at age 13. Trump describes the tough and often physically abusive treatment there admiringly. Recapitulating the dynamic of turning to those who literally and figuratively whip him into shape, he’s now stocked his administration with generals.
Paradoxically, Trump the boy—for whom safety and danger were fused—became President Trump in part by promising security to those fearful of economic and cultural displacement in a changing and often frightening world. Under the authoritarian’s guise of powerful protector, he fans and quells fear simultaneously, pitting one group against another. Just as he seeks but can never find safety, he promises but never delivers it.
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Click above_Just published today in The Guardian
Excerpt:
For human beings today, dominance and prestige compete with each other as the two primal expressions of leadership.
When it comes to US presidents, we expect to see a bit of both.
For Trump, however, it is dominance all the way through.
Click above: Cover article from June, 2016
An especially effective dominance mechanism for the alpha chimp is the charging display. The top male essentially goes berserk and starts screaming, hooting, and gesticulating wildly as he charges toward other males nearby. Pandemonium ensues as rival males cower in fear and females grab their little ones and run for cover.
Once the chaos ends, there is a period of peace and order, wherein rival males pay homage to the alpha, visiting him, grooming him, expressing various forms of submission.
Trump’s incendiary tweets are the human equivalent of a charging display. Designed to intimidate his foes and rally his submissive base, these verbal outbursts reinforce the president’s dominance by reminding everybody of his wrath and his force. When the alpha chimp charges, you cannot help but take note – with your ears and with your eyes.
Look at Mr Trump. What do you see? He is physically big and dynamic. His face gives the impression of a volcano about to explode. And explode he does, with regularity. Trump is more overtly aggressive than any political figure in the United States today, so aggressive, so insulting, so egregiously denigrating that you thought he might not be bluffing when, for example, he threatened to “lock Hillary up”, or when he warned North Korea that it “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen”.
Hillary Clinton will be on the Rachel Maddow Show tonight. This is what is likely to be covered: 1) dishing out payback and 2) biggest revelations. Department of Revising History
The Trump administration has a lot in common with AHS, given its penchant for wealthy sociopaths, and characters driven by blind ambition or naked greed. Like Trump’s policies, AHSoften combines the fears of queer people, poor people, black people, disabled people and women into an overwhelming cavalcade of nightmares. And while an episode of AHS can seem like three episodes of a regular show, a single week of Trump-era news can feel like a month’s worth of headlines.
This administration is a rollercoaster of outrages, a spinning teacups ride of horrors: We should be afraid of Russia! No, North Korea! No, wait, white supremacists! Does anyone even remember ISIS? Don’t forget, climate change will kill us all—but not before we lose our health care or get gunned down for minor traffic violations. It doesn’t end, and it’s all too fast. It’s overwhelming. It fills us up. And nothing captures that bloated and confused terror better than an episode of American Horror Story.
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In the show, Ally (Paulson) tells her therapist that this election has affected her the same way 9/11 did, and she’s not alone. Plenty of therapists have reported a spike in their clients’ anxieties since the election. For a large number of people in this country, Trump’s election is a trauma. All horror is about trauma—the fears it engenders, the way we fight through it. It cannot be buried, avoided or ignored. The only way out is through. So we work our way through it in the nightmare dream logic of horror. Horror has a long history of working out cultural fears through allegory and, Boy Howdy, are we dealing with some cultural fears right now. Like, all of them. The fears we once thought buried, the horrors we’ve too long ignored, they’ve all come back like Freddy Kruger.
Kai (Evan Peters), a blue-haired Trump supporter bent on becoming a one-man hate-crime wave, says in the premiere that America has chosen fear over freedom, and though that statement’s been true since 9/11, it’s gained power since Trump came on the scene. Trump appeals to the fears of his base: their fear of terrorism, their xenophobia, their fear of poverty, their fear of being passed over, forgotten, replaced. Likewise, Trump embodies the fears of his detractors: white supremacist, narcissist, sociopath, abuser, bully, spoiled child, senile old man, fascist dictator, everyone sees something different when they look at him but they all see something chilling. Trump has become a mirror of our own worst fears.
Tuesday, Sept. 12, 2017 MSNBC Evening round-up: David Corn on Rachel Maddow now about this article:
Harvard professor and psychoanalyst on the "antiquated" Goldwater rule and our president's "serious mental illness”
Excerpts:
Clinically, if we were to look at the checklist for sociopathy, what are some of the indicators that Trump is presenting?
It is people who lie and cheat. Everybody lies some of the time, but in this instance we mean people who lie as a way of being in the world, to manage relationships and also to manage your feelings about yourself. People who cheat and steal from others. People who lack empathy … the lack of empathy is a critical aspect of it. People who are narcissistic.
Trump’s case of narcissism is particularly severe because he also is out of touch with reality whenever he becomes upset. When he says, “I had the largest crowd at an inauguration in history,” it does not matter that you can tell him that it is not true, he still insists on it. Well, that is very troublesome because what it means is that he needs to believe it. He is able to give up reality in exchange for his wished-for belief. Sometimes we call that a delusion. We have not used that word much with Donald Trump because that does get confused with people who think that they are Napoleon. But Trump has a fluid sense of reality, which is a sign of a very sick individual.
Sociopathy itself is a sign of a very sick individual, someone with a lying, cheating and emotional disorder. The intersection of those two occurs in sociopathy. It is not just bad behavior that people have to lie and cheat the way he does, it is an incapacity to treat other people as full human beings. That is why his focus is on humiliating others to aggrandize himself, as he did in the Republican primaries when he was debating and calling people names. The same thing applies to Hispanic immigrants and separating the children from their parents. That is a very, very serious mental and emotional problem. Normal people have normal empathy. It is part of being a human being. Lying and cheating and humiliating others and grinding them into dust in order to triumph is not just bad behavior. It is a serious mental illness.
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The best diagnosis for Trump is that he is a malignant narcissist. It contains the narcissistic part which is no big deal alone — lots of people are narcissistic — but the malignant part is the sociopathy dimension. These terms suggest that Trump is a very primitive man. He is also a man who has a fundamental, deep psychological defect. It is expressed in his inability to empathize with others and his lack of genuine loyalty to anyone. You will notice that Trump wants everyone to be loyal to him, but he is loyal to nobody.
It is a one-way street. Trump appears to have no sense of social obligation or reciprocity.
Yeah, that is right. He has no sense of that because it is all about him. That is narcissistic, but it is much worse than the ordinary person with narcissistic personality. You know, I have known lots of people like that and none of them are as evil or dangerous as Donald Trump because they do not have the sociopathy part. They may be oriented towards themselves, they may be self-centered, they may care mostly about themselves. But when it comes right down to it, they have some compassion, they have a conscience. But not Donald Trump. That is the malignant part. So yes, you want to say he is narcissistic personality, yes. Malignant narcissism? Yes. Sociopathy? Yes. Antisocial personality? Yes. Paranoia? Absolutely. He is quite paranoid but again, if you look at it from underneath, it all fits together.
Why is he paranoid? He’s paranoid because … he needs to defend himself, his self-esteem, by saying that other people are bad. “You are the bad guy, not me. You are the one attacking me, I have no wish to attack.” He is extremely paranoid and it edges into delusion. He does not really know what the truth is, at least at those moments. All these descriptive labels are true. If you put them all together, you have got a picture of Donald Trump.
If you understand the man you understand what you are dealing with, and I don’t think he is at all different from these tyrants in the past. I don’t know that he is any different from the people he admires.
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What do you think will happen with Trump’s presidency?
I think one of two things will happen and maybe both. First of all, the greatest risk to us right now is that there will be another “Reichstag fire”-type event.
The more desperate Trump becomes, the more he needs to have a crisis so the country will rally around him. If I had to pinpoint it I would say he is going to start bombing North Korea. Unfortunately, the North Korean leader is just as sick as Trump. The two of them are like little boys on a playground but much worse, because little boys are not evil, they are just aggressive. The second thing is — and this is the Republican calculation — at what point do I need to abandon Donald Trump in order to preserve my political career? I think that is exactly what is going through the minds of the Republican Party leadership right now. They have to wait for a shift in public opinion and it is coming. Charlottesville was one major event and there will be others. Then I think they will go to Trump and say, “We are going to impeach you or we are going to apply the 25th Amendment.”
But in the end he will simply cut bait. He will leave other people to clean up the mess. Trump will resign and say, “I am still the best and the only savior, and these evil people and their evil media have forced me out.” He will keep his constituency, he’ll leave with honor in his own mind and by the way, keep his businesses.
I watched my president perorate at the Pentagon and all I could think as he held forth about heroism on the 16th anniversary of 9/11 was how did we end up with Humpty Dumpty.
It was Humpty Dumpty, of course, who declared: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.” At least Humpty Dumpty said it without that repetitive thumb-to-stubby-forefinger gesture of our esteemed leader.
Words cascade from that pinched mouth and they mean nothing, because when a man of moral emptiness tries to exhort a nation to moral greatness the only thing communicated is pitiful, almost comical, hypocrisy.
Between a hero and a huckster, between speaking and mouthing, the distance is great. Watching the esteemed leader’s head turning jerkily, like an old electric fan, from teleprompter to teleprompter, I almost felt pity. His is the Age of Indecency.
President Trump seems lonely in his evident unfitness. Between him and his wife Melania I imagine what John Lanchester once described as “one of those silences which can only be incubated by at least two decades of attritional intimacy.” Well, they’ve known each other for 19 years.
Monday, Sept. 11, 2017
Late breaking - Monday night First of Two.
On Lawrence O’Donnell, the Wall Street Journal (“Some Trump Lawyers Wanted Kushner Out”) reports that earlier in the summer some of Trump’s lawyers aired concerns about Jared Kushner and suggested he leaved the White House. Some of the attorneys said that others in the White House could be implicated in the Russia probe. Lawyers drafted a statement that was never used in anticipation of a Kushner exit.
Member of President Donald Trump's legal team wanted his son-in-law Jared Kushner to resign from his position as a senior adviser because of his controversial meetings with Russian nationals during the election and his initial failure to disclose them on his security clearance form, according to the Wall Street Journal.Business Insider article continued
Second big evening story
This Trump and Russia news was covered on Rachel tonight saying that it got lost in the Friday news dump during the 24 hr. coverage of Irma. Reuter’s and then Inquisitr got it out. Do you think Trump is a match for this Russian hardliner?
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia’s newly installed ambassador to Washington said on Friday that he had a warm and constructive meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian news agencies reported.
“I was received by President Trump, I presented my credentials. For my part I said that we are looking forward to an improvement in the relations between our two countries,” Tass news agency quoted the ambassador, Anatoly Antonov, as saying.
“President Trump received me in a warm and friendly way ... The atmosphere was very genial, constructive and welcoming. At least, that was my personal feeling,” Russia’s RIA news agency quoted Antonov as saying.
“We, together with his colleagues, his staff, agreed to continue our cooperation.”
“I said that I look forward to working with the U.S government in the area of Russian-American mutual interests. And I said that, as far as Russia is concerned, we are ready to do that, we’re ready to take concrete steps.”
Antonov took over as ambassador from Sergei Kislyak, whose contacts with members of Trump’s campaign team made him a central figure in the row over Russian influence on last year’s U.S. presidential election.
From Charles Blow’s Should Survival in Trump’s Hell: You could stay in hell for a little while if you knew that you were going to get out.
My mother always told me that when I was going through something tough and dispiriting. It was her way of saying that trouble doesn’t last forever, that even in your darkest place, hold fast to the hope and the light, that though today you are in the valley, tomorrow you shall scale the peak.
Well, Mama, this is hell. Indeed, Donald Trump’s America is the Ninth Circle. Charles Blow, Link Below.
Excerpt: It is hard to witness a president so obsessed with the obliteration of the legacy of his predecessor that he is attempting to undo that legacy with every stroke of his pen.
It is hard to witness a bully attack traditionally marginalized communities, one after the other.
It is hard to witness a family of corruption besmirching the presidency, the country and America’s standing in the world.
It is hard to witness the dismantling of basic norms, the dismissal of propriety and the devaluation of truth and honesty.
It is like being injured and having the offender repeatedly pound the wound before it can properly heal.
Like many Americans, I try my best to do the small affirming things in my family and in my community that express my love and reaffirm my values. I spend a bit more time in museums and give a bit more space for the activities that celebrate the creative imagination and that express the long tumultuous span of the human condition. I try to nourish my soul so that it will survive, because I know that the fight is not finished.
We are in hell. We have to remember that one day we will get out.
Like The Twilight Zone, I am one of millions who never missed an episode to The Prisoner.
Rarely does a television show portend a future such that you think that some degree of magical fortune-telling was reverse engineered into how it was made. Premiering 50 years ago in early September, “The Prisoner,” both starring and created by Patrick McGoohan, certainly fits that bill — extra certainly, you might say, during these 2017 times.
McGoohan had starred in the thriller “Danger Man,” an espionage series, from 1960-62, before hitting upon the idea of something rather further out with “The Prisoner,” which would comprise 17 episodes about a man who resigns his job in London, only to be gassed in his apartment moments thereafter, and taken away to an island seaside community called, simply, the Village.
The inhabitants of the Village all have numbers rather than names, with McGoohan’s character being Number Six. His chief adversary is Number Two, which prompts the famous query of “Who is Number One?” Who is Number One indeed. CONTINUED
Excerpts from Paul KrugmaN:
Excerpt:
The vast majority of Duty to Warn therapists like myself use the diagnosis of malignant narcissism for Trump. This is worse than the diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder which you can see here. We disagree with Dr. Francis in that we believe one can be both a bad person and have a diagnosed mental disorder.
EXCERPT:
The paranoia of severe sociopathy creates a profound risk of war, since heads of other nations will inevitably disagree with or challenge the sociopathic leader, who will experience the disagreement as a personal attack, leading to rage reactions and impulsive action to destroy this “enemy.” Trump’s sociopathic characteristics are undeniable and create a profound danger for America.
This is Trump, the violent fantasist who dreams of a physical supremacy he never achieved, and has then spent his life expressing this insecurity and hostility through boardroom bullying and, of course, sexually predatory behavior. He has lived his life in thrall to toxic masculinity, but lacked the ability to prove this “manhood” on the football field, and then dodged the armed forces, never attempting to prove his “manhood” on the battlefield. He has chosen instead to spend a lifetime tearing down the people who have dared stand in his path, and the women who dared to say “no.”
Excerpts:
EXCERPTS:
Tuesday, Sept. 19, 2017
Updated this evening: Some of the words to describe the speech n MSNBC, HuffPost and other liberal media: Combative, rambling, repetitive, loose cannon, undermine the world, bellicosity and swagger, menacing, astounding rhetoric, saber rattling, dark global vision, contradictory signals to rest of world, most atrocious speech ever given by a president,threatening nuclear war from podium of UN very, never had president bluster about using nuclear weapons, a significant speech, defines the Trump Doctrine, will be studied for years, mentions “rocket man”… and this from VOX: perfect distillation of his hyper-nationalist America First worldview adapted for the world stage. Transgressing boundaries, from The Hill.
Excerpt: 
“It’s Hillary!” an audience member shouted. And the candidate tilted his head back, opened his mouth wide and laughed without reservation, quite possibly for the first time in his political life.
As more is learned about animal intelligence, it is not understood how much of their behavior is learned or inherited in as yet unknown mechanism. Many of the intelligent behaviors are surprising and have been summarized in a series of posts. Please refer to posts on birds, lizards, ants, termites, and elephants. Perhaps, individual bee intelligence is most surprising, with the ability to have symbolic language, abstract symbols, use the most efficient pathways to many flowers, kaleidoscopic memory of five miles of plants, and the ability to tell others about the exact locations from the five miles of travel. But, possibly, the most amazing is their ability to self-medicate. It is certainly reasonable that if bees can do this, many other animals must also. This post will describe what is the most recent research about animal ability to self-medicate and the possible ways they know how to do this.
Below are two excerpts from The Loneliest President. If you want to understand what might have made Trump into the man he is, this is worth reading, from this new excellent psycho-history of Trump. 
It’s been this way always, because he’s always been foundationally, virulently untrusting. “There’s a wall Donald has that he never lets people penetrate,” a former associate told me. Trump has a dark, dour view of humanity. He considers the world “ruthless,” “brutal” and “cruel.” Through this zero-sum, dog-eat-dog lens, friends aren’t friends—there’s no such thing. “They act nice to your face, but underneath they’re out to kill you,” he wrote in his 2007 book, Think Big. “… they want your job, they want your house, they want your money, they want your wife …” Why he’s like this is the subject of vigorous discussion among psychology experts. The deep-seated influence of his formidable father? The wound of the alcohol-fueled death of his more mild-mannered older brother? Simple genetics? Trump is not self-reflective—“I don’t like to analyze myself because I might not like what I see,” he told a biographer several years back—but he can be self-aware. And on this front, he’s been quite clear, and remarkably consistent.
Lance Dodes is one of the prominent Duty to Warn therapists. He was on Lawrence O’Donnell with Dr. John Gartner.
It is people who lie and cheat. Everybody lies some of the time, but in this instance we mean people who lie as a way of being in the world, to manage relationships and also to manage your feelings about yourself. People who cheat and steal from others. People who lack empathy … the lack of empathy is a critical aspect of it. People who are narcissistic.
Excerpt:
Link above. Here’s an excerpt from Reuter’s:
From Charles Blow’s Should Survival in Trump’s Hell: You could stay in hell for a little while if you knew that you were going to get out.
Excerpt: It is hard to witness a president so obsessed with the obliteration of the legacy of his predecessor that he is attempting to undo that legacy with every stroke of his pen.
It is hard to witness a bully attack traditionally marginalized communities, one after the other.
Excerpt:
LEAKED - This made me like and admire O’Donnell even more. He needs a control room staff who appreciate the gravity f what he reports. I recommended he have a nice high CBD marijuana edible an hour before air time: Watch MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell’s Unhinged Outtakes…for Eight Crazy Minutes (UPDATE)
Author of “Evil in Modern Thought” says progressives must not shun the concept, especially when it fits so well. An interview with Susan Neiman, the director of the Einstein Forum and a former professor of philosophy at Yale University as well as Tel Aviv University..” 
Before Dems Get All Chummy with Trump, Let's Remember What a Disgusting President He Has Been So Far
