By Hal Brown, MSW, retired after 40 years of practicing psychotherapy. Formerly director of a mental health center and in psychoanalytically oriented private practice.
Unless you worship at the feet of Donald J. Trump and your judgment is distorted you might wonder whether had the former president been looking at himself clearly the above statement referring to "smarts" ought to have been
"many people are like me, they inherited it but eventually they lost it."Trump's praise of Putin, Xi, and Kim Jong Un is getting media coverage today.
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Click above and below to enlarge images |
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One has to wonder what Putin and Kim are thinking in these photos. |
Here's a video of a segment from Morning Joe with a discussion of this.
The following is a transcript of the relevant portion of the interview:
Trump: “Top of the line. Top line. They’re all top of the line. Are our guys not top of the line? Never was. These are top of the line people at the top of their game. President Xi is a brilliant man.
If you went all over Hollywood to look for somebody to play the role of President Xi, you couldn’t find, there’s nobody like that. The look, the brain, the whole thing.
We had a great relationship. You know, when he first came to Mar-a-Lago, It was so organized by them and by us, but by them very pom, pom, pom. Everything’s like business. No games, you know.
They don’t say, Gee, how did the Yankees do last night? Oh, that was a wonderful. They don’t care. They don’t care about anything. I said, You ever go to a Broadway play? I’ll take you to one. Do you ever have plays like do you ever go.. No, I don’t know.
He’s all this is business. These aren’t game players, right? I like it, you know, in a way, I like it. You have no life. But that’s what he likes.”
Carlson: “Yeah.”
Trump: “Top of the line. Smart. Top of the line. When they came in, it was supposed to be a meeting that lasted exactly 15 minutes. . So we go to breakout sessions with all they had. Like 40 people. We had 40 people, you know, the comparables. Right? And we’re sitting across the table from each other in the ballroom of Mar a Lago.
It was an amazing scene, but our meeting was supposed to take 15 minutes. It took 4 hours. We got along so well.
People ask how smart is Kim Jong Un? Kim Jong Un is smart too. You know, when you come out and as a young man at 24, 23, even though he sort of inherits it, most people when they inherit, they lose it. And that’s easy stuff. He took over a country, a very smart people, very, very energetic people, very tough people at a very young age. And he has total dominate control. That’s not easy.
These are these are very smart. Putin, very smart. Now, he’s had in and probably a bad year. If he took over all of Ukraine and what are we going to do because Biden is so committed to Ukraine. What happens if it’s a not winnable war? You know, there are people that say Ukraine cannot win. You can’t beat Russia. Russia right now, I’m not saying anything out of school. I read it in one of our newspapers. So, you know, it’s probably fake news, but maybe not. I don’t think it is.
Russia right now is making massive amounts of ammunition. Sounds simple, right? But they’re making massive beyond anything they’ve ever made before. We don’t have any ammunition. We’ve given it to Ukraine. We’re not we’re not prepared to fight. I rebuilt our military, new planes, new tanks, new everything. They’ve taken, the military that I’ve rebuilt, and they’ve given it all to Ukraine. I mean, massive amounts.”
If you want to understand the depth of disorganization of the way Trump's mind functions read the transcript. I suspect most of you glossed over it. Even if you did read it, read it again even though it may be painful.
What is in this man's head? Is there no filter between his brain and his mouth? Does he think he's a history teacher analyzing the intelligence of despotic leaders? Who will be discussed in his next class? Probably Hitler, Stalin, and Mao...
Does he think his audience, even his Fox News audience, have favorable opinions of the most prominent dictators making the news today?
Is this just another example of Trump strategically trying to own the Libs or is it a manifestation of his deteriorating mental condition?
We can only speculate as to the answers to these questions.
What jumped out at me was the line in my title and shown in TV screen photo I used for my illustration. What Trump shares with Kim that he doesn't share with Putin and Xi is that they both inherited their positions from their fathers. Kim Jong-un is the third son of Kim Jong-il, who was the country's second Supreme Leader from 1994 to 2011. He is a grandson of Kim Il-sung, who was the founder and first Supreme Leader of North Korea from it's establishment it's in 1948 until he died in 1994. (Wikipedia)
Donald John Trump was the son of the man pictured below. Go figure... I didn't know what his middle name was until I searched for a photo.
His middle name was probably pronounced Krist rather than Christ as in Jesus Christ. It was his mother's surname:
Not to get off on a tangent (loath that I would ever do that for the sake of being snarky) but perhaps the former president was given his middle name after John the Baptist.
Related: This demonstrates how disorganized Trump's thinking is from the Carlson interview: