November 9, 2024

Will Trump sign an ethics code before assuming office? By Hal M. Brown


If you have a subscription to The NY Times you can read this article by clicking here:



Read a summary here: "Trump's team hits first roadblock as they start to assume power" in RawStory.

This is from the Times:

In 2019, Congress amended that law to require candidates to create and publicly post an ethics plan before the election and to “include information on how eligible presidential candidates will address their own conflicts of interest during a presidential term.”

That bipartisan law was born in part out of concerns about ethical issues during the first Trump administration.

While Mr. Trump’s appointees were required to comply with ethical codes, Mr. Trump declared shortly before taking office that he would not divest his assets, nor would he place them in a blind trust.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group, has since identified more than 3,400 conflicts of interest tied to Mr. Trump during his first administration, among them holding political events and hosting foreign dignitaries at hotels and resorts owned by his company.

How insane is this? Read on:

By refusing to sign that agreement, Mr. Trump effectively faces no limit on contributions and does not need to name his donors publicly. Money raised by the transition is not regulated by any other government agency.

A separate concern involves the other memorandum of understanding, with the White House. Among other things, it sets the conditions under which the current administration can share sensitive government information with the incoming president’s team.

Until the Trump transition signs that document, the Biden administration is legally barred from providing it with the security clearances needed to share classified intelligence and national defense briefings, Mr. Stier said. It also cannot give transition employees physical access to the 438 different federal agencies that they will soon control, and it cannot allow them to review their files.

But by law, that agreement cannot be signed until an ethics plan that conforms to federal statute is submitted to the White House and posted online, creating something of a game of chicken between the outgoing Biden administration and the incoming Trump transition.

If neither side blinks, Mr. Trump’s team would be forced to assume control of the entire federal government cold. That, Mr. Stier said, could leave the country vulnerable at a critical moment.

“The consequences are severe,” Mr. Stier said. “It would not be possible to be ready to govern on Day 1.”

I think that, to put it mildly, this shows a surfeit of arrogance. I can see Trump, knowing he's about to become dictator with a Supreme Court and Congress cheering him on, saying something along the lines of "I don't need to sign no freaking ethics code" and other choice non-grammatical expletive laden lines like saying where Biden's transition team can shove their ethics code.

I don't think Trump believes he needs any transition process that involves members of the Biden administration.

My sense of him in his now supercharged highfalutin narcisstic feeling of having the ultimate unchecked power of a dictator, and his being, oh, let's say being a wee bit narcisstic, is that he thinks he can sashay into the White House without any preparation and start giving orders.

 Tragic as it is to recognize this he can do it.

As for the ethics code, it would go from this...


... to this:


Most recent blogs (click images below):



Read previous blogs here.

Trumpworld definitions:

Phallocentrism

Manosphere

Toxic Masculinity


November 8, 2024

If Trump has dementia it might be a kind doctors have never seen. Call it weaveheimers. If not, the weave may be as brilliant as he says it is. By Hal M. Brown, MSW


I was among numerous mental health experts who thought there was evidence that Trump was in the early stages of dementia. Most of what we pointed to as symptomatic was his fragmented speaking style where he jumped from disconnected topic to disconnected topic. We often called it word salad. He never denied he did this but he described it in a positive way. This is from The New York Times on Sept. 1. 2024:

Meandering? Off-Script? Trump Insists His ‘Weave’ Is Oratorical Genius.

Former President Donald J. Trump’s speeches often wander from topic to topic. He insists there is an art to stitching them all together.

But on Friday, while speaking at a rally in Johnstown, Pa., Mr. Trump insisted that his oratory is not a campaign distraction but rather a rhetorical triumph.

“You know, I do the weave,” he said. “You know what the weave is? I’ll talk about like nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together, and it’s like, friends of mine that are, like, English professors, they say, ‘It’s the most brilliant thing I’ve ever seen.’”

Asked for examples of the technique, the Trump campaign provided what it called a “masterclass weave” — a four-minute, 20-second video of the candidate speaking at a rally in Asheville, N.C., in August in which he bounces from energy bills to Hunter Biden’s laptop to Venezuelan tar to mental institutions in Caracas to migrant crime to “the green new scam” to Vice President Kamala Harris. 
 
Trump has said his speaking style, his weave, is genius. What if it is? Here's more from The NY Times:

Certainly, in the history of narrative, there have been writers celebrated for their ability to be discursive only to cleverly tie together all their themes with a neat bow at the end — William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens and Larry David come to mind. But in the case of Mr. Trump, it is difficult to find the hermeneutic methods with which to parse the linguistic flights that take him from electrocuted sharks to Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism, windmills and Rosie O’Donnell.

James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University and a renowned Shakespeare scholar, ruminated about Mr. Trump’s use of the word: “I read Trump’s comment bragging that ‘I do the weave.’ I take him at his word, as one of the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of ‘weave’ is ‘to pursue a devious course.’”

James Joyce was celebrated for his stream of consciousness that, over the course of hundreds of pages, revealed a person’s temperament. William Faulkner was an early adopter of the weave, engaging in a kind of circular storytelling, as seen in “Absalom, Absalom!” These weavers were trying to capture on the page the inconstant nature of a shifting mind.

If it is not an indication of dementia or psychosis, as a Freudian I see his speaking style as free association. Instead of putting a filter between his unconscious and what comes out of his mouth he does what a patient on an analyst's couch does. He says whatever comes into his mind without censoring it or trying to make it sound rational. If he was in psychoanalysis with his analysts help he would try to understand the messages his unconscious was sending him.

Because he often did this so-called weave during rallies he had the audience reaction to decide which lines were effective. If the crowd cheered or laughed he incorporated the better lines into subsequent rally speeches and interviews. If an audience didn't repsond the first time he'd know not to use the lines again. The effective lines became part of his shtick.

If Trump has dementia we are likely to see it worsen over the next few years. If he doesn't I will be able to say that I was wrong.

It will be a major mea culpa. After all I'm the clinical social worker in the title of this Salon Chauncey DeVega column:

Clinical social worker: "With the Trump Bible, one must consider dementia"

Here's more of what I wrote at other times:


It wasn't just myself and a handful of clinicians seeing signs of dementia with Trump. Here's a general Google search of "Trump dementia" and here's a Google News search of the same terms. 

There are two things we will discover about Trump in the coming months and years. One is whether he really wants to follow Project 2025 chapter and verse and remake the country into an authoritarian country with him as its dictator. The signs that he is trying to do this will be obvious. The other thing we will know is whether he has dementia because this condition, while its course varies, always gets worse.

If Trump has been doing the brilliant and beautiful weave perhaps we'll see that he's created a tapestry you might want in your house.


However, we don't know whether he'll create a lovely tapestry or an ugly scary one.
If he has dementia his weave could create something that looks like this:
These images were created by Perchance Photo AI


Read previous blogs here.

Addendum on a personal note: 

I live in a continuing care retirement community in a liberal suburb of Portland, Oregon. Many of the residents here, almost all of whom are politically progressive, have taken to wearing generic name tags. I had my own made to reflect how I was feeling. The first used as a background Salvadore Dali's painting The Persistence of Memory (see Wiki article)

Then as the election approached with the polls neck and neck I had another one made with the figure from Edvard Munch's "The Scream" (see Wiki).

Thinking Kamala might win I had yet a third one made with another Dali painting, Le Sommeil (Sleep) which you can read about here. Here's the excerpt that resonates with me:

Freudian theories, however, extends beyond just a consideration of the unconscious. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Freud, the renowned psychologist proposed a theory, Thanatos, or 'Death Instinct', in which he suggests that all animals, including humans, try to prolong their life by defending all threats of death that are inappropriate to their particular species. In humans, this is manifest as aggression if the threat is external and self-destruction when directed at the self. The counterpart to Thanatos is Eros in which an individual life moves towards a 'natural' death. Le Sommeil seems to suggest that tension, the head in a catatonic state supported by a series of crutches.

Now I am not sure which one I will be wearing. Perhaps I will alternate. 

(Click below to enlarge)








November 7, 2024

Trump is going to do, or try to do, some things what will enrage half the nation. It will take time for him to start a full on dumpster fire. By Hal M. Brown



Below are the article links.

The red, black, and blue headline articles on HUFFPOST above convey much of what I planned to write about today. As I wrote in my title, Trump is going to do, or try to do, some things what will enrage half the nation. Not only will this engender outrage among the millions of people who voted for Kamala, some who did so reluctantly because they were voting against Trump, but it will lead to many lawsuits. Some of these will end up in the Supreme Court which is considered by at least half the country as being not only in the bag for him but corrupt.

Some of what he intends to do will have an immediate effect. Examples of these will be his day one appointments or announcements. He could cement his critics view about Aileen Cannon being his tool by appointing her as Attorney General. He could announce that he has cut a deal with Putin for him to end the war in Ukraine by stopping all American aide and starting the process of pulling out of NATO.

I expect that we will hear soon, possibly today, a broad outline of what he calls his "day one" plan. I expect he will talk about his campaign promises and how he will make good on them. 

It will take varying periods of time for these to be fuel for the dumpster fire I expect his administration to turn into. If he follows though on his tariff plan, for example, it will take months for this to result in the cost of everyday items to increase.

Likewise, elimination of departments, Education and the two departments dealing with weather, this will take more time to have an effect on everyday people. If Trump actually follows through on his saying he might give RFK Jr. the authority to formulate health policy he might as well eliminate the The United States Department of Health and Human Services and the FDA. Again, the trickle down consequences for ordinary Americans will take time to be felt.

If Trump makes good on the Project 2025 plan to make as many positions in the federal goverment dependent on passing a loyalty test to Trump thousands of experts in many fields would lose their jobs.

Consider this (from USA Today)

Project 2025 calls for a major overhaul of the Justice Department, including a "vast expansion" of political appointees in the Civil Rights Division and the FBI.

Trump has similarly said he would bend the Justice Department to serve him politically – "If I happen to be president and I see somebody who's doing well and beating me very badly, I say, 'Go down and indict them,'" he told Univision in an interview last year. John Kelly, his former chief of staff, said Trump often described "constant and obsessive" ideas of using the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service to target his enemies.

Should Trump follow with this plan I would expect mass resignations. His cult may applaud this but, again, what will the rest of the nation think?

We also don't know what the leadership in the military will do if Trump tries illegally to invoke the Insurrection Act (read article) and use American solders on American soil.

We could have a mass exodus of dedicated and talented Americans who leave their jobs voluntarily or involuntarily. 

If all of these people lose their jobs they and their families will suffer economic hardship and members of their communities will feel for them. 

Trump's war against the LGBTQ+ community, his hysterical rhetoric and lies about forced child sex change and saying he'll make sure no schools will get federal funds if they teach anything about gender preferences will lead to most of Hollywood joining to vociferously condemn him. Not that it matters except to him, but he'll never get a true A lister to perform for him. 

Much of what Trump will do depends, as I wrote in my brief blog yesterday, on his need to get revenge against his enemies. If he decides to order the Justice Department to not only go after Hunter Biden but also after President Biden he will look to many people like a vindictive tyrant. While his cult will cheer him on with this we don't know if others who voted for him want to see him go after an 81 or 82 year old man who will have graciously attended his inauguation.  Trump was the first president in 150 years not to attend his successor's inauguration chosing instead to stay at Mar-a-Lago. 

I doubt Trump minds being called a tyrant. To him this characterization is probably a point of pride. However, I am quite sure he doesn't like being called a petty tyrant. Look this up in Google News (here)  He's already been called this many times. The more his tyranny looks petty the worse it is for his image among people who voted for him but weren't the hardcore Trumpers who want him to be both a tyrant and petty.

We don't know whether it will be a match, several matches, or spontaneous combustion that will start the dumpster fire. I am sure it will something or a combination of things we know Trump intends to do.

A dumpster fire begins as very small, but unless the fire department arrives in time it can get out of control. With Trump there's no fire department. If there was it would be in the form of the Supreme Court or Congress. There's no superpumper fire engine that can put out the conflagration his dumpster fire could ignite.


The country wouldn't literally burn. It would be American democracy that would go up in flames. This only could be stopped if things got so bad that in two years both the House and Senate ended up in Democratic Party control with enough Republicans in the Senate to have the 6o seats needed to convict Trump if he's impeached by the House.

If this was successful then they would have J.D. Vance to deal with.

Illustrations made by Perchance Photo AI

Read previous blogs here.

Addendum on a personal note: 

I live in a continuing care retirement community in a liberal suburb of Portland, Oregon. Many of the residents here, almost all of whom are politically progressive, have taken to wearing generic name tags. I had my own made to reflect how I was feeling. The first used as a background Salvadore Dali's painting The Persistence of Memory (see Wiki article)

Then as the election approached with the polls neck and neck I had another one made with the figure from Edvard Munch's "The Scream" (see Wiki).

Thinking Kamala might win I had yet a third one made with another Dali painting, Le Sommeil (Sleep) which you can read about here. Here's the excerpt that resonates with me:

Freudian theories, however, extends beyond just a consideration of the unconscious. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Freud, the renowned psychologist proposed a theory, Thanatos, or 'Death Instinct', in which he suggests that all animals, including humans, try to prolong their life by defending all threats of death that are inappropriate to their particular species. In humans, this is manifest as aggression if the threat is external and self-destruction when directed at the self. The counterpart to Thanatos is Eros in which an individual life moves towards a 'natural' death. Le Sommeil seems to suggest that tension, the head in a catatonic state supported by a series of crutches.

Now I am not sure which one I will be wearing. Perhaps I will alternate. 

(Click below to enlarge)











November 6, 2024

Which Trump will America get? Will it be the forgiving benevolent Trump or the revenge fueled monster? By Hal M. Brown, MSW

 

Perchance Photo AI can give us images of who Trump will turn out to be, but it can't predict. 

No ifs, ands, or buts, and no what's ifs, we have entered the era of Trump trumpified. That word isn't in the regular dictionary but has several definitions in The Urban Dictionary. I mean it to say he will be more Trump than he ever was, as if he took the pill Alice took which made her huge.

 Now it is wait and see just how much of a revenge bent fascist he turns out to be.

First thing this morning I took my Wonder Woman for President comic book poster off the refrigerator door. I couldn't help but noticing that Wonder Woman, while she had the brunette hair of Kamala Harris, also was White. Don't go there, Hal. There's no sense rehashing President Biden's decision to ordain her as his heir apparent. There's no way to determine whether a Josh Shapiro or Gavin Newsom might have won this squeaker of an election. 

Onto another topic:

It is possible that now that he's won Trump will bask in his glory and not be hellbent on excacting revenge and retribution on everyone who ended up on his enemies list. This would mean he's had a partial symptomatic remission of his malignant narcissim. This is unlikely but I suppose possible if the narcissist in him may mediate the sadistic psychopathic part of his psychopathology by telling him it's a good look to come across as the kindly and forgiving Uncle Trump.

Who knows, it's even possible Melania or Ivanka to might appeal to a kinder gentler side of him? Even Barron might try to do this. Nah! Won't happen.  Even they aren't total sociopaths out for themselves, human doesn't and forgivenss doen't exist in a man incapable of empathy. He might find it is in his best interest to fake it.,, nah, I doubt that too.

Short blog today because of lack of sleep and being shellshocked. Previous blogs are here.



November 5, 2024

The Trump shark was an election morning nightmare, by Hal M. Brown, MSW

Trump has a thing, one might say a phobia, about sharks as his story about choosing electrocution over being eaten by sharks attests. Here's a quote from an article in The Week:

Trump is "obsessed with sharks, terrified of sharks," Stormy Daniels said in 2018. "He was like, 'I donate to all these charities, and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.'"

This may be what led to my dream.

I woke from the dream at 4:30. I was at a beach standing on a boardwalk and saw a large shark starting to swim towards several bathers who didn't see it. I tried to yell to warn them but they didn't hear me. 


There were some folding metal chairs on the boardwalk and I threw them into the water to alert the people but I still couldn't get their attention.

Then, still not seeing the shark, they came out of the water and walked onto the beach, but the shark became a land shark and followed them onto the beach. Then there was a dog on the beach who did see the shark and was almost nose to nose barking at it. Still the people were oblivious. 

I threw some more chairs and was able to hit the shark on the back but the shark didn't respond. All the while I'd been shouting as loud as I could but nobody heard me.

I managed to get down to the beach. Under the boardwalk I met some security guards. They happened to be the same red shirted unarmed security team members we have at the continuing care retirement community where I live.  They had also seen the shark. The bathers were ignoring them too. Being unarmed they didn't know what to do.

We stood there together feeling helpless.

I couldn't fall back asleep so I got up, made some coffee, turned on "Morning Joe" and fired up my laptop and checked to the the lead stories on HUFFPOST and saw this:

Nate Silver: Harris Wins 40,012 Of 80,000 Vote Simulations

Statistician Nate Silver published his final Silver Bulletin just after midnight on Tuesday, and the results were stunningly close.

The FiveThirtyEight founder ran 80,000 simulations of the upcoming election: In them, Harris won just over 50% of the time. Trump won just under 50%. And the simulations found an exact Electoral College tie 270 of those times.

On RawStory the lead was:

When polling places close across the United States tonight, in the event that Donald Trump appears to be losing, it’s not hard to predict what he and his allies will do overturn the result between now and Jan. 20.

The early outlines of the MAGA strategy for overturning a potential loss look remarkably similar to what unfolded after the Nov. 3, 2020 election.

This was on the main page of The New York Times.

If only the land shark, which obviously symbolizes Donald Trump in my dream, was a comedic device like the land shark featured in nine episodes of Saturday Night Live .

Here's the compilation of various episodes with different characters opening the door for the land shark who claimed to be delivering, among other things a candygram. It has a proclivity for attacking single women.... nuff said about that.


Trump isn't the amusing land shark in the SNL skits. Nobody had their head really bitten off. He's more like the great white shark from Jaws. He's the great in his own mind White candidate. In fact just yesterday he bragged about having white skin. Oddly, he also talked about going to the beach although I can't recall ever seeing a photo of him at a beach (see article).

‘Absolutely, but I could’ve been on the best beaches in the world. I own the best beaches in the world.'”

The former president then bragged about having “beautiful white skin” and griped that the presidential race has prevented him from getting a proper tan:

I could’ve been at the great Turnberry in Scotland. I could’ve been anywhere I wanted to be. I could’ve had those waves smacking me in the face. That white, beautiful white skin that I have would be nice and tan. I got the whitest skin ’cause I never have time to go out in the sun. But I have that beautiful white, and you know what? It could’ve been beautiful, tanned, beautiful.

Unlike the shark in "Jaws" who is just a shark being a shark who has an appetite for people, Trump will wreak havoc on American democracy the way the giant bloodthirsty predatory fish did in the surf in Amity (filmed on Martha's Vineyard).



It's like we've been at sea hunting the Trump shark and realized how big it has become with half the country about to vote it into the White House. We realized that we were going to need a bigger boat to stop this from happening. President Biden couldn't do it. Now we have a damn big boat with Kamala Harris at the helm, but we don't know if it will be big enough (see clip).


No blog about Trump being a dangerous shark using pop culture examples can be complete without a reference to Bobby Darin's hit "Mack the Knife." While the song has mellow and cool sound, it is actually about a murderous rapist named Macheath from The Threepenny Opera. The song tells of a knife-wielding criminal of the London underworld from the musical named Macheath, the "Mack the Knife" of the title.   (reference).

Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear
And he shows them pearly white
Just a jackknife has old Macheath, babe
And he keeps it out of sight


You know when that shark bites with his teeth, babe
Scarlet billows start to spread
Fancy gloves, though, wears old Macheath, babe
So there's never, never a trace of red


Now on the sidewalk, ooh, sunny morning, uh-huh
Lies a body just oozin' life
Eek, and someone's sneakin' 'round the corner
Could that someone be Mack the Knife?


There's a tugboat down by the river, don't ya know
Where a cement bag's just a-droopin' on down
Oh, that cement is just, it's there for the weight, dear
Five'll get ya ten, old Macky's back in town


Now d'ya hear about Louie Miller? He disappeared, babe
After drawin' out all his hard-earned cash
And now Macheath spends just like a sailor
Could it be our boy's done something rash? 


Now Jenny Diver, ho, ho, yeah, Sukey Tawdry 
Ooh, Miss Lotte Lenya and old Lucy Brown
Oh, the line forms on the right, babe
Now that Macky's back in town


I said Jenny Diver, whoa, Sukey Tawdry
Look out to Miss Lotte Lenya and old Lucy Brown
Yes, that line forms on the right, babe
Now that Macky's back in town


Look out ol' Macky's back

Let's hope that Kamala will vanquish Mack the Knife.

Hopefully Trump the shark can end up in a metaphorical museum. This is the home of Bruce the mechanical shark from Jaws.


Some people want to see Trump in prison. If he loses the election I don't care where he resides. He's never been known to go swimming even though Mar-a-Lago has a pool or even visit a nearby Florida beach where, in fact, there are sharks. I want to make sure that in time his cult will abandon him and realize that they better not go swimming on the beach of facism again.


By tomorrow I hope I can rest easy knowing that Kamala proved that Trump wasn't that great a white shark as he and his cult think he is.


None-photo illustrations are made by Perchance Photo AI.


------------------------------

If you missed my podcast with Chauncey DeVega click here.

I also post my blogs on Substack here. If you want each new blog emailed to you you can subscribe there. It's free.

Read previous blogs on my Stressline.org website which you can also follow/




November 4, 2024

If Trump wins be ready for the scariest clown of all time using a cast of other scary clowns to implement his horror circus, by Hal M. Brown, MSW

 


When I was a kid I was lucky enough to see the world famous Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus at Madison Square Garden a few times. Yes, that Madison Square Garden, the site of the 1939 Nazi rally and the Donald Trump malevolent tour de force.

I got to see Emmett Kelley as Weary Willy do his solo act. It was the only solo act in the entire show. With a big broom he crisscrossed the entire arena trying to sweep a spotlight into a dust bin.

I saw all the other clowns including the dozen or so getting out of a tiny car. 

I grew up watching Clarabell the Clown squirting Buffalo Bob with seltzer on Howdy Doody. None of these clowns scared me.

If Trump is elected he'll be a scarier clown running a country than the bemedaled Idi Ami (AI image on top of page). 

Trump will have a cast of scary clowns to help him. These won't be normal people putting on clown clothes and makeup. They will be, to varying degrees, psychopathic, ignorant, and delusional people wearing ordinary outfits.

He will have some or all of the following in his cast of clowns:

Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, Stephen Miller, RFK Jr., Aileen Cannon (as Attorney General), Corey Lewandowski, Steve Cheung, Tucker Carlson, Boris Epshteyn, Jason Miller, Dan Scavino, Tulsi Gabbard, Herschell Walker, and the faceless people who crafted Project 2025 would be given their portfolios to wreak havoc on American democracy. He might forgive Laura Loomer for her plastic surgery and give her a job, and of course he'll have the spawn of his loins, Donald Jr. and Eric, who could end up on his Cabinet. He might make Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock co-chairs of the National Endowment for the  Arts.

This is an incomplete list of those who could get top jobs where they'd be able fire thousands of disloyal department members and replace them with Trumper. For more job candidates look at this list of those who spoke at the MSG rally and at the GOP losers in every election for the past 10 or so years. 

If the Republicans win the House he will have his lickspittle Mike Johnson as one of his most powerful henchmen. If the GOP wins the Senate we'd probably have Mitch McConnell as majority leader again unless Trump is so pissed off at him for not being loyal enough that he makes sure Jim Jordan becomes speaker. A runner up for that job if he manages to win his election could be Ted Cruz.

Trump, if he succeeds in becoming the Hitlerian leader he aspires to be, will not only have all the resources of law enforcement to do his bidding but he'll have the entire US military. Consider what will happen if he appoints General Michael Flynn as Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or Defense Secretary. If Trump really wants to stop migration across the southern border and doesn't care about being labeled as a war criminal by The World Court or being condemned by The United Nations be could order the Army to patrol the Rio Grande with helicopter gunships with orders to open fire on anyone who dares to dip a toe into the river.


Some of these people look scary enough without modifing their photos. For example, there was really no need to use BeFunky software to change how Stephen Milller looks.


Rather than make a collage of their faces and run them through a progam to make them look scary I asked Perchance Photo AI to make some scary clowns. Don't click on the image below to enlarge it if it will make you anxious.


Clowns can be funny, sad, scary, even terrfying, or just wierd looking. Fear of clowns is a real phobia called coulrophobia. The clowns who will be implementing his reign of revenge and terror will lead to justifed anxiety. Being afraid of them won't be a phobia. It will be a reality based fear.



Here's an excerpt related to what Trump could do as president:

Whether it is thousands or millions, we know there are numerous supporters who are ready to follow his marching orders if he loses.

If he wins they may join the new Trump SS (see illustration on the top of the blog) to hunt down, detain, and deport or imprison those he has been demonizing ever since he rode down that infamous golden escalator.

Others might join Trump's version of the Gestapo, the secret police who didn't wear uniforms when they did their dirty work.


He might also have his version of the SA, sometimes referred to as Storm Troopers or Brownshirts.  This was the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party, whose violent tactics played a huge role in Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. Before establishing the SA as a paramilitary wing, it was known as a ‘sports division’ in the party to avoid suspicion. (Reference)

Recommended reading on Salon:

Dr. John Gartner on how Harris hit Trump's weak spot: He "is now using a very limited vocabulary"

"Trump had poor judgment and impulse control even before his mind appeared to be degrading and decompensating"


If you missed my podcast with Chauncey DeVega click here.

I also post my blogs on Substack here. If you want each new blog emailed to you you can subscribe there. It's free.

Read previous blogs on my Stressline.org website which you can also follow/







In the news today: How far will the Supreme Court go to promote trans ingnorance and anti-trans bigotry? By Hal M. Brown, MSW

Above:  Protesters of Kentucky Senate Bill SB150, known as the Transgender Health Bill, cheer on speakers during a rally on the lawn of the ...