MAGA World loves that Trump's a malginant narcissist, will they care that he's become cognitively impaired?

 

By Hal Brown, MSW, Retired psychotherapist

Few residents of MAGA World read HUFFPOST. I can tell this from from the few trolls who comment of their articles. I doubt many will read this article: 

Befuddled Trump Can't Figure Out Which Bush Did What In Bizarre Rant

I won't even excerpt the article since this wouldn't do it justise. Vox associate editor sums it up in his post on X: 

if Joe Biden confused Jeb and George W. Bush, Hannity would anchor special coverage that would last until the 2024 election

Here's another article:

'Terribly confused' Trump's rant about whales could be sign of cognitive decline: Morning Joe

If you do a search on Google with the words Trump malignant narcissism (here) you find numerious articles. Scroll down to the 32rd and you'll find one of mine.

Here's what I posted on Daily Kos.

Click above to read

For this blog I've changed the illustration.

The HUFFPOST article decribes the most recent example of cognitive confusion that any objective clinician would see as alarming indications that their patient might be suffering from early dementia. The only other explanation that I can see is that Trump's confusion about which Bush was which is due to his being under extreme stress. Of couse one explanation doesn't preclude the other.

I am not a medical clinician but I have been trained to know when a patient has symptoms that require a referral to a neurologist for an assessment. If Trump was my patient this is what I would have done when I was in practice. A neurologist would do more than administer the MOCA.

I am not even sure that if Trump took the MOCA test (above) now he would be given a clean bill of health as far as signs of early dementia.

The question as to whether his hard-core MAGA cult would care about this is something to consider. The typical member of the Trump cult is White and poorly educated. Part of the - love is not too strong a word - for him comes from his being a grandiose narcissist who rants about vegeance against his enemies. They vicarously enjoy how he relishes expressing how he'd destroy his enemies if he become president again. They not only care about him wanting to also destroy democracy but practically drool over the idea he'd become a dictator who whould empower them and push policies that express their bigotted beliefs.

Trump has built a cult of personality. It is difficult to imagine MAGA World with anyone else as its ruler. Unlike Trump's good pal Kim Jung Un he wasn't groomed to be successor to a dynasty.

There's no way Donald Jr. and certainly not Eric, could out-Trump or eve come close to equal-Trumping the original.

The salient question for Trump's reelection is whether his cult wants someone who is the embodiment of the mad king from The Game of Thrones as their leader but who is also becoming senile.

Click to read article

I can't see any of the other GOP presidential candiates coming close to having the kind of charisma Trump exudes for his cult. Trump's madness is his brand.

If you add senility, or fast developing dementia, to his madness it will be fascinating to see if he can keep a grip on the hold he exerts over his cult.

Addendum:

The only GOP candidate who actually has their own kind of charisma is Chris Christi. I think this is why Trump fears him the most. While he can never be a cult leader, and I doubt he aspires to be one, there's no doubt that the man is a commanding pressense.

Christi can equal or better the bloviating of Trump, and he does so with a razor sharp wit using fresh rather than stale retorts and talking points the way Trump does.

If it comes down to Republicans wanting a Trump-lite candidate who promises a renewal of Trump's policies only from someone who has full command of their mental faculties they will go with DeSantis or Ramaswamy. They could want someone more in the middle like Nikki Haley. They won't want Christi who is more of a Republican like John McCain was or Mitt Romney is today. Christi doesn't represent today's  MAGA Republican Party.

If I was a small government Republican rather than a big and effective government liberal Democrat I'd favor Chris Christi. He doesn't believe in America First nationalism and he doesn't want to dismantle democracy and replace it with autocracy. He is also very, very smart.

Since the GOP has done an effective job of demonizing President Biden I actually think Christi would stand a good chance of becoming the next president if he pulled a rabbit out of the hat and won the GOP nomination.

It is possible if Trump's cognitive decline contiunes to the point that it is impossible to deny unless one is a totally brainwashed member of his cult. This will leave the GOP candidates to battle it out among thmselves and Christi will then have an opportunity, to use the Mafia term popularized in The Godfather, to make his bones, and take out the other candidates.

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Election 2024: Silly Season or Stinky Season?

By Hal Brown

Read today's blog story on single page here.

Click above to enlarge

Link to article "Like ‘wearing a Speedo’: Fox News freaks out over Biden wearing sneakers in public ‘instead of dress shoes’"

#sneakergate is now a hashtag on Twitter:

Click images to enlarge
They don't link to Twitter

Then there's this...

 See "Trump shares image of his minor son being used in political attack"

The two articles above caught my eye this morning. I thought how downright absurb, or silly if you will, they were. 

I suppose one way look at this is that there are some creative Trump supporters. After all, how does one turn the fact that instead of wearing sneakers meaning that President Biden is athletic they say this is proof postive he's senile? 

I'm 79 and mentally and physically fit. The four pairs of shoes I own languish in a box at the back of my closet since I rarely wear them.  In fact, I don't even own a necktie. Then again, in case you hadn't noticed, I'm not president of anything. As you can see I am one of the many who have discovered HOKA shoes which I wear in warm weather whenever I don't wear sandals.

Perhaps this Rosanna_RosannaDanna, who may or may not have made the image but did post it on Truth Social, thinks they are a brilliant satirist. Whoever it is took their handle, with the name spelled not quite correctly, from the Gilda Radner SNL character. They've been on Reddit (here) for four years but never posted anything.

The youngest Trump progeny (that we know of) has been kept out of poltics (though he still makes the news on some websites like this article about how he supposedly won't tell his father he loves him). From what I've read Melania wants to insulate him from daddy's poltical world. She might not be happy that Big Daddy reposted this image on Truth Social and that this is a story being shared. Horrors upon horror, not only did it make Raw Story, but it's on my blog.

It breaks my heart that Melania might be perturbed at Donald.

As for Rosanna: what a way to get national attention! It tempts me to join Truth Social and see if I can get Trump to re-post something I put on his personal online sandbox. One might ask "Who let the cat do his business in that particular sandbox?"

These attempts to smear President Biden are all rather silly, but then we have the likes of the class-act Marjorie Taylor Greene who thought it appropriate to hold up those photos of Hunter Biden with a scantily clad woman, supposedly a prostitute, at a House committee hearing.

We already have Jim Jordan's jingoistic juggernaut, James Comer's crime confabulations, and of course the master of miserable himself, Donald J. Trump... one may ask:

For those not familiar with the reverse question mark, it means the statement is rhetorical.

Just who are the the Trump supporters? I see three general groups.

By Hal Brown, MSW

Retired after a 40 year career as a psychotherapist and a mental health center director, who was a reserve police officer for 20 years, and also a cranberry farmer in Massachusetts.

Read Disquis comments and this blog story on single page

I was just thinking about the latest poll (above on Morning Joe) which shows Biden five points ahead of Trump in a national election and wondering who those who would vote for the latter are and why they'd do this. I've broken them down into categories.

There are, of course, many dyed in the wool Trump supporters, but they seem to fall into several groups. 

I'll try to break them down into general categories here.

One are the actual Trump worshippers who are often considered members of his cult. 

They swallow hook, line, and sinker all of the propaganda that he is some kind of savior whether religious or secular, or a combinaiton of both. They look at the images on the digital trading cards and think that this somehow his the "real" him as if the evidence of their own eyes decieves them. It's as if they are watching a Superman TV show or movie and see Clark Kent and know that under his suit is a iron-muscled super hero (who as in the photo of ⅓ scale statues you can own for $4,379, below, is actaully a few inches taller than the Daily Planet reporter).

The question about what may be wrong with these people has been asked and answered - I'm not going to bother citing references from noted mental health professionals - except to say the usual conclusion is that they are engaging in wishful thinking which is, in some instances, suggestive of their having a clinical deusional psychiatric disorder.

You have to add to this that some of these Trump supporting zealots, whether or not they have a mental disorder, is that they have IQ's below the national average. 

Everyone, whether they were on the honor roll or D students is suspectible to propaganda, especially when the message supports what they want to believe. If you're reading this you probably know what confirmation bias is and understand it's power:

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The effect is strongest for desired outcomes, for emotionally charged issues, and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Confirmation bias cannot be eliminated, but it can be managed, for example, by education and training in critical thinking skills. Read more here.

There are also a what I lament may represent a large percetange of the population who are just plain gullible. Some may believe in outlandish QAnon claims, others may think that most of the X-Files TV shows were based on facts, and no doubt since they still advertise, numerous people believe that Prevagin really inproves memory. I wrote in some depth about those I'll call the "Prevagen People" here:

This group may include members of the first, but among them are people with no impairments in mental health, intelligence, or ability to engage in critical thinking. They are those with deeply held racist, and/or bigotted, and/or fascist beliefs. The "and/or's" are improtant since there are those who are mostly or exclusively racists, which would include anti-Semites and members of the LGBTQ+ community, and those who are fascists who believe the country should be an autocricy run by a dictator who shares their beleiefs.

These people don't need demographic predictions to know that the country is becoming less White. All they need to do is look around them. From watching pop culture to walking down Main Street they will see that Americans who have assumed jobs and had roles usually held mostly by Whites now come in all shades of skin color.

They look at a version of the Pride flag we celebrate through a decidely dark lens:

The flag on top includes black and brown stripes 
to represent marginalized LGBTQ+ communities
 of color, along with the colors pink, light blue
 and white, which are used on the 
Transgender Pride Flag.

Another way to depict them and their reaction is with a decidely White version I made of The Scream (original here):

Again, none of these groups are mutually exclusive. However, I do see a fairly descrete group which for want of a better term I'd call "the enemy of my enemy is my enemy" contingent of Trump supporters.

They will align themselves with anyone no matter how dumb they are or outrageous their behavior is as long as they also support Trump.

These are people who hate the Democrats, whether President Biden in particular or any Democrat, with a visceral passion. They may or may not buy into the notion that Democrats are some kind of demon communists or socialists. The smart ones know full well this isn't true and the uniformed couldn't even define the terms. 

Some of the savvy group are hard-core capitalists who think that having a safety net for less the fortunate which costs taxpayer money (noting some of these people avoid paying their fair share of taxes) takes money away from their bottom lines. 

Some may be those who feel that because they worked hard to get where they are, owners of small businesses for example, nobody deserves to get a leg up from the government. It doen't matter to them that they might have benefited from low interest small business loans or other help from the government. 

In this group you'll find that there are some whose businesses or investments are effected by government regulations. 

These people would rather vote for the Devil himself rather than vote for a Democrat.

Update/adendum

Below is a comment from someone who read this blog on anther platform. I don't know where they fit into my three categories but it is clear to me they buy much of the GOP propaganda (against Joe and Hunter Biden for example) and don't understand how the special proescuter is not "throwing indictments" at him without good cause, and there is a rigorous process for how such judicial procedures are conducted. 

It seems that you and some Democrats are the haters. The four years we had under Trump wasn't so bad. And if those same 4 years were under by a different president, Biden, Clinton, or another Republican, there would be a good chance that person would be reelected in 2020. 
But the name Trump makes some people go nuts and he wasn't reelected.
Yes, he's a bombastic egotistical, loud mouth self promoter as well as other things.
I didn't vote for Trump in 2020, or Biden. And there's no way in hell can I vote for Biden in '24.
Yes, Trump is a jerk and all, but the way they are throwing one indictment after another against him all in the name of hoping he will not run is not what this country is about.
You don't try and lock up a possible political opponent by any means. You don't threaten lawyers who want to represent Trump with the possible loss of their law licenses or if they are up for a judgeship by squashing it.
John Adams said, "Even a scoundrel has the right to consul." And he defended the British soldiers who shot at Americans at the Boston Massacre.
Come '24, if I vote for Trump, it won't be because of his policies and such. It will be a protest vote on what is going on with the Justice Department and Attorney General in this.
And Biden had better look over his shoulder. He and Hunter and the rest of the Biden clan might be in deep shit as day after day, more evidence is coming forward on what they have been doing. 

Adapted by Hal Brown from Tacosunday Public Domain

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