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

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)