Trump is in a whirlpool of weird and is mired in a maelstorm of mania. By Hal Brown, MSW

 

Trump is in a whirlpool of weird. Another way to put it is that he's mired in a maelstrom of mania. 

This was the top of the page story on HUFFPOST this morning.

The part of this story I reacted to is as follows:

This is the comment I posted to that article:

Maybe saying he is better looking than Kamala is what he thinks is part of a comedy routine, but if he believes it or thinks it is relevant to anything add this to the growing evidence that Trump is caught in a whirlpool of weird. He is, no doubt, the first presidential candidate to make such a comparision.

Two readers replied. One wrote "that boy ain't right" and the other wrote "he's weird." 

I thought about Trump, and Vance, being called weird and how this has become one of the Democrats most effective attack words. I am among the many writers who like to think of alliterations to use in titles so I came up with "whirlpool of weird" and then in looking for illustrations I saw the one of the maelstrom off Norway and came up up the second part of my title because it fit Trump so well. 

I ended up using PhotoAI to make illustrations of Trump caught in a whirlpool and used the one in the top middle from the six below:

Pairing Trump's weirdness with his mania makes perfect sense. This is from the Wikipedia defintion of mania:

Mania, also known as manic syndrome, is a mental and behavioral disorder^[1][2] defined as a state of abnormally elevated arousal, affect, and energy level, or "a state of heightened overall activation with enhanced affective expression together with lability of affect."^[3] During a manic episode, an individual will experience rapidly changing emotions and moods, highly influenced by surrounding stimuli. Although mania is often conceived as a "mirror image" to depression, the heightened mood can be either euphoricor dysphoric.^[4] As the mania intensifies, irritability can be more pronounced and result in anxiety or anger.

The symptoms of mania include elevated mood (either euphoric or irritable), flight of ideas and pressure of speech, increased energy, decreased need and desire for sleep, and hyperactivity. They are most plainly evident in fully developed hypomanic states. However, in full-blown mania, these symptoms become progressively exacerbated. In severe manic episodes, these symptoms may be obscured by other signs and symptoms characteristic of psychosis, such as delusions, hallucinations, fragmentation of behavior, and catatonia.^[5]

Trump is an unusual person but he is a person. He wants to believe the super-human images depicted in his digital trading cards and most recently in his brush with death from an assassin's bullet. His saying that he is better looking that Kamala Harris - who others have been depicting as Wonder Woman (see Google image search) - would bother him if he was aware of this.

Kamala herself is not about to authorize digital playing cards depicting herself the way Trump portrayed himself. Trump probably doesn't know it, but the comic book Wonder Woman (alias Diana Prince) actually ran for president. 

I just had the cover and hadn't read the comic so I had to do some research (here) to find out that she won.

Read: Holy voter suppression, Batgirl! What comics reveal about gender and democracy. 

While some of Trump's narcissism is frivolous, like saying he's better looking than Kamala, it is part and parcel of his need to believe he is better in every possible way than anybody else. It comes with the arrogance that he believes he knows more about every subject than anybody. Consider the now classic images from his talking about killing Covid with bleach and how Dr. Deborah Brix looked which he was proposing this. (Read what she thinks about this /  article)

I very much doubt Trump ever did the laundry and opened a bottle of bleach or he'd know how powerful the chlorine odor was so nobody would be stupid enough to drink it.

Jumping foward from then to now, we see a Trump more detached from reality and more arrogant than ever. One can use words like weird and mania but this can be dismissed as political rhetoric. In fact these decriptions should be looked at as a clinical assessment of his mental instability. 

If he becomes president if you think of what might have happened if Americans who came down with Covid swallowed bleach consider what could happen if he tells supporters to do something that they don't dismiss out of hand as stupid and life threatening. 

Even if Trump loses he still has the power to incite violence with his words. President or not, because of his personality he is the most dangerous person in America. As president he is the commander in chief of the armed forces. He has threatened to use them against civilians (read article). As a defeated candidate he will say he really won and still has an angry army he can order to do his bidding.

A President Trump who will no doubt implement the democracy destroying Project 2025 he is staggeringly dangerous.  A defeated candidate Trump may not be as dangerous, but he is still extremely dangerous.

Read recent blogs here.

Stop calling the GOP anti-woke hysteria weird. Weird is wonderful. Call it wiggy instead.

By Hal Brown

The GOP has gone wiggy in their war on woke.

The author lives in a suburb of wonderfully weird Portland, Oregon.

Click above and below to enlarge the images

Here in Portland, Oregon we are proud of being weird and wonderful. Keep Portland Weird is a frequently used slogan (read about it on Wikipedia).

This is the webpage of Travel Portland:

This conveys how Portland is both weird and woke.

This is from the website Boundless Roads:

Cities like Portland aren't the only promoters of weird and woke as a positive image. For example Weird N Woke is a line of clothing which combines weird with woke in their name  .

The company, founded in Lancaster, PA, offers clothing like the Liberty is Dead t-shirt. Here's their Facebook page. I am now a fan of the company and appreciate that the founder Austin Welk (about him) resides in the Republican Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It voted GOP in every presidential election since 2000 and in the last Presidential election the vote was Republican, 56.9% to 41.2% Democrat. 

Another way weird is used in a positive sense is in services. For example some of these are described here.

The first column I read this morning was this (subscription):

One word in a sentence prompted me to write a comment in the article:

But Biden’s biggest advantage has to do with the opposition — the Republican Party has gotten weird.

Here's my comment:

I live in Portland, Orgeon, which proudly proclaims (as does Denver) itself as wonderfully weird. Thus I suggest that calling the Republican Party weird is a misnomer and does weirdness a disservice. I suggest the word wiggy which includes weird in the definition: emotionally uncontrolled or weird.

At this writing seven readers there recommended my comment:

Following posting this I realized I should have included Austin as a proudly weird city.

Then I looked at Raw Story where I saw this article:

The word was used in this sentence:

As a result, “They have to win the endorsement of a crowd in an echo chamber having a conversation that the rest of the country thinks is too nasty or weird to join,” he wrote.

Headline writers often use alliterations so anti-woke weird warriors sound good. In my opinion wiggy is a better word in this context.

This is how my online dictionary defines weird and wiggy:

Weird

weird | wird | adjective suggesting something supernatural; uncanny: the weird crying of a seal. • informal very strange; bizarre: a weird coincidence | all sorts of weird and wonderful characters. • archaic connected with fate.

Wiggy: 

wiggy | ˈwiɡē | 

adjective (wiggier, wiggiest) informal, mainly North American emotionally uncontrolled or weird: you've been acting all wiggy.

Since both word have the soft W sound wiggy can be used in phrases with anti-woke and warrior as an alliteration. Both words can mean bizarre. Wiggy adds emotionally uncontrolled to the definition. Therefore it describes the Republican war on wokeness. Not only does weird have a positive connotation, but another reason I'd like wiggy used instead is that weird is overused and wiggy is a far less used word.

Addendum:

We can thank Ron DeSantis for pushing the war against woke to and beyond the breaking point by going after Disney and continuing to dig in his heals in his utter bigotry. For example: 

DeSantis declines to say if he supports ‘mainstream human rights’

Here's one of my blogs about him.

Here's what an hysterical bigot had to say in a Fox News opinion piece.   I found his essay when I did my web search for woke and weird.

Here's what my tour around America taught me about the weird, woke and wicked

Here's what I'm hearing from panicked parents around the country

The author spews intolerance.

* "Why is there a seemingly sudden increase in pedophiles, sexual deviants? Why do we have so many amoral—or plainly immoral—educators, school administrators, school boards, politicians, community leaders, and even judges, hell-bent on advancing the sexualization of our innocent children, and pushing perversion into the hearts and minds of the most impressionable among us?

*Why are too many of these leaders hiding their aberrant "sex education" and "gender-affirming" curricula from the parents of their students, stripping moms and dads of their rights to determine when and how their children are exposed to sensitive topics in school?

* What do these groups of decadent influencers have to gain?  In short, their ambition is the total breakdown and collapse of the family. Their target is our children.  Their goal is social chaos.  In some cases, they have been successful. Tragically successful.

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