The malignant megalomaniac's Memorial Day message

 By Hal Brown. MSW

I wonder if Trump pays attention to the meager number of people who "like"
his posts considering that 3,020 people is about 1/100,000th of the US population.
Caricature: DonkeyHotey

Above post:

HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY TO ALL, BUT ESPECIALLY TO THOSE WHO GAVE THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE FOR THE COUNTRY THEY LOVE, AND TO THOSE IN LINE OF A VERY DIFFERENT, BUT EQUALLY DANGEROUS FIRE, STOPPING THE THREATS OF THE TERRORISTS, MISFITS AND LUNATIC THUGS WHO ARE WORKING FEVERISHLY FROM WITHIN TO OVERTURN AND DESTROY OUR ONCE GREAT COUNTRY, WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN IN GREATER PERIL THAN IT IS RIGHT NOW, WE MUST STOP THE COMMUNISTS, MARXISTS AND FASCIST “PIGS” AT EVERY TURN AND, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

Trump couldn't even manage write an entire, albeit run-on, sentence which any rational American leader could have written  in a way that truly honored those who this holiday is meant to honor. Take President Biden, for example. He was also up early today and this is his tweet:

Here are the first two paragraphs of "A Proclamation on Prayer For Peace, Memorial Day, 2023" issued on May 23rd:

On Memorial Day, we honor America’s beloved daughters and sons who gave their last full measure of devotion to this Nation.  We can never fully repay the debt we owe these fallen heroes.  But today, we vow to rededicate ourselves to the work for which they gave their lives, and we recommit to supporting the families, caregivers, and survivors they left behind.

 For generations, stretching back to the formation of our country, these courageous people answered duty’s call, willing to give their lives for that which we all hold dear.  They fought for our Independence.  They defended our democracy.  They sacrificed for our freedom.  And today, as they lie in eternal peace, we continue to live by the light of liberty that they so bravely kept burning bright around the world.

One would have to be really cynical and a Biden hater to suggest or believe the president was playacting when he was at the Tomb of The Unknown Soldier today:

A number of reasons why Trump spends the wee hours of the morning (this one was posted later than most, at 4:43 AM) on his Truth Social platform venting his spleen (or whatever organ) have been proposed. Some have attributed this to dementia (even Steve Bannon) and a few have even suggested this is because he has late stage syphilis. The explanation is really simple: he's human. 

What!

How can I say he's human?

This is because no matter who anyone is one of two things will happen when they are under extreme stress. The stress may be conscious or unconscious or something in between. Evil people may be facing the hangman's noose or an imminent natural death and have what religious people sometimes call a "come to Jesus moment" and ask God forgiveness, while others may escalate their, again with a religious metaphor, worst angels or inner devils.

I am not going to relitigate the case which I and many other psychotherapists have made for diagnosing or calling Trump a malignant narcissist.  You can Google it here to see what others besides me have written or Google it with my name to see what I've written. Suffice to say he meets the criteria for this assessment of his psychopathology. For more applicable to what is happening to Trump Goggle narcissistic rage and injury here.

What I see as occurring now is an escalation of his rage reactions and lashing out against people he see as attacking him. Jack Smith, Fanni Willis, Alvin Bragg, Leticia James, and E. Jean Carroll are examples. He even raged against Judge Arthur Engoron who is hearing Leticia James' New York State case calling him a "Radical Left Lunatic Judge in New York City" who is "refusing to let go of the case. He is a partisan disaster. A Rigged & Corrupt System!"

We may never know whether any of his lawyers told him that this is recklessly self-defeating behavior for someone who is in a legal predicament. Even a lawyer who graduated last in their class from the worst law school in America and was handling nothing more consequential than traffic tickets they thought were unfair would tell their impulsive clients not to insult the judge.

As a bad legal client Trump and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, the eyepatch guy, have a lot in comment besides their personality in that they are a defense lawyer's worst nightmare. Rhodes, who his ex-wife described as cruel and abusive, might have avoided the 18 year sentence if he had shown a modicum of remorse. Instead he raged about how the system was corrupt and he was justified in everything he did.

The best judges and prosecutors don't let their emotions influence their adherence to the law, but I assume some of them struggle not to let their feelings get to them when they deal with defendants who are accused of committing horrendous crimes or who behave with outrageous disrespect whether in public or in the courtroom. When a judge holds someone in contempt it shouldn't be due to hurt feelings but because their behavior met object criteria for contempt. 

Common sense would dictate that someone whose future depends on the total dispassionate objectivity of judges and prosecutors should try not to piss them off since, after all, they are only human. They'd be as stupid as a critically ill or injured patient rushed to the hospital who insulted the emergency room doctors and nurses.

.

Addendum:

From Barack Obama:

From Vote Vets: 

One doesn't have to pronounce that Trump has one or another actual psychiatric condition. For example, in "Understanding Donald Trump's Narcissism" a psychotherapist really diagnoses him without making a diagnosis.

Update:

Not to gush over President Biden, but his powerful and poignant Memorial Day remarks were one of his best speeches ever. While most of it was probably written for him and it was on a teleprompter you could see he was considering the meaning of each and every sentence as he spoke them. There were references that I am certain he added and while delivering the speech he seemed to add extemporaneous comments including to a mother and daughter ho were in the audience whose husband and father was killed in action. Not that I was looking for a stumble or stutter but I could count only three times when his delivery was anything but flawless. At the 40 minute mark you can watch the video of the speech here.

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It's redundant to say crazy cuckoo MAGA people but it also insults Sonny the cuckoo bird

By Hal Brown, MSW,  Retired psychotherapist. More about me.

Fair Use, General Mills

Maybe I needed a second cup of coffee to clear the cobwebs out of my mind this morning but the first thing that caught my attention in the title of the following article was the first four words:

Reading this made me think of the original crazy cuckoo.

In context below these words were used by Democratic strategist Kurt Bardella explaining how Biden outmaneuvered McCarthy on the debt ceiling deal as follows:

So if this goes down because Matt Gaetz or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert or any of those crazy cuckoo MAGA people decide to tank the US economy, it is one hundred percent going to be at the feet of the Republican Party and not the president."

Cocoa Puffs is a classic American cereal known for being marketed to children and for its sugar content. It was introduced in 1956. 

While the name "Sonny" may be the answer to a trivia question, the bird's catchphrase, "Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs" has become iconic. How deeply impeded in American culture it is can be demonstrated by the 2011 story about  a sword-swinging samurai declaring himself 'Cuckoo For Cocoa Puffs' when he was arrested. In another case a man was arrested for indecent exposure when he was walking naked down a street in Tulsa and he claimed it was due to eating Cocoa Puffs.

Here's Sonny's "bio" from Wikipedia:

The mascot of Cocoa Puffs, Sonny the Cuckoo Bird, was introduced in 1962. In television commercials, Sonny attempts to concentrate on a normal task but ends up coming across some reference to Cocoa Puffs themselves (usually described by the adjectives "munchy, crunchy, chocolatey") and bursts with enthusiasm, exclaiming his catchphrase "I'm cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!"^[5] Sonny was voiced by Chuck McCann from 1962 to 1978, and has been voiced by Larry Kenney since 1978.^[6]

The line "cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs" has entered the vernacular as a term for somebody who is irrational.^[7]

Sonny's name comes from the original format of the commercials, in which he was paired with his grandfather (also voiced by McCann). Rather than proper names, they always referred to each other as "Gramps" and "Sonny." When the grandfather was dropped from the ads, "Sonny" remained as the character's name. In 2010, Gramps returned to the Cocoa Puffs ads, with McCann reprising his role as Gramps and Kenney continuing to voice Sonny.

Sonny was designed by Gene Cleaves. Animation pioneer "Grim" Natwick (of Fleischers' Betty Boop team) also contributed to the early images of Sonny and Gramps, according to then-contemporaries who collaborated with Natwick.^[8]

Sonny was originally depicted as wearing a pink-and-white striped shirt, then in 1995 was redesigned, this time wearing 1990s "extreme" clothes and being given a more Disney-esque appearance. In 2004, he was redesigned in a more simplistic fashion, this time without clothing.

Sonny, of course, was the original crazy cuckoo. He wasn't crazy in the sense of being mentally ill, he was crazy in sense of being extremely enthusiastic.

As far as being a cuckoo bird he didn't look anything like real cuckoos.

Here's something I didn't know until I read about cuckoos in Wikipedia:

Cuckoos have played a role in human culture for thousands of years, appearing in Greek mythology as sacred to the goddess Hera. In Europe, the cuckoo is associated with spring, and with cuckoldry, for example in Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost. In India, cuckoos are sacred to Kamadeva, the god of desire and longing, whereas in Japan, the cuckoo symbolises unrequited love.

Not to get too serious, oh crap, this all is very serious... but between having Donald Trump who was merely a malignant narcissist who expressed delusional beliefs to having legislators influencing policy who very well may be clinically delusional, and having so many people in MAGA world being unmoored from reality, this country really does need some intensive psychotherapy.

Marjorie Taylor Greene's most famous lunacy was suggesting that California wildfires were caused by George Soro and his space laser. I wish it was possible that the ghost of Sigmund Freud, another famous Jew, could tell NASA and the NIMH how to make mental health space lasers.

Addendum: 

Freud didn't really say this, but he might have....

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Can Twitter replace Fox News? Consider what my Twitter page looked like this morning.

By Hal Brown 

Most of you, if I have an accurate sense of my blog readers, are loathe to even click on Twitter let alone actually have an account and post their own tweets there. You probably would be one of the people depicted in the DonkeyHotey image from 2022 above. You can see how he was depicted by caricaturist DonkeyHotey (website) with an impish smile in 2012 to looking mean but oblivious in his grandiose state of smug self-delusion in 2022. 

Yet Elon Musk makes the news almost every day and now, according to a featured article in Salon this morning, wants to have Twitter replace Fox News:

I am not sure how this is possible. I doubt very many people want to turn off their televisions and use their laptops or other Internet devises to get their fix of right-wing opinion. There are ways to watch the Internet on the big screen (seeWikiHow) - but how many people are going to do this? My hunch is not very many. I tried to get my laptop to play through my smart TV with a cable I had for another purpose and after considerable trial and error I manage to get it to work. 

Then  noticed that my smart TV had an Internet setting so I was able to get Twitter there.

This may all seem like techie stuff, but in order for Musk to succeed in making Twitter an alternative to Fox News he has to have numerous people willing to take the steps to put it on their televisions. 

Given that, how many people even open Twitter first thing when they look at what's online using an Internet device? The MAGA world he lusting after, even want to follow the news, are more likely to turn on their television than go to the Internet. If he really wanted to become a media mogul like Rupert Murdoch he would be better off if he purchased NewsMax or One America News (OAN) and try to expand the number of cable stations which broadcast them. This is a bit dated being from 2021 but is relevant: Large Majorities of Newsmax and OAN News Consumers Also Go to Fox News. He'd have his work cut out for him but at least he'd have an opening to break into television.

My morning online routine is to look at my overnight email, then see what HUFFPOST has as their top story, check Raw Story for their articles which summarizes news as it breaks, I scan The New York Times and Washington Post websites, and see what Salon is publishing.

I always have MSNBC on so on weekdays "Morning Joe" is playing in the background.

Among all these sources I try to come up with an original take for my blog of the day.

For those of you who rarely if ever look at Twitter, and may see screen grabs of select tweets in various articles, below are screen grabs of my Twitter page for this morning.

Clicking images will enlarge them and not take you to Twitter.

After skimming the Salon article I thought I'd see what just going to Twitter.com looked like.

The top tweet is from Musk about DeSantis and his announcement on Twitter:

What stood out to me was the Trump-like incoherent sentence "But you what isn't noise?" I assume he meant to write "But what you hear isn't noise" ending with a period rather than a question mark. The sentence after that isn't grammatical either. What would convey what (true or not) Musk meant is that what people heard wasn't noise but rather was DeSantis setting an all-time record for fund-raising.

If you click on Find out more this is what you will see:

You will have to go to Twitter (here) to read their Community Notes Guide.

In order going down the page as it appeared on my laptop are the following mishmash of tweets. I don't know if your Twitter page would look like this. I was struck by the contrast in tweets from liberal Thom Hartmann's tweet with was second under Musk's tweet to Lauren Boebert which was the next tweet. Down the page there was a similar contrast.

While alternative platforms, one of the best known being Mastodon (below)  have tried to replace Twitter, none have lured away the well known posters on Twitter as the screen grabs show.

Today there are tweets from President Biden, Kevin McCarthy, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rick Scott,  George Conway, Jim Jordan, and Barack Obama for example.

 So far I haven't seen a post on Mastodon, where I have an account where I've made 952 posts since Nov. 2022 (here) copied onto a news or opinion article they way so many tweets are.

 

Update: (Ben Collins is a senior reported at NBC News)

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