Mainstream media fails to warn that Trump aspires to be a fascist warlord

Mainstream media fails to warn that Trump aspires to be a fascist warlord

by Hal Brown

Comment on my stories on Facebook (here) or on Twitter (here). Stories that pique my interest through the day are down the page.

Salon's Chauncey DeVega once again tried to sound the alarm about just how dangerous Donald Trump is. Unfortunately Salon's alarm bell isn't nearly loud enough to wake democracy loving Americans  up so they do something to stop it.

His message can be summarized in just the first two and the last paragraphs. 

Donald Trump aspires to be a warlord. He publicly admires despots, tyrants and other authoritarian leaders who kill their enemies and take away the rights of anyone who oppose them. Mental health professionals have repeatedly warned that Donald Trump is likely a sociopath with an erotic attraction to violence and mayhem.

He has repeatedly shown that he has no regard for the rule of law, democracy, human rights or other restrictions on his behavior. He encourages his followers and allies to engage in acts of terrorism and other violence on his behalf. The most notable example came, of course, on Jan. 6, 2021. To this point, Trump has been limited by his cowardice. He prefers to have others engage in violence on his behalf instead of directly ordering such acts or participating in them himself.

This was the lead story in Salon this morning:

By way of comparison this was the lead on FoxNews' website this morning:

Alas, Salon's influence is less than nil when it comes to swaying opinion among the people whose eyes to the growing menace of Trumpian fascism in America couldn't be more tightly closed.

The story has been cross-published on RawStory (here) where it is trending and has, as of this writing, 167 comments. 

I have written extensively about Trump being a dangerous malignant narcissist who revels in violent fantasies. In fact just the other day Trump's writing about Mitch McConnell having a "DEATH WISH" prompted me to write this story showing him as I think he fantasizes himself:

I am alway interested in what other mental health professionals have had to say about him, particularly the only one who knows him up close and personal. Chauncy DeVega quoted Mary Trump in his story.

I wanted to put her words into an illustration showing an angry Trump so I looked "angry Trump" up on DuckDuckGo and the Salon article came up first:

Click above to enlarge

Here are the words I wanted to highly with the photo:

Chauncey DeVega concludes his article as follows:

Aspiring warlord Donald Trump has told America and the world exactly what he and his movement intend to do. Unfortunately, the mainstream news media and other hope-peddlers have deluded themselves into thinking that it's all a misunderstanding or harmless hyperbole. We should take Trump at his word. On these issues, he does not prevaricate or tell lies. It will do no good to protest that you couldn't possibly have known. We all knew this was coming, and now it's here.

If the crisis to democracy isn't here right now it certainly is around the corner. Like Putin having amassed his troops for their so-called military exercise on the borders of Ukraine, Trump has readied his soldiers to do battle.  The signs are there. How big do they have to get?

Whether it's the Boy Scout motto, Miguel de Cervantes, or the proverb "to be forewarned is to be forearmed" the message is the same...

Afterword:

The proverb "to be forewarned is to be forearmed" should be applicable to Donald Trump.  For proverb and idiom mavens (from this website):

Many idioms that have no obvious source are often referred to, for no good reason, as 'old proverbs'. 'Forewarned is forearmed' has a genuine claim to be called such, as it dates from at least the end of the 16th century, and could be much earlier. The Latin saying 'praemonitus, praemunitus' loosely translates as 'forewarned is forearmed'. There's no evidence to show that the English proverb is merely a translation of the Latin though. The two sayings could easily have originated independently.

The meaning of the proverb is quite straightforward and literal - so long as it is understood that forearm is here the archaic verb meaning 'to arm in advance', rather than the noun forearm, that is, the part of the arm between the elbow and wrist. The saying is so straightforward in fact that it was originally simply 'forewarned, forearmed'. It is found in that form in Robert Greene's A Notable Discovery of Coosnage (a.k.a. The Art of Conny-catching), 1592:

"forewarned, forearmed: burnt children dread the fire."

Stories of the day that piqued my interest.

This article came out in February. It is now even more relevant than it was then:

The hypothetical look into what happens if Trump goes to prison

Here’s Hoping Elon Musk Destroys Twitter, by Ross Doughat (NY Times, Subscription)

The essay begins:

“I strongly supported Obama for President,” Elon Musk tweeted late last month, part of the spree of ideological comments accompanying his continuing takeover of Twitter, “but today’s Democratic Party has been hijacked by extremists.” Around the same time, he set the social-media platform ablaze by reposting a cartoon showing a stick figure comfortably on the center-left in 2008 redefined as a right-wing bigot by 2021 because the left-wing stick figure had raced way off to the left. Then this week, he expressed the same kind of thought in the abbreviated style for which the site is famous: “Twitter obv has a strong left wing bias.”

And now, at last, we have the news that he’s likely to allow Donald Trump to tweet freely once again.

All of these comments and promises align the country’s richest man with the rightward side in our culture war. But though I don’t know Musk — I’ve never interviewed him or hung out with him in any secret billionaire lair — I think I know enough about him, and I know enough Silicon Valley people like him, to suggest that neither his tweeted self-descriptions nor the criticisms being lobbed his way capture what’s distinctive about his position and worldview.

A term like “conservative” doesn’t fit the Tesla tycoon; even “libertarian,” while closer to the mark, associates Musk with a lot of ideas that I don’t think he particularly cares about. A better label comes from Virginia Postrel, in her 1998 book “The Future and Its Enemies”: Musk is what she calls a “dynamist,” meaning someone whose primary commitments are to exploration and discovery, someone who believes that the best society is one that’s always inventing, transforming, doing something new.

If you think this sounds uncontroversial, think again. First, the dynamist may not care where novelty and invention spring from: Unlike the purist libertarian, he might be indifferent to questions of public versus private spending, happy to embrace government help if that’s what it takes to get the new thing off the ground — and happy to take that help from regimes like Communist China no less than from our own. And he may be willing to risk much more than either the typical progressive or the typical conservative for the sake of innovation. Political principle, social stability and moral order are all potentially negotiable when discovery alone is your North Star.

My comment:

Full disclosure: I have a Twitter account which I primarily use to try to promote stories I post on my blog. I fully expect Musk to allow Trump to resume tweeting. Aside from the negative of handing a victory of sorts to Trump, there are two positives. The lesser is that if he personally invested money in Truth Social that is gone since that platform will immediately go under. The greater positive is that every time he tweets something off the wall or outrageous (which will be most of the time) there will be numerous sarcastic, scathing, and snarky replies, some with contemptuous, mocking, and ridiculing illustrations which will be posted in articles about his tweet.

Related from BuzzFeed

We were on...

"Have you ever had a friend who’s had one of those on-again-off-again relationships, like a less cute Ross and Rachel situation?"

 Excerpts:

.... it was easy to imagine Republicans launching apoplectic broadsides in response to Biden’s sweeping and progressive pardons. The public would inevitably hear tired clichés about Democrats being “soft on crime” and failing to appreciate the seriousness of “gateway drugs.”

And yet, in the wake of Biden’s announcement, the Republican National Committee had literally nothing to say about it. The National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee were silent, too.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy also completely ignored the developments.

To be sure, it’d be an exaggeration to suggest that all Republicans sat on their hands. Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who routinely complains that not enough Americans are behind bars, made sure to register his disapproval yesterday. So did one of Fox News’ prime-time hosts.

But by any fair measure, the GOP apparently thought that the smart election season move yesterday would be to let Biden’s pardons go unmentioned.

My own opinion on this is that the timing coming prior to the November elections is smart. Biden has been characterized by the Right as being old and out of touch with the younger generations which these days seems to mean anyone not on Social Security. In the case of marijuana there are numerous potential voters left, right, and center who have used it in the past or who currently used it. Whether any of them are inclined to vote Republican might change their mind based on this issue alone is hard to say. However, it can't hurt and it may very well help some Democrats in close races.

Excerpts:

"...if God Himself actually tells you (to kill someone), and He’s like, 'Hey, I am the ultimate governor of all of life, and I have judicially said that person is going to die, and I’m telling you to do it,' yeah," Winger said. "Now, historically, as a Christian, do I expect this to happen? Not really.

He later backtracks:

 "So, as a Christian, in principle, if God tells you to kill someone, yes, you should. It’s God."

"But in practical reality, I really don’t expect this to happen," he continued. "Not that there could never be an exception, but if anybody comes up to me, and says, 'God told me to kill so-and-so,' my default is to think they’re probably wrong, because there’s a lot more weirdos out there than there are people that God is telling to do something like that. There’s my answer."

Basically he's saying that it is "weirdos" who hear God telling them to kill people. In fact, anybody who actually hears voices whether they believe they come from God or a teapot is mentally ill. It doesn't matter whether the voices tell them to adhere to Christian values or run naked in the street, they are still auditory hallucinations.

This is bad news for the FBI and in particular Trump appointee FBI Director Wray:

Read article about this in RawStory. It isn't just Director Gray that is under fire. Attorney General Garland is also being harshly criticized for the way is, or isn't, handling the documents investigation.

You probably don't read The Bulwark. If you don't look at from time to time you miss stories like this:

Excerpt:

Masters was asked, point blank, if he thought the 2020 election was “stolen” or “rigged—in any way, shape, or form—enough to keep Donald Trump out of the White House,” and Masters replied:

I suspect that if the FBI didn’t work with Big Tech and Big Media to censor the Hunter Biden crime story, yeah, I suspect that changed a lot of people’s votes. I suspect President Trump would be in the White House today if Big Tech and Big Media and the FBI didn’t work together to put the thumb on the scale to get Joe Biden in there.

Trump is 'daring the DOJ to come and get him' over more missing documents: NYT's Haberman...

She said ""The Trump team is basically daring the DOJ, once again, to come get him and we'll see what the DOJ does."

I am very skeptical this comes from Trump's team of lawyers telling him what they know is in his best interests. It may be another "team" of sycophants. If he hears it from his lawyers they are telling him what he wants to hear. I think this comes form Trump and is absolutely predictable because he is a malignant narcissist with seriously impaired judgment. He revels in the thought of a confrontation where he, in his grandiose delusional state, which he thinks he will win. He's bought into his own propaganda, into the iconography produced by artists hawking their wares to his cult.

Here's a name from the past that I bet you forgot about:

Harvey Weinstein’s Second Trial For Rape And Sexual Assault Charges Begins Next Week. Here’s What You Need To Know.

After being convicted of sexually assaulting two women in New York, the former movie producer is facing criminal charges related to five other women in Los Angeles.

Oregon news: 

This is bad, very very bad...

Trump's "very famous pollster" John McLaughlin isn't THAT John McLaughlin

Trump's "very famous pollster" John McLaughlin isn't THAT John McLaughlin

by Hal Brown

Scroll down the page for news stories that break during the day which I think reader would be interested in.

This is the HuffPost story that led me to see if Wikipedia had added breaking news to to profile of the only "famous" person named John McLaughlin I'd heard of:

Trump’s Eerie Claim About Washington And Lincoln Sets Twitter Ablaze:

Former President Donald Trump made a claim on Wednesday that was wild by even his lofty standards. He said he would’ve not only defeated an undead George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in an election, but would’ve wiped them out in a historic landslide. 

Speaking at the Hispanic Leadership Conference in Miami, Trump said: 

“I remember a very famous pollster, very well known, John McLaughlin, came to my office just prior to the plague coming and he said, ‘Sir, if George Washington and Abraham Lincoln came alive from the dead and they formed a president-vice president team, you would beat them by 40 percent.’ That’s how good our numbers were.” 

Notably, Trump did not mention the condition of the zombie presidents in this wild scenario, which would mean a 70-30 landslide victory by Trump...

I remember John McLaughin as a TV host but I didn't know he was a pollster. I wanted to determine whether he was, and if there was any verification that he ever met with Trump to telling him about polls that showed him beating George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in a hypothetical race.

It took a minute to find out that there's another person with that name who is a pollster.

This is from a website called Historica Wiki:

John McLaughlin was an American pollster who worked for Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign. An Irish-American whose grandfather immigrated to the United States in 1876 and became an NYPD captain, he was born in Fort Dix, New Jersey while his father served in the "Fighting 69th" New York Infantry Regiment; his uncle was the regiment's colonel. In 2018, he spoke out against a Newsweek op-ed which criticized the prevalence of Irish-American conservativ pundits in contrast to "sober"  Protestant pundits during the 20th century, and he argued that the Irish-American vote swung several swing states towards the Republican Party  due to the Democratic Party's identity politics.

We may never know whether Trump believed that his very own John McLaughlin was one and the same John McLaughin who was actually famous. 

It is certainly possible that the meeting Trump described actually occurred and that pollster McLaughlin actually conducted the poll he told him about.

I wouldn't be surprised if this actually happened and since the McLaughlin in question is still alive I hope someone asks him about this. 

What does surprise me is that assuming this incident occurred  Trump waited until now to tell this story. It is possible he forgot about it, though if he thought McLaughlin was really "very famous" it seems like he would have related this claimed poll result a long time ago.

Remember (like who could forget?) this story:

... and then there are all the cartoons and photoshops of Trump on Mt. Rushmore (Google images):

Click images to enlarge

There are three basic kinds of narcissism. One is usually called healthy narcissism which is tied in with having a high level of self-esteem and which often motivates people to excel putting aside elements of self-doubt when faced with difficult tasks. 

Then there is the pathological narcissism present in people who have all or most of the characteristics of narcissistic personality disorder which by now most reader are familiar with since numerous clinicians have explained how Trump fits into this diagnosis:

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) describes NPD as possessing at least five of the following nine criteria.^[2]

• A grandiose sense of self-importance
• Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love
• Believing that they are "special" and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)
• Requiring excessive admiration
• A sense of entitlement (unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with their expectations)
• Being interpersonally exploitative (taking advantage of others to achieve their own ends)
• Lacking empathy (unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others)
• Often being envious of others or believing that others are envious of them
• Showing arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes

Then there's a third kind which hasn't made it into the diagnostic manual. This is delusional narcissism.

Mary Trump explains as a clinical psychologist how her uncle fits into this category here:

Mary Trump tell-all paints president as a ‘narcissist’ who is ‘lost to his own delusional spin’

Delusional narcissism is the stuff of fictional characters whose braggadocio or imagined grandiose view of themselves is magnified for comedic effect. Think of the Evil Queen who utters the famous line “Magic mirror, on the wall – who is the fairest one of all?” Of course, think of the preening narcissist Donald Trump:

.....

While on the subject of narcissistic people in the news, there's Elon Musk, who I wrote about on Monday:

Click above to read article

Of course he wants to own Twitter. He's the world's richest person so he doesn't need the money. This is all about keeping himself in the news. Once he takes control most of what I read says that one of his first acts will be to re-instate Trump's account.

Assuming Trump starts tweeting there, which I think he will, it will render his Truth Social platform just about worthless. I don't know if Trump has any of his own money invested in Truth Social but if he does it will be flushed down the toilet. Even if he doesn't loose money it will on the list as yet another of his failed ventures.

He'll spin his return to Twitter as a victory and revel in having a large audience for his tweets. However, what he will also have to deal with is the media republishing some of the most snarky of the replies to his tweets the way they post the tweets like those shown in the HuffPost article referenced in my story today.

I will post news stories which pique my interest as they break though the day. Here's some you may have missed. 

Maggie Haberman Flushes Out The Book Detail That Really Troubled Donald Trump

Of all the details about Donald Trump in Maggie Haberman’s new book “Confidence Man,” the New York Times reporter said the former president was most riled by her reporting that he tore up and flushed papers down White House toilets.

“I think that was what upset him the most,” Haberman told Stephen Colbert on Tuesday’s broadcast of “The Late Show.”

“He had an immediate and pronounced and angry reaction to that reporting when I put it out many months ago,” she continued. “He issued a statement, it was a phone call to the world, and I think his exact statement was, his question was, ‘Who would know that?’ Which I think was actually a literal question that he was asking, but he asked it out loud.”

Trump in response to the story “spent some time asking his aides, ‘What do you think of that reporting?’” Haberman added. “Usually that’s because he’s trying to figure out whether something is damaging to him or not or how much more could be there.”

When Haberman initially broke the news, Trump denied the claim. The reporter later tweeted photographs of papers, with what appeared to be Trump’s handwriting on them, clogging up toilet bowls.

Trump coup attempt loses title of 'funniest Supreme Court filing'

What world do we live in that a satirical outlet defends First Amendment rights better than police and our courts?

Hunter Biden might be charged with some stuff — but not enough stuff to satiate Republicans

Feds say there's evidence to charge Hunter in relation to taxes and a gun purchase, but his enemies want to squeeze