Trump supposedly had a bad day yesterday, but did he feel it?

By Hal Brown

 Note the archives are on the right >

 

According to Lisa Rubin writing on The Maddow Blog Trump's day went for bad to worst yesterday. 

Trump is a man who doesn't experience what you and I would call normal human reactions or emotions. About as normal, or fairly common, a reaction that he experiences may be fury when he doesn't get his way. That sometimes appears to be out of control and might be better referred to colloquially as blind rage if it isn't a performance to incite his crowds. With Trump you can never be sure about such things.

I doubt he moped around Mar-a-Lago last night lamenting how bad his day went. I doubt he stormed around throwing pottery against the wall. 

It wouldn't surprise me if he laughed about how he lied his ass off in his E. Jean Carroll deposition and figured that the news about the Eastman emails was pee-pee in the wind. He knows that few members of his Tucker Carlson watching cult would even be aware of this.

Trump's reaction to news like this and like this.

Click above to enlarge image

If you read articles like "George Conway warns of Trump 'meltdown to end all meltdowns'" you might think, or at least hope, that Trump is near the brink of descending into irreversible Mad Hatter madness.

Public domain image adapted by Hal Brown

You might very well be wrong. Trump isn't normal. There's a timeworn cliche in psychology that is used to explain the difference between neurosis and psychosis:

Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them.

One of the primary differences between what used to be called neurosis (and now has other names like anxiety disorder or depressive disorder) and psychosis is that those suffering from a neurosis can discern reality from unreality. To varying degrees those suffering from psychosis have impaired reality testing.

Of course Trump actually owns his version of a castle, but that isn't the point. 

Trump has rigid and primitive ways of dealing with things that happen to him that would devastate most people. In psychology the ways people cope with stress are called defense mechanisms and everyone uses them. 

Some, like humor, are considered by experts to be healthy. Somewhere in the middle is projection. This is unconsciously taking unwanted emotions or traits you don’t like about yourself and attributing them to someone else. Trump frequently uses this but it may be conscious or partially conscious.  

The most unhealthy defense is denial. This is where everything that doesn't fit into one's belief system is denied.

This is where I trying to decide whether or not to resort to what has become a cheap cliche.

It may very well be that Trump doesn't have a worry in the world, at least a worry he actually takes seriously.

Let's hope that at some point in the near future reality will bite him, and bite him (to use a word he likes) bigly.

You can use your imagination to visualize what part of his anatomy you want reality to sink its teeth into.

Previous four editions:

• The vicious "art" of political photoshopping
• Investigation: The mystery of how Trump got Judge ...
• Is Trump crazy or crazy like a fox? It may be up t...
• Trump Junior praises conspiracy theorists for patt...

Comment below.

The vicious "art" of political photoshopping

By Hal Brown

One of my favorite illustrations is below. I showed Trump during his hour long outside time in prison playing golf with his little putter. Since I doubt he'd be in the general population I assume he'd be in a segregated cell but he'd still be allowed outside once a day for exercise. 

It took longer to find the perfect photo of a prison yard which actually had a fenced in area with some grass in it than it did for me to find a picture of Trump putting and add it. I could have tried to put him in prison orange pants but as you can see in the second picture that didn't come out very well.

When I was a kid too old to really read the articles in The New Yorker, which we subscribed to, I always looked forward to each issue to look at the cartoons. Charles Addams was my favorite. This probably says a lot about my personality. I aspired to be a cartoonist when I grow up, but alas I couldn't draw well enough. I remember drawing a cartoon of a severed head floating down a river singing "I ain't got no body." 

It was only when easily to learn inexpensive photo manipulation software became available that I was able to put hopefully better ideas into illustrations. Before I was banned from posting on Daily Kos I was the only one who regularly posted their own illustrations for stories they pit on the website.

Frequently when I end up writing on a political topic I think of an illustration to create to use before I give much thought to what I'm going to write.

I enjoy writing but there is an element of work in this since I have to not only try to come up with an original perspective on an issue in the news, but compose grammatical and coherent sentences and also try to be clever and snarky. Making the illustrations is pure enjoyment. It may take as many as 10 steps to put together an illustration but it never feels like work.

In addition to the simple things I can do on my laptop screen I use two inexpensive programs, InPixio and BeFunky. I don't use Photoshop itself. Years ago Kleenex became cleanex and referred to any facial tissue.Google used to mean any Internet search and now it's a verb, to google. Photoshop is still a product but "photoshop" is often used lower case to mean any image manipulation.

I used InPixio to add a football to a photoshop somebody else made:

Click to enlarge

In yesterday's blog story I also used someone else's image to make my own. I took this image...

and using both BeFunky and InPixio created this one:

Because that story was about Judge Cannon as well as Trump I made this image of her to go with this caption: 

Judge Cannon's reputation among what appears to be the vast majority of legal scholars seems to be in ruins. Does she care? My impression is that she couldn't care less even though she is in dire need of the legal version of a visit to the emergency room.

I often post my images on Twitter:

A caricaturist who calls himself DonkeyHotey (to be pronounced Don Quixote) allows anyone to use his pictures with credit. I often use them, for example the numerous caricatures of Trump which I used to make this one adding the playing cards:

I used BeFunky to change Trump's face and InPixio to add the vomit to this image:

Sometimes I just make an image to post as a comment to an article on RawStory since they allow pictures in the comments section. I used this in an article about Marjorie Taylor Greene. I used BeFunky to turn a color photo of her into the black and white version below, and InPixio to put her in front of an old time KKK rally.

Here's how I turned a Trump frown upside down and a Judge Cannon smile into a frown:

I found the secret stamps online and a stack of file folders and added them to the photo of Mr. Spock. It takes an extra step to copy just his fingers so they seem to be holding the documents.

I added the hot air to this and put the caricature of Musk into space next to his Tesla.

I used these in one blog story:

Even if I could draw I'd be hard pressed to be as creative as the most well-known political cartoonists. For example, Ann Telnaes is a political cartoonist for The Washington Post who creates some of the best in the genre. You can see some of them if you don't subscribe on Twitter. Here's a recent one, click below to animate it.

 

I have to take a break now. If I have time I'll find some of what I consider my better illustrations. 

Investigation: The mystery of how Trump got Judge Cannon, coincidence or not?

Trump managed to get a Trump loving judge to kiss his royal ass, but was it blind luck?

By Hal Brown

I changed the photo of Trump originally depicted in an image someone else made of him on a mocked-up Time cover (here and below) to make him look decidedly unpresidential. I put him in prison and added Lady Justice on the left and an X'ed out altered image I made of Judge Cannon on the right.

Another of my images: Judge Cannon's reputation among what appears to be the vast majority of legal scholars seems to be in ruins. Does she care? My impression is that she couldn't care less even though she is in dire need of the legal version of a visit to the emergency room.

You need a Daily Beast subscription to read this article on their website where you can see the illustration which shows a rendering of a well-worn paperback mystery titled "The Cannon Clue."

You can read the Daily Beast article without a subscription here on YaHoo.

 RAWSTORY provides a good summary:

The Daily Beast story describes how Trump lawyers may have shopped for a judge they presumed would be not merely friendly but lovingly to kiss the ample Trump royal ass. The crucial would here is "may" since so far there's no proof they did this. Was the fix in? Or did they decide to increase the odds that they'd have Judge Cannon assigned the documents case. We just don't know the answer. This has not stopped speculation.

If you couldn't buy an item you needed in a nearby store in this era of online shopping you might get it from Amazon. But they did have the equivalent of an online store to file their case. They claimed the online mechanism was offline but it turns out it wasn't. This was a lie. So they they hit the streets and traveled some distance from the court where the case normally would have filed to Judge Cannon's courthouse. However, there are nine judges there so there would be no guarantee she'd get the case.

This is the gist of what the article reports:

When Donald Trump’s legal team filed their court paperwork protesting the Mar-a-Lago raid, a lawyer took the rare step of actually filing the paperwork in person. At a courthouse 44 miles from Mar-a-Lago. And they got a judge to oversee the case that was outside both West Palm Beach—where the raid took place—and the district where they filed," the Daily Beast reporter wrote. "Those incredible coincidences have led lawyers and legal experts to suggest that something may not be above board with how Trump’s team filed their lawsuit."

It turns out that filing such legal briefs are almost never done at a courthouse in person anymore. In almost all jurisdictions they are done electronically. 

The RAWSTORY article concludes:

Lawyers in the area, who didn't want to give their names, also found the method of filing the lawsuit curious.

According to one, "I don’t know anybody who files in person. I didn’t even know you could do that anymore. It looks like this person was trying to select a particular judge,” while another suggested, "People don’t do this anymore. It’s extremely odd. I guess you could do this if you wanted to get a particular judge—or avoid getting a particular judge."

So far there's no irrefutable proof that the fix was in. It may be that the cards were stacked to favor Cannon's being assigned the case. It may be a coincidence. 

This is from The Daily Beast:

• “I think somebody pulled a fast one in the clerk’s office to rotate it to a friendly judge. It doesn’t sound like it was done by the blind filing system,” mused another.
• ...which consists of nine judges. Cannon is in a neighboring division, so she can occasionally get West Palm Beach cases.
• Theoretically, that would give Trump a 1-in-9 chance of getting Cannon on the case.
• However, The Daily Beast analyzed new case assignments in West Palm Beach in the week preceding Trump’s lawsuit and found that Cannon actually got a much higher share, nine of the 29 new complaints—roughly a third of all cases.
• But the system still appears random.
• On Monday, Aug. 22, in West Palm Beach, Cannon got the first case. Trump’s lawsuit was the second of the day in that division, and she got that too.
• A head clerk of federal courts in another state told The Daily Beast that lawyers sometimes time filings as if they’re players at a casino. Sometimes it works.
• “If you play cards and count the cards, I suppose they could say, ‘I’ll hold this here until I see if other judges got assignments.’ But it would be very risky because it’s random,” she said.

 It all may boil down to what you believe:

Perhaps it was just the luck of the draw:

 

I made my illustration after reading the RAWSTORY article and posted it as a comment there among similar illustrations, below, which other readers posted. I altered this Time Magazine image to make my own:

I changed the photo of Trump to make him look decidedly unpresidential. I put him in prison and added Lady Justice on the left and an X'ed out altered image of Judge Cannon on the right.

Other commenters posted these images: