Trump's weirdest, most stupid, and cruelest idea may have been for the US-Mexican border moat

Trump thinks he's fantastically fabulous. He is really both cruel, stupid, and if he's fabulous he's a fabulous fabulist.

By Hal Brown

As usual, you can click images that aren't links to enlarge them.

Note that archives of all editions are on the right >>

American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation

As I was fitfully drifting off to sleep last night slowly but hopefully surely recovering my bout with pneumonia. I was listening to David Rothkopf (Wiki profile) being interviewed about his new book on NPR. This is from Amazon:

t could have been so much worse: a deeply reported, insider story of how a handful of  Washington officials staged a daring resistance to an unprecedented presidency and prevented chaos overwhelming the government and the nation.

  Each federal employee takes an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic,” but none had imagined that enemy might be the Commander-in-Chief.  With the presidency of Donald Trump, a  fault line between the president and vital forces within his government was established.  Those who honored their oath of office, their obligation to the Constitution, were wary of the president and they in turn were not trusted and occasionally fired and replaced with loyalists.  

American Resistance is the first book to chronicle the unprecedented role so many in the government were forced to play and the consequences of their actions during the Trump administration. From Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and his brother Yevgeny, to  Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, to Bill Taylor, Fiona Hill, and the official who first called himself “Anonymous”—Miles Taylor, among others, Rothkopf examines the resistance movement that slowly built in Washington. Drawing from first hand testimonies, deep background and research, American Resistance shows how when the President threatened to run amok, a few key figures rose in defiance. It reveals the conflict within the Department of Justice over actively seeking instances of election fraud and abuse to help the president illegally retain power, and multiple battles within the White House over the influence of Jared and Ivanka, and in particular the extraordinary efforts to get them security clearances even after they were denied to them.   

David Rothkopf chronicles how each person came to realize that they were working for an administration that threatened to wreak havoc – one Defense Secretary was told by his mother to resign before it was too late – in an intense drama in which a few good men and women stood up to the tyrant in their midst.

You can follow David Rothkopf on Twitter here. He is the host of "Deep State Radio" podcast. I expect we'll be seeing him interviewed on MSNBC and other stations about the important, and frightening, revelations in his book. On Sept. 26 he was on Lawrence O'Donnell's show talking about Russia and Ukraine. Here's the transcript.

 I wonder if Fox News would dare put him on.

You can listen to the interview here:

I modified a frequently used photo of Trump with Be Funky. 

In the interview one of the comic book weird, think DC Comics Bizarro World where everyone has overdosed on LSD, one idea he mentioned was this:

I wondered what a nuclear physicist with hurricane expertise would say what the ramifications of this would be. At least this flight of fancy wasn't manifestly cruel.

But Trump had another series of ideas for handling one of his major obsessions and these were downright sadistic. It involved his solution for dealing with the influx of brown-skinned people into the United States across the border with Mexico.

One idea also involved employing heavy ordinance. When he heard about caravans headed toward the country he asked top military leaders if we could shoot missiles at them. Somehow he was disabused of the idea that firing explosive missiles into an allied border nation was a good idea.

This came after he inquired about whether he could deploy the U.S. military to shoot people who approached the boarder and was told they weren't allowed to do this he asked whether our troops could just shoot them in the legs.

His most bizarre idea involved digging a coast to coast moat along the boarder. He suggested that alligators and snakes be put there to deter people from crossing. I dismissed the notion of putting highly lethal snakes in the water after doing some web searching. Water moccasins (or cottonmouth snakes) aren't particular aggressive and not that poisonous. Maybe Trump had the idea that he could import aquatic cobras from Africa but even I didn't know there was such a snake until I looked it up. 

This is how Task and Purpose covered the story:

 

I thought about how brain-dead an idea this all was. For one thing people could just use boats of various kinds to cross even if there were alligators and snakes, and for another where would he get all the alligators and snakes? Another aspect of using these creatures is what would they eat beside the unlucky people they could devour?

On the plus side, watching so many alligators from the banks of the moat could be a tourist attraction. Vendors could set up there to hawk alligator wares and sell chunks of raw meat to feed them. On the US side they could sell shirts like this:

On the Mexican side they could see shirts like these:

Of course let's not forget that alligator meat is a popular dish in many parts of the country so look for food carts selling many tasty versions as a local very fresh from the canal delicacy:

Above photo from Amazon.

IF THIS WAS BUILT IT COULD BE A MAJOR NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL TOURIST ATTRACTION.

For example there could be boat tours like this:

The background of the Rio Grande River is from this website The boat is The Portland Spirt. It is cut out from a photo I took near my house on the Willamette River (see original).

There's even more to this idea that piqued my interest along the line of just how much more stupid could this man be. By way of comparison the Panama Canal is about 50 miles long. The US - Mexico border is just short of 2,000 miles.

Even if the cost wouldn't be prohibitive what with moving contractor crews and their heavy equipment from all over the country there's a not so small matter of the differences in heights between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Depending on tidal cycles which differ between the two oceans the Pacific can be 20 feet higher than the Atlantic. This is why the Panama Canal has locks.

Hypothetically, let's say such a canal was to be build. It would mean that there would have to some sort to dam on the Pacific side to keep the water from flooding across our southern border. If there was no way to regulate this consider the possible effects aside from changing water levels and tides in both oceans. I have no idea what this would do.

Instead just look simplistically at what ocean tides flowing black and forth between the oceans would do if left uncontrolled.  To prevent erosion all banks of the canal would have to be reinforced to prevent the formation of bays and saltwater lakes on both sides of the border. Maintaining both sides of the erosion protection embankments would not be easy or cheap. Major storm and hurricanes could cause breaches.

If and supposedly when the giant Cascada Earthquake occurs the west coast would have other more serious problems but who knows what it would do to the Trump Canal?

The solution, cost be damned, is obviously a dam. This would have to be a world class damn, it would make Hoover look like a Hoover.

On another subject, here's my comment to this interesting article:

A neuroscientist warns: The war with Trump has just begun — and it’s deeply psychological

Bobby Azarian, Raw Story

October 26, 2022

I don't think a third party stands a chance and is more of a distraction than anything. The Republicans have become the party of authoritarianism and in a sense the know-nothings of modern times. They are the perfect marks in their gullibility, their easily exploited fears of "the other" and their deeply rooted bigotry. Play on their insecurity, fears, and stupidity. That's the magic that has worked for Trump and his minions.

The Democratic Party is reality based and while not without flaws such as infighting and bad messaging, they are trying to maintain what used be values both they and Republicans could usually endorse.

I was hoping for some brilliant way to deprogram those member of the MAGA cult who have swallowed the Kool Aide - obviously they aren't reading articles like this on RawStory, other liberal websites, certainly not my own little blog, and wouldn't tune in to MSNBC even if they exclusively broadcast a no-holds-barred cage match between Trump and Nancy Pelosi. Okay, maybe they'd watch that. How many would read David Rothkoph's new book "American Resistance: The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation" to learn just how cruel and stupid their Dear Leader really is. How many have or will listen to the Bob Woodward tapes and realize that Trump revealed just how dangerous his beliefs were.

Just how can those of us who see the dangers so well explained in this article to enough voters so they never elect Trump or a Trump clone?

I'm still sick, being treated at home for pneumonia, so just a bit about Herschel Walker (again)

 before I go back to rest in bed while I recover from pneumonia....

Herschel Walker is in the news again with another accusation of him getting a woman an abortion. 

A woman who claims she was in a years-long romantic relationship with Herschel Walker says the Republican Senate nominee for Georgia pressured her into having an abortion in 1993, she announced at a press conference on Wednesday.

The woman, referred to as Jane Doe to protect her identity, attended the press conference virtually with her lawyer, Gloria Allred, and read her statement. Her voice was heard, but her face was not shown.

Doe said she decided to tell her story now to highlight what she said is Walker’s hypocrisy. “He has publicly taken the position that he is about life and against abortion under any circumstance when in fact he pressured me to have an abortion and personally ensured that it occurred by driving me to the clinic and paying for it,” said Doe.

At a campaign event in Georgia prior to the press conference, Walker called the allegation a “lie.”

“I already told people this is a lie, and I’m not going to entertain, continue to carry a lie along. And I also want to let you know that I didn’t kill JFK either,” Walker said, adding that Democrats are doing and saying whatever they can to win the Senate seat.

He says it's a lie. Like previous accusations he said it never happened. No way... why won't anyone ask him if there have been other incidents in his life when he didn't recall things other people said they knew happened because they saw him do them or heard him say them?

Read:

• Herschel Walker, or one part of him, may be telling the truth as he remembers it...
• and then read about the therapist who supposedly cured him of having multiple personalities.
• Let's not forget that he admitted to having dissociative identity disorder and amnesia is a hallmark of this condition. It doesn't mean he is straight out lying but it is possible he did these things while another personality (alter) was in control and has no memory of them.

I have no idea wha I'm going to write today, if anything

 I have a doctors appointment in a half hour for a upper respiratory infection that isn't Covid but has laid me low and made me feel miserable for over week. I won't bother with a list of symptoms but they are of concern enough for the doctor to have made an appointment for this morning after a telehealth Zoom visit yesterday afternoon. He may want to order a chest x-ray and put me on some broad-spectrum antibiotics.

I was wrong, no chance Trump will testify live, but perhaps J6 Committee thought he might

By Hal Brown

Trump by DonkeyHotey

I spent some time speculating in these blog posts (below) that Trump might decide he wanted to outsmart the January 6th Committee and run circles around them when he testified and have a huge national audience while he did this. Of course this was a grandiose delusion.

• Can Trump resist starring in the drama of testifying?
• Will Trump comply with J6 subpoena? Don't be surpr...
• 

  Will he or won't he? Part 3 on Trump testifying before J6 Committee

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  Will he or won't he testify? Don't assume he won't. Updated.

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First it was reported that Liz Cheney said that there was no chance he'll even have an opportunity to try this.

Cheney: Jan. 6 Panel Won't Accept Live TV Testimony From Trump

"He’s not going to turn this into a circus," the House committee’s vice chair, Rep. Liz Cheney, said of the former president's subpoena.

Then this came out:

"The committee treats this matter with great seriousness," she said. "We are going to proceed in terms of the questioning of the former president under oath. It may take multiple days. And it will be done with a level of rigor and discipline and seriousness that it deserves."

The panel, Cheney continued, will not allow the former president to turn his testimony into "his first debate against Joe Biden and the circus and the food fight that that became."

“This is far too serious set of issues. And we’ve made clear exactly what his obligations are. And we are proceeding with, with that set out,” she added.

Cheney's office later clarified her remarks, making clear that she was not ruling out the possibility of Trump's live testimony.

So I don't know what to make of this. Was I right or was I wrong? 

I might have been right in another way.

It's possible that the January 6th Committee thought he might actually agree to live testimony and knew that he would, as Liz Cheney said, turn his appearance into a circus or at least attempt to.

Perhaps Cheney and the committee knew what to expect and decided they wouldn't give him a megaphone to air his grievances, or at least make sure there were strict rules in place if they did allow him to testify live.

Perhaps they think the optics of refusing to allow him to testify live would look bad for the committee.

Congress's Crazy Caucus: Let's call it what it is

 By Hal Brown

Kevin McCarthy in the once Hallowed Halls of the House and the "Crazy Caucus" it has become. Click above to enlarge image. Background image here.

I thought of writing this after making this comment on an article on RAWSTORY.

Click above to enlarge

As a retired psychotherapist I look at this through a diagnostic lens. But to paraphrase Dylan “You don't need the psychiatric diagnostic manual to know which way the wind blows.” To varying degrees the "crazy caucus" is composed of people who are seriously in need of mental health intervention. It is eye-popping that the presumably mentally healthy members of Congress like McCarthy don't take this seriously. Are they going to let the inmates totally run the asylum? They may not be able to stop them.

Above is the comment plus the illustration which I put on this article:

Unfortunately the word "crazy" has too many meanings and is used in both positive and negative ways. 

The word isn't in the psychiatric dictionary or the diagnostic manual. 

Too many people think that even the craziness of someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene or Herschel Walker are just quirks.

They don't want to delve into an analysis as to whether Greene believes the things she says that would strongly suggest she has a delusional disorder. 

They don't want to consider whether Herschel Walker, who may end up in the Senate, still has a dissociative identity disorder. 

I wrote about Walker here:

I don't know if Greene was ever in therapy. Walker was and he claimed he was cured with the help of God and by Jerry Mungadze. He believes in exorcism, the occult, and demon possession.  I wrote about this here.

It is important not to stigmatize mental illness. Most people with a diagnosed mental illness who are functional enough to make it into public life have disorders like depression and anxiety. Generally they are aware of this because they suffer and frequently seek treatment.

One of the most problematic issues in mental health is that there are some disorders which don't cause people to suffer. These individuals may cause others to suffer but they lack the empathy to care about who they hurt.

The key is to differentiate people who do suffer themselves from those whose reality testing is severely impaired and who cause others to suffer, can't make decisions based on reality, or both.

Walker and Greene are just two examples of people who are now or may be members of Congress who may be diagnosable as having a mental illness which impairs their ability to determine what is real and what isn't. Greene seems to enjoy making people she considers enemies suffer. Walker, or some of his alter personalities, may not remember having made people suffer.

This brings me to the Unhinged Head Honcho, Donald Trump. While he meets every criteria for being a malignant (or sociopathic) narcissist this doesn't mean he can't tell what's real and what isn't. We know he lies but don't know how many of his lies he believes, hence the title and subject of this article:

Trump may end up being tried for one or two crimes (helping plan an insurrection or the documents theft) which could result in a jail sentence where a jury would have to see if his defense is credible. To suggest it would be interesting to see if his defense involved some kind of insanity plea is an understatement.