I was writing about Elon Musk being nuts and then Trump posted a Superman video

I was writing about Elon Musk being nuts and then Trump posted a Superman video

Another example of the

Media making megalomania mainstream

by Hal Brown

Follow the latest news about Mastodon here

Archives on Right >

Why I was banned from Daily Kos

Posting now on Mastodon - see right column there 

If I posted this I'd be a candidate for a rubber room at Bellevue:

These are available for free.

.

As an early member of Duty2Warn and a retired psychotherapist I have written a lot about Trump's psychopathology and very little about Elon Musk's because the former was a danger to democracy and the later I viewed as a sideshow even though he got tons of media attention and it become evident how deranged he was.

Update: The idiocy of this is:

"MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT! My official Donald Trump Digital Trading Card collection is here!" the ex-president posted on his Truth Social account. "These limited edition cards feature amazing ART of my Life & Career! Collect all of your favorite Trump Digital Trading Cards, very much like a baseball card, but hopefully much more exciting. Go to collecttrumpcards.com/ & GET YOUR CARDS NOW! Only $99 each!

Presumably the worthless Trump University issued a diploma on paper to their grifted graduates, some of whom paid $35,000 for the Trump Gold Elite" package, which promised personal mentorship from experienced instructors "handpicked by Trump that would make them rich. Sycophant suckers in the card con don't even get something they can frame or stick on the refrigerator.

People are posting images like this from a tooter on Mastodon

There are articles all over the Internet mocking him. Hear' a good one from Steve Benen on MSNBC who wonders if Trump is really serious about running for president.

Even Fox New news is treating this like it shows Trump to be a fool: 

Trump roasted after 'major announcement' turns out to be digital trading cards

This is how the Murdoch owned NY Post put it:

The 45th president’s new NFT* collection depicts — who else? — himself in various forms of, well, highly virtual reality.

Trump is featured with a chiseled chest wearing a cape, triumphantly riding an elephant and sporting a dapper James Bond-style tuxedo in the cards, according to his announcement on Truth Social.

“Hello everyone, this is Donald Trump, hopefully your favorite president of all time — better than Lincoln, better than Washington, with an important announcement,” Trump said in a tone-deaf video linked to the post. “I’m doing my first official Donald J. Trump NFT collection.”

The former leader of the free world then urged fans to buy the so-called Donald Trump digital trading tokens — which he described as “much like a baseball card” — for “only” $99 each.

*A non-fungible token is a : a unique digital identifier that cannot be copied 

The word I am reading the most frequently to describe this grift is cringeworthy.

HERE'S MY ORIGINAL BLOG STORY

I wasn't planning to write a blog story about Elon Musk today. I just put together an image that I posted on Mastodon for this toot:

Click above to enlarge image

By now if you have been paying attention you know Trump is teasing an announcement with a video on Truth Social showing him opening his shirt to reveal a Superman t-shirt. On "Morning Joe" Joe  reminded viewers that Trump had wanted to open his shirt to show a Superman t-shirt underneath when he left Walter Reed after he had Covid. 

Someone apparently didn't think this was a smart thing to do when so many people were dying of the disease and they managed to dissuade him. This was reported on in the media, The Murdoch NY Post for example.

Yesterday my favorite columnist, Heather "Digby" Parton, wrote 

Elon is the new Trump: But how long can he hold the No. 1 Troll title? on Salon

Thought bubbles added

Today Igor Derysh wrote, also on Salon: 

Free speech warrior Elon Musk bans, vows “legal action” against student for tweeting public info

Musk is so committed to free speech he wants to use the power of the state to suppress public info about him

This is from The Intercept: HOW ELON MUSK SAYS HE CATCHES LEAKERS AT HIS COMPANIES - 

Musk has boasted of entrapping a Tesla leaker by watermarking emails, and he is threatening any dissidents still at Twitter.

In Musk and Trump we have two headline hogging people who meet the criteria for being a malignant narcissist. The malignant part is being sociopathic. The narcissism part means that they are so full of themselves that they often behave in ways that are self-defeating. 

Musk and Trump are grandiose narcissists whose lifeblood is getting attention. They have no deeply held political beliefs. They have no empathy for those who they hurt . They will dominate the news for at least the short-term future. 

This will not please people like Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, Lauren Boebert (story), and Louie Gohmert (story) who hope to have the media spotlight on them when the new Congress convenes.

In the greater scheme of things Elon Musk is irrelevant though his craving for attention has been correctly compared to a toddler's tantrum the same way Trump's antics have.

Trump is only truly relevant in the longer term if he runs for president either as a Republican or an Independent.

Yesterday I wrote in my blog about DeSantis that Trump would be the easier candidate for Biden (or whichever Democrat runs) to beat than the other Republican's who have been mentioned as likely GOP candidates. I wrote:

There is one outcome we can hope for, though we can't to anything to make it happen. This is that Trump loses the primary, whether to DeSantis or anybody else, and decides to run as an Independent. His psychopathology strongly suggests he would do this. He doesn't have any loyalty to the GOP or anyone in it with the exception of his dwindling number of sycophants. 

Doing this keeps him in the public eye until Tuesday, Nov. 7th 2023 when he splits the vote assuring an easy Biden win. He can have his rallies and spew his hate speech and paranoia to his cheering cult.

Ye got media attention for his ludicrous announcement that he's a candidate. 

There's nothing to keep Elon from doing the same thing. He isn't running for president, at least not yet. After all if Ye and do it and Musk knows he isn't the brightest bulb in the pack. Why shouldn't the richest person in the world who could buy Trump many times over and who has reported 155 IQ do the same thing?

"Elect Elon" isn't a bad alliteration but "Make America Musk" might appeal to him as a slogan for a Twitter blue baseball cap.

Is there a vaccine to inoculate America against the smart and sane fascist anti-woke Ron DeSantis?

Is there a vaccine to inoculate America against the smart and sane fascist and anti-woke Ron DeSantis? The hypocritical culture warrior, fascist, and overall  P.O.S.  just did a 180 on Covid.

By Hal Brown

Archives on Right >

Why I was banned from Daily Kos

Posting now on Mastodon - see right column there 

Preface: A big thanks to DonkeyHotey

The caricaturist who goes by the name DonkeyHotey (pronounced Don Quixote) has already provide writers with numerous illustrations for articles about the man who is looking like he will be the GOP candidate to president in 2024.

Click image to enlarge

I have used his caricatures numerous times as have many well known websites. Here's a story about his best 2021 caricatures. 

DeSantis is in the upper right corner

Note the illustration he posted on Dec. 11th on Who, What, Why of Trump here.

You can follow DonkeyHotey on the sites below:

flickr.com/photos/donkeyhotey/
https://whowhatwhy.org/author/donkeyhotey/
https://twitter.com/DonkeyHotey
donkeyhotey.com

@DonkeyHotey@mastodon.coffee

About DonkeyHotey

Today's story

Ron DeSantis is Trump without the stupid red MAGA cap to cover up is male pattern baldness. He has full head of hair. He still believes that to make America great it has to go back at least 100 years.

We know DeSantis will take any position, and change any of them, if he thinks it will help him achieve his political ambition to be president. Here's an example from the news today.

This was then: DeSantis recommends getting vaccinated

Today: 

Democrats can't do a damn thing about which Republican ends up running. Most of them who I've read or heard believe Trump would be the easier candidate to defeat. They can wish Trump would be the candidate, but the various iterations of the saying "if wishes were fishes..."  applies here.

It will be interesting where never-Trump Republicans will come down if the candidate is DeSantis. By now it is a political trope to say that DeSantis is an intelligent and sane version of Trump. He's not about to cozy up to the likes of Ye and Fuentes. He won't tweet barely coherent paranoid rants.

Pundits are not only saying he is more likely to win against Biden or any other Democrat should Biden not run than Trump, but polls support this: 

My impression from reading and listening to never-Trump Republicans is that most of them want to see a tradition conservative run rather than someone who is waging culture warfare and wants to be an anti-woke autocrat.

Nicholas Kristof was on Morning Joe this morning discussing his NY Times column from Dec. 10th Trump Struggles but American is Still Feverish.

Excerpt addressing whether the defeat of Trump endorsed and Big Lie supporting Republicans means the fever has finally broken:

But I may be wrong — and I worry that it’s premature to argue that the national fever has broken. We as a nation still face arguably the greatest peril since the end of Reconstruction, for three reasons.

First, remember that this extremism goes beyond Trump and even beyond the United States. Italy has just installed a far-right prime minister whose party has its roots in neo-fascism, a reminder that the fever persists globally.

Second, even when Trump broke bread with Holocaust deniers and then urged a suspension of the Constitution, congressional Republicans mostly looked the other way. When leaders of one of our major political parties struggle to defend the Constitution or condemn neo-Nazis, America still feels feverish.

Third and most fundamentally, our political dysfunction is driven in complex ways by a broader economic and social dysfunction and despair, one that we fail to grapple with effectively.

If DeSantis runs, and wins, I think it will demonstrate that like the chicken pox virus does, it went dormant in the body and then emerged as a horrible case of shingles. 

There's a vaccine, Shingrix, to deal with that. It requires two doses several months apart to be effective. If you have had it or know anybody who has, you are well aware of how bad it is.

If we extend this metaphor, and I haven't met many metaphors I'm not willing to extend if they make sense, we can say that America got the first dose of anti-fascist conspiracy theory destroying vaccine to deal with the disease of Trumpism. Now they need the second dose to prevent infection with DeSantisism.

Update:

By every measure, Ron DeSantis’ newest Covid gambit is a tragedy

If Covid-19 were capable of feeling emotion, it’d likely be delighted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' latest public health moves.

Excerpt: Imagine Covid-19, eager to infect as many people as possible, was able to hire its own lobbying team. Then imagine the dangerous contagion’s lobbyists, eager to help their client infect as many people as possible, began pressing politicians on what to say and do with regard to public health policy.

In this fanciful hypothetical, we could probably imagine what the politicians would be told to say and do by Covid’s lobbyists. Officials would be encouraged to, among other things, question the efficacy of vaccines, while rejecting the findings of public health authorities.

Or put another way, if Covid-19 could hire its own lobbying team, it’d be delighted by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and his latest announcement.

Addendum:

Thanks to A. my partner and percipient proofreader for reminding me of this.

There is one outcome we can hope for, though we can't to anything to make it happen. This is that Trump loses the primary, whether to DeSantis or anybody else, and decides to run as an Independent. His psychopathology strongly suggests he would do this. He doesn't have any loyalty to the GOP or anyone in it with the exception of his dwindling number of sycophants. 

Doing this keeps him in the public eye until Tuesday, Nov. 7th 2023 when he splits the vote assuring an easy Biden win. He can have his rallies and spew his hate speech and paranoia to his cheering cult.

 The MAGA mentally ill, emotionally vulnerable, or just plain dumb conundrum

 

By Hal Brown

Archives on Right >

Why I was banned from Daily Kos

Posting now on Mastodon (see right column there

Public Domain  from Wikipedia

Yesterday I wrote about  the media normalizing mentally ill MAGA's.

Today I noticed the same thing that is a subject of this article in RawStory  even before I read it.

Before reading this I noticed that George T. Conway, III was quoted as saying "The GOP congressman who called for 'Marshall Law!!' in a text to Meadows obviously must have thought he was participating in a coo, not a coup, and so is clearly off the hook." I even made an illustration and tweeted it to Conway.

As I write this this is being discussed on Morning Joe:

Looking back at Trump, who claimed many times to have the biggest brain and bringing up the genes he supposedly inherited from his MIT scientist uncle, and that he went to the prestigious University of Pennsylvania Business School (implying it was their graduate school). Actually he did his first two years at Fordham and transferred to Penn. While there was a clamor for Trump to release his tax returns I never saw anyone demand he release his college transcripts, not that this would have told us anything since he could have cheated his ass off and paid people to do his work.

My friend, a clinical psychologist, who has expertise in interpreting standard IQ tests, told me that she thought Trump's testable IQ would be slightly below average, that is under 100.

While some MAGA politicians spouting conspiracy theories have advanced degrees, and may fit into the category of being mentally ill in one or another way, Mark Meadows has an associate degree from the University of South Florida. We don't know what his grades were, but he is probably their most "distinguished" graduate.

Lauren Boebert went to Rifle High School in Colorado but did not graduate and got her GED.

Boebert's fellow loony-tuner Marjorie Taylor Greene has her BBA (Bachelors of Business Administration) from the University of George.

Of course there are now and always have been brilliant  and accomplished people who never went to college or like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, dropped out, though they were in Harvard.  Some even quit high school before they graduated. Richard Branson quit school when he was 15. David Karp dropped out of an elite Bronx high school, also at the age of 15, to launch Tumblr. 

Arnold Schwarzenegger dropped out of high school to pursue a career in body building and Quentin Tarantino quit because he thought he could do a better job educating himself. There are many more listed here.

Then there's Elon Musk, whose IQ supposedly is in the neighborhood of 155. He is an example of someone who has lost the ability to think critically and not engage in self-defeating behavior because, while they are intelligent, they have the kind of psychiatric disorder described in my previous story.

There is no correlation between intelligence and psychosis, including delusional disorders. There has been research (see the article Personality and Intelligence, for example) into the correlation between various personality types and intelligence. 

It seems to me that anyone can develop a belief that leads them into the morass of conspiracy theories like those of QAnon regardless of their testable IQ.  For example here's how Steven Hassan, a well known expert on cults, describes how he ended up joining the Moonies. (About Hassan)

What all this seems to boil down to is that there is no conclusion to be drawn regarding the initial question about whether these MAGA cultists are mentally ill, emotionally vulnerable like Steve Hassan was, or just plain dumb. They can be either one, two or all of them. 

Talking Points Memo reporter Hunter Walker is quoted in the RawStory piece: "Adults in government, not only engaging in frighteningly undemocratic language, but their base intelligence is called into question." We certain can fairly question their base intelligence, however going further than that leads us into the realm of both the unknown and the unknowable. 

Intelligence may be a factor in their beliefs, but there's no way a conclusion can be drawn to label the overall intelligence of those who can be considered to be MAGA cultists.

Most recent stories:

• How to build a house on a budget - Nothing to do with the title, about Mastodon
• The normalizing of delusional sociopathic grandios...
• What would our country be like without Fox News?