Weighted down by legal woes, Trump may now be a fish out of water

Mixing metaphors in my title and blog... what can I say I've been awake since 2:00 AM with heartburn... that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

By Hal Brown

 

I already expressed my opinion yesterday about how Trump might react to being indicted in words and some illustrations using BeFunky and InPixio (scroll down). Above is how I envision him being caught in a net weighted down by whatever constitutes the evidence against him and the machinations of the legal system. 

I'm not a fisherman but I've seen what fish look like when they are being hauled up in a net flopping around when for the first time in their lives they are no longer in their natural watery environment.

We've all heard the saying "like a fish out of water" applied to how someone feels uncomfortable in certain situations. It's an odd saying because a fish can't survive out of water for very long with one species that is an exception.

So far Trump has been like the invasive fish (below) that can live and travel on dry land  for as long as six days (article).

How long can Trump do this?

Trump thinks he can do it forever. Seriously, forever. I suspect he thinks that he's immortal.

Pundits predict, but the fact is that it is impossible to know.

Addendum:

The New York City hush money case arguably has the most colorful cast of characters.

This will be another one. Although I would like Trump to receive his just rewards for trying to destroy democracy it would be satisfying for his objectifying women and not being able to keep it in his pants to be his unzipping (ops) undoing.

Click above to read article

Here's another version courtesy of your's truly:

Images from yesterday's blog:

Click above to enlarge. Lower left the net I used for today's illustration. Also shown what InPixio and BeFunky looks like.

Did you know that there are ways to take an image of text and make it into actual text? For example using a Google images feature I can take this from Trump's Truth Social and rended it as text.

As I have written many times, from my perspective as someone who practiced psychotherapy for 40+ years and one of the premier psychoanalyzers of Donald Trump 🤓I read such posts as a diagnostician and see that his language is more and more disjointed. This suggest he is headed towards a mental breakdown.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump. 16s

I did absolutely nothing wrong, I never had an affair with Stormy Daniels, nor would I have wanted to have an affair with Stormy Daniels.

This is a political Witch-Hunt, trying to take down the leading candidate, by far, in the Republican Party while at the same time also leading all Democrats in the polls, including Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Congress and numerous Democrat District Attorneys, Attorneys General, and the..

.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump. 53s

...Department of Injustice itself, which has unprecedentedly placed top DOJ prosecutors into the Manhattan District Attorney's office in order to "get Trump", have found that I did nothing wrong. Now, they fall back on the old, and rebuked case which has been rejected by every prosecutor's office that has looked at this Stormy "Horseface" Daniels matter, where I relied on counsel in order to resolve this Extortion of me, which took place a long time ago. Since then, I have won lawsuits...

Bonus: Links to lots of websites some of which you may never have look at.

How will Trump react to being indicted?

 By Hal Brown, MSW

If you're reading this you are a news junky and probably have read some of the news and opinion articles shown above. You've seen what is being reported as Trump's likely indictment in New York City by DA Alvin Bragg.

The closest thing I have heard about how Trump will react to being indicted, whether in New York or Georgia or both, is that he will use this to his advantage. This is the glove that does fit when it come to applying what we know about his personality to this situation.

A frequently used phrase is that he will play the victim card. I doubt he will bemoan his plight as shown in my second illustration, at least not in public. Trump may actually feel overwhelmed at times but he won't show this where a camera can catch him. 

Most likely he will rant and rave at an escalating level reaching a crescendo of incoherent rage so far unseen. The man lives by the polls and when he see his support for the GOP nomination dropping this will be a trigger. Then the more the chance that he may actually go to prison percolates into his awareness he will begin to slide down the slippery slope of mental decompensation. 

Trump has what mental health experts calls rigid psychological defense mechanisms. These are unconscious built-in ways all people protect themselves from experiencing anxiety. Depending on the level of stress and threat of major life setbacks this anxiety can be devastating.

Those with flexible defense mechanisms are considered more psychologically healthy. They can adapt and adjust to life stress without breaking down. Those with rigid defense mechanisms are more likely to have them shatter and be vulnerable to having severe psychiatric reactions from debilitating depression all the way to psychotic episodes.

If this happens to Trump, as good a performer as he is, he won't be able to fake it successfully. He's a good actor but he's not that good.

Trump may never do the perp walk to Rikers or another jail, but his downfall may very well be a psychological breakdown. This could result in his either being secretly spirited off to an inpatient psychiatric hospital, or more likely being treated at Mar-a-Lago which mysteriously will be closed to guests for renovations.

Click above to enlarge

Addendum:

Click above to enlarge

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump. 16s

I did absolutely nothing wrong, I never had an affair with Stormy Daniels, nor would I have wanted to have an affair with Stormy Daniels.

This is a political Witch-Hunt, trying to take down the leading candidate, by far, in the Republican Party while at the same time also leading all Democrats in the polls, including Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Congress and numerous Democrat District Attorneys, Attorneys General, and the...

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump. 53s

...Department of Injustice itself, which has unprecedentedly placed top DOJ prosecutors into the Manhattan District Attorney's office in order to "get Trump", have found that I did nothing wrong. Now, they fall back on the old, and rebuked case which has been rejected by every prosecutor's office that has looked at this Stormy "Horseface" Daniels matter, where I relied on counsel in order to resolve this Extortion of me, which took place a long time ago. Since then, I have won lawsuits...

Comments:

Someone on Mastodon wrote:

Maybe you can riff on his CPAC self-description as a “warrior.” This from the guy who dodged the draft with his spurious Bone Spurs diagnosis. Hence my suggestion of a new hashtag: #BoneSpursWarrior

So I added to one of Trump's NFT trading cards:

Click above to enlarge. The image on the upper left is from this blog.

 Ben Kalom said...

 

In his usual bloviating style.
He will never see the inside of a correctional facility.

He has opened the door for the real dangerous people - -the individuals who did perform, who did participate, who did accomplish, who have held their personal desires and fantasies in check, who are truly dictatorial, who will amass a weaponized force, who can institute martial law, who are not going to defend the U.S. Constitution because it stands in the way of their grand schemes.

If you give Mr. DeSantis a first look, merely peruse his wikipedia page, not stop to think about the underlying architecture of who he is, his roots, his upbringing, his participations, his accomplishments, his credentials, his current success at pedagogic and unilateral dogmatic management of his Florida statehouse, his unilateral way of wiping out history and "nationalizing" the areas of Florida where Disney Theme Parks reside, his singular method of revealing a militarized precision for assault

If all you do is stop at his superficial characteristics, you would think he's a good candidate for making things great.

Personally, I see nothing more than another Lorenzo Di Medici - a power-hungry, careful, tactical strategist who can get done what Donnie could never do...

Let's start looking at DeSantis as a more dangerous, more "Il Duce" type, with even more of the Etruscan peninsular genetics flowing through his very Italian veins.

As bad as Donnie was, Meatball Ron is far worse. Far, far, worse. Exceptionally dangerous.

Peace, brother from another mother...

Ida Haley commented:

I think he will continue his victim hood. He is now pronouncing himself the one who will take retribution against those who are bedeviling the faithful.

He apparently posted hunter Biden d**k pics on his own truth social. He will ramp up the assault on the Biden s to distract from his and his spawn's own criminality.

His fifth column is alive and well and very active under the radar. Bannon, Flynn, stone, manafort, the Russian and Arab government's are all working to protect him from prosecution and TO GET HIM BACK IN THE WHITE HOUSE.

Qanon runs deep. We are still being surprised at the depth of involvement by Fox news, we haven't even opened the can of worms at the FBI and secret service. They just arrested a retired FBI agent from NY for conspiring with the Russians. He was in charge of the FBI in NY covering Russia and he's the one who announced trump had no Russian help. We have secret service people who have destroyed evidence about jan6.

Not to get hysterical, but we don't know how deeply compromised our government is. We have insurrectionists sitting in Congress who now control the house and possibly the Senate. I'm not hearing anything about Mitch McConnell; if he has to be replaced, who would that be?

We still have a supreme court that is Vatican 2.0. how far are they willing to go to undermine the democracy because that is certainly their plan.

We are facing possibly the biggest threat to our democracy in modern times, yet the MSM PLAYS IT LIKE BOTH SIDES DO IT. It's business as usual, it's not. We had a huge fasc*st movement in the 30's that funded Hitler's rise to power and plotted to overthrow FDR.

Please comment below

The delusional news bubble and those who inhabit it

 By Hal Brown

Bonus: Links to websites I read

A couple of days ago I posted a blog with the title "The news bubble they live in vs. the bubble we live in."  I made a similar illustration to the one I made for this blog meant to depict the news bubble that viewers of Fox News and consumers of other far-right media reside in. 

It is encircled by a wall. It isn't exactly impermeable. It's made of some kind of amazing rubber that only allows certain news through while other news bounces off.

The simple dictionary definition of a delusion is "a false belief or judgment about external reality, held despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, occurring especially in mental conditions." This is outdated because of the part about mental conditions. While delusions are symptoms of some severe mental disorders the large majority of people that believe the outright lies and major distortions of the truth served up by the far-right media are not mentally ill as defined here:

Paranoia involves intense anxious or fearful feelings and thoughts often related to persecution, threat, or conspiracy. Paranoia can occur with many mental health conditions but is most often present in psychotic disorders. Paranoid thoughts can become delusions when irrational thoughts and beliefs become so fixed that nothing can convince a person that what they think or feel is not true. When a person has paranoia or delusions, but no other symptoms (like hearing or seeing things that aren't there), they might have what is called a delusional disorder. Because only thoughts are impacted, a person with delusional disorder can usually work and function in everyday life, however, their lives may be limited and isolated as a result of their delusions.

Delusional disorder is characterized by irrational or intense belief(s) or suspicion(s) that a person believes to be true. These beliefs may seem outlandish and impossible (bizarre) or fit within the realm of what is possible (non-bizarre). Symptoms must last for one month or longer in order for someone to be diagnosed with a delusional disorder. 

Reference

The key phrase in the dictionary definition above is despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. This presents a conundrum for a diagnostician such as myself. There is contradictory evidence readily available for anyone who wants to see it. It seems impossible that anyone misses it even if they immerse themselves in a media news bubble. 

We see people interviewed at Trump rallies. Jordon Kepler does many of these on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Here's a segment of him discussing a special he did (MSNBC). He is really providing an important service by giving us insights into how these people think.

Kepler is non-judgmental. He could be a clinician. Instead of having his patients come to him he goes to them. They are easy to find among the attendees at Trump rallies. They identify themselves by what they wear.

He presents the truth to them and allows his, dare I call them patients or subjects, to respond and they do often at great length. They are unwavering in their convictions. What they say is delusional but they don't seem, at least to me, to be otherwise behaving as if they are mentally ill. It may be that they suffer from a kind of permanent brain fog and were first infected by Donald Trump.

I don't think the people who hold these beliefs, whether those from QAnon or "merely" believe the lie that the election was stolen or J6 was just a bunch of tourists in the US Capitol, can be put on a simple bell curve from being psychotic to being willfully ignorant. It is more complex than that. We have to factor in intellectual capacity since some of these people may have a very low IQ. We also have to consider their peer group. If each and every person they interact with believes these lies there's nobody to say "yeah, but" and go on to present factual reporting.

Here are several examples to add to those in my blog below, those in the far-right media bubble will never see news about this, as reported in Raw Story:

Fox News sees its own viewers as 'uninformed simpletons': former right-wing operative

This is the top of the website story on HUFFPOST but how many MAGAs will read it?

Do you think Tucker Carlson is going to report on this?

Jan. 6 rioters trashed a GOP senator's office, and he hasn't acknowledged it

This Paul Waldman opinion essay requires a subscription to read so my hunch is that you can count on zero fingers the number of MAGAs who will read it:

Thank you, Kevin McCarthy and Tucker Carlson

His conclusion:

Let’s summarize what the McCarthy-Carlson collaboration produced. First, it put Jan. 6 back on the top of the news agenda, reminding everyone of Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his 2020 defeat, the violent reaction of his radical supporters and the craven response of Republican politicians who fed deranged conspiracy theories to their base to save their own political skins.

More important, it created an opportunity to revisit the actual events of that day. Some people watched Carlson’s fantasy depiction of Jan. 6 as a peaceful protest where Trump supporters strolled into the Capitol and took selfies while “milling around.” But a much larger audience likely saw multiple news reports on TV, newspapers and the internet in which both journalists and Republican leaders reiterated the ugly truth about that day’s attack on democracy.

The episode has also further discredited Fox News as it reels from extraordinary revelations showing network executives and personalities privately acknowledging in emails and texts that claims of a stolen election were preposterous even as they amplified those claims on the air. It’s long been argued that Fox News is in no real sense a news organization but is instead a propaganda machine that advances the interests of the Republican Party. That’s never been more clear than it is today.

McCarthy probably thought it was shrewd to give Carlson access to the surveillance footage. Instead, his decision helped reinforce an accurate understanding of Jan. 6, undermined the status of the right’s most important media outlet and reminded the electorate of the rotten core at the heart of the GOP. It’s quite an accomplishment.

On the lighter side, something else the MAGA morons won't read, is the hilarious column by Alexandra Petri in today's Washington Post

Opinion Tucker Carlson has proof the dinosaurs were not killed by a meteorite

Excerpts:

Here are hundreds — indeed, thousands of hours of dinosaurs walking around, browsing through foliage. The occasional T. rex attack. Not a meteorite in sight. Nor, I should add, a meteor, as these so-called scientists would have you call the same object when it’s burning up in the atmosphere. Two names for the same thing? Seems fishy to me. And speaking of fishy, here is a plesiosaurus. You will notice that it is just swimming around, definitely not extinct. This is what the mainstream media doesn’t want you to see. Pretty clear proof that this so-called meteorite is vastly overblown. If this meteorite really did hit, then why do I have so much footage of dinosaurs just walking around, eating leaves and, frankly, boring me to tears?

….

Next, we will observe footage that reveals Abraham Lincoln was mostly not assassinated — I have almost an hour of footage of him enjoying a theater performance without incident! And footage showing that for the overwhelming majority of his life, Elvis was alive. Next, lots of footage of the Hindenburg flying without a single problem! Makes you wonder who stood to gain by painting it as a disaster! We will be following this with footage of people eating lead paint and going “Mm, delicious!” and ... absolutely nothing happening to them, as far as we can tell! Here is someone jumping out of a building using a MyPillow as a parachute and — it seems to be working, for the part of the footage that matters! 

Also, here is some footage of people counting ballots — when they were counting, Donald Trump was ahead, and I think that says it all.

How many Fox News viewers even subscribe to The Washington Post which features this?

This is the blog from the other day comparing the two news bubbles:

It's like a segment of the population is wearing hearing aides and eye glasses that filter out everything they don't want to hear or see.   Call it living in a bubble. There is a major difference between the news "bubbles" we live in. Ours has a permeable membrane. The boundary of the bubbles they are ensconced in is rigid.