I assumed that one certainty I knew about Trump was that he's wide awake at 3:00AM. Perhaps I've been wrong.

By Hal Brown, MSW, retired after 40 years of practicing psychotherapy. Formerly director of a mental health center and in psychoanalytically oriented private practice. Currently internationally known expert on the inner workings of the mind of Donald Trump (click here).

CLICK ABOVE TO ENLARGE

The order I look at websites in the morning are as follows: my email, HUFFPOST to see what their lead story is, Raw Story so see what they post as breaking news stories and opinion, and then The NY Times and Washington Post. 

Thus I noticed this in my email:

Cick above to enlarge

It was no surprise to me to read  the words "Trump screeches at Fox News in all-caps 3 am Truth Social post" since he often posts in the wee hours of the morning. There's really nothing particularly newsworthy in the Raw Story article (here).

What would be newsworthy about Donald Trump would be that something never reported was discovered. 

Indulge me here. After all there are people around the world from Russia and Latvia to Sweden and China who may consider me to be an expert on the workings of the mind of Donald Trump. 

First it was his predawn tweeting and currently what he puts online he likes to call "truths" since these posts are on his Truth Social platform in the wee hours of the morning. They constituted what I thought of as an indisputable fact about this man who has thrown our understanding, mine as a mental health expert and non-therapists alike, of what the human mind can manifest.

While articles were being published by other mental health practitioners proposing various diagnoses to explain Trump's behavior in 2020 I wrote Add a section to the DSM-5. It doesn't come close to having a category for Trump.

People can walk on hot coals, undergo surgery under hypnosis, lift cars to save their children, remember every name and number in the Manhattan phone directory, and... this is what led me to write this... sleep walk and do complex tasks while they are sleeping.

Consider:

Someone who is sleepwalking may:

• Get out of bed and walk around
• Sit up in bed and open his or her eyes
• Have a glazed, glassy-eyed expression
• Not respond or communicate with others
• Be difficult to wake up during an episode
• Be disoriented or confused for a short time after being awakened
• Not remember the episode in the morning
• Have problems functioning during the day because of disturbed sleep
• Have sleep terrors in addition to sleepwalking

Sometimes, a person who is sleepwalking will:

• Do routine activities, such as getting dressed, talking or eating
• Leave the house
• Drive a car
• Engage in unusual behavior, such as urinating in a closet
• Engage in sexual activity without awareness
• Get injured, for example, by falling down the stairs or jumping out a window
• Become violent during the period of brief confusion immediately after waking or, occasionally, during sleepwalking (Reference)

As if I have to spell it out, here's the what if.

What if Donald Trump isn't really awake when he makes these 3:00 AM posts?

I written recently that there is one thing that Trump can't control during this period where he's under more stress that he's most likely ever been in his life due to his legal situation. This is his dreams. He may be having nightmares. He may wake from terrifying dreams and briefly remember being pursued by black monsters with sharp fangs who want to rip him apart. 

Many people don't remember remembering their dreams, whether they are frightening or not. Therefore it's possible Trump doesn't even think he has dreams.

Likewise, people who engage in simple or complex behaviors while asleep don't remember what they did.

Using the old term for posting online because it sounds better, Donald Trump may be sleep tweeting.

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Take a break from politics, do what I did: go someplace different if you can

 By Hal Brown

It was a fortuitous accident that friends who had rented a house for a week in the resort destination of Black Butte Ranch had a couple leave unexpectedly so they offered me their bedroom for a few days.

I've lived in a suburb of Portland (Oregon) for about 10 years but had never ventured to the central part of the state where this resort community is. 

Getting there is not particularly easy because once you drive south on an expressway for an hour you turn east and head into the Cascade Mountains and up, up, up from sea level to 3,300 feet. The road is very curvy and you have to pay close attention to your driving. Fortunately there are many pull-off areas where you can stop to take photos.

I had a few days with minimal discussion of politics among my liberal friends and I even wrote a blog yesterday before anyone in the house had gotten up. Mostly though we just escaped thinking depressing thoughts.

I glanced at the news  online when I got home this morning at 8 AM (I left there at five) and nothing struck me as worth writing about, meaning I had no original thoughts. 

What I do have to share are the photos I took on the trip. The first two are political. I sneakily took the photo below of the man with the Trump 45 hat.

It was a reminder of the vast political divide in this country to see this man with a Trump hat in the book section of a thrift store in the town of Sisters which is liberal leaning. This was made up for seeing the man below in the same town. Two men with beards and they couldn't have more opposite politics.

These are the photos I took on the drive there:

Then when I got home I tuned into MSNBC and saw this:

Ugh! What is there to say, one day it's Tennessee and then it's Alabama.

I was gong to watch an old Jame Bond movie but thought better of this idea and am now watching this which got horrible critical reviews but which the audience really liked:

Follow-up: I gave up on The War with Grandpa. I am nwatching this Spike Lee movie which is highly rated by critics and viewers.

If Trump thinks "gangs of hundreds" storm stores and escape carrying stolen refrigerators he's one very sick puppy

By Hal Brown, MSW, retired after 40 years of practicing psychotherapy. Formerly director of a mental health center and in psychoanalytically oriented private practice.

Click to read HUFFPOST article shown above.

I won't bother selecting another Superman comic Bizzaro World image to add to this blog depicting Trump's mind. You can chose your own.

Before I read the above article I clicked on another HUFFPOST story, Trump Targets Transgender Health Care In NRA Speech, because how he could shoehorn this topic into a speech to a bunch of gun nuts piqued buy curiosity. I was curious to learn whether he was urging open hunting season for anyone promoting transgender health care. Color me shocked to discover that this topic actually made a modicum of sense even for someone with a warped bigoted mindset.

“Upon my inauguration, I will direct the FDA to convene an independent outside panel to investigate whether transgender hormone treatments and ideology increase the risk of extreme depression, aggression and even violence,” Trump said during a speech at the National Rifle Association’s conference in Indianapolis on Friday. 

“I think most of us already know the answer,” Trump added. 

Trump and his Republican allies have baselessly claimed that gender identity was a factor that led a shooter to kill three kids and three adults at a school in Nashville, Tennessee.

Then scrolling down the web page I saw this:

You can listen to his near 30 second lamentation here:

Add this to the priceless collection of utterances coming from the mouth of Donald John Trump which will provide choice fodder for late night comics to mock.

Trump Puts Refrigerator Theft On Blast In Bizarre NRA Forum Remarks

Trump told an NRA convention crowd that "gangs of hundreds" storm stores and swipe fridges, but Twitter users aren't feeling his big claim.

The HUFFPOST article  begins...

Donald Trump claimed Friday that thefts at retail stores in major cities include “hundreds” of people running out carrying pilfered refrigerators. 

The former president, in a speech Friday to the National Rifle Association convention in Indianapolis, said that “gangs of hundreds” of young people in major cities “attack” department stores.

“And they run in by the hundreds, and they’re running out carrying refrigerators and carrying air conditioners and big stuff ― big, little, everything,” Trump said.

“Fur coats, non-fur coats, everything they’re carrying. They empty out the stores.”

... but the remainder of the article is composed of clever tweets made in response to this.

Last week Salon's Chauncey DeVega interviewed our very own Trump psychoanalyst, Justin Frank. 

"He is visualizing burning things and blowing them up": How Trump may be coping with being caught

Justin Frank, author of "Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President," on this week's historic indictments

 

The one question I would like to ask Dr. Frank is whether when Trump makes remarks like these if he actually believes the words that come out of his mouth or is this performance art.

If he believes what he says, as someone who practiced for 40 years as a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist, but not a formally trained psychoanalyst, I would have to say, to eschew psychological jargon, he is one very sick puppy.

-----

I'm not going to watch it, but here's the entire 52 minute rant on CSPAN. 

It seems way to early to say "thank you, Brian," based on Justice Alito's abortion pill ruling

 By Hal Brown, MSW, retired after 40 years of practicing psychotherapy. Formerly director of a mental health center and in psychoanalytically oriented private practice.

By chance when this news (see article in Raw Story: "Justice Alito temporarily blocks court ruling revoking abortion drug)" broke I was at a friend's house where her 9 year old grandson was watching Monty Python's Life of Brian, hence my title and illustration. The New York Times used the word "briefly" and both The Washington Post and Raw Story used the word "temporarily". HUPPPOST was more specific:

Click above to read article

What all this means is impossible to determine except that given that this is the far-right vehemently anti-abortion justice dominated Supreme Court I am not about to thank Brian or any particular deity some people believe exists in a realm up there in the sky somewhere.

If you aren't familiar with who Brian is, he's Brian Cohen, a young Jewish-Roman man who is born on the same day as—and next door to—Jesus, and is subsequently mistaken for the Messiah. He is played by Graham Chapman. 

Just a short comment about Dianne Feinstein

By Hal Brown, MSW, retired after 40 years of practicing psychotherapy. Formerly director of a mental health center and in psychoanalytically oriented private practice.

There are more and more reports that Diane Feinstein is getting more and more confused and that she is contradicting herself from one day to the next regarding important matters. 

Her contradiction of her staff announcing her saying he had no imminent plans for this made the news but Raw Story + (subscrition) reports this:

Forgetting the assault weapon ban

In January, California endured back-to-back mass shootings within 48-hours of each other.

While celebrating the Lunar New Year on Jan. 21 in Monterey Park, 11 people were slaughtered and another nine left permanently scarred. Two days later, on Jan. 23, in northern California, a farmworker killed seven people while injuring at least eight others.

Later that day, as Californians reeled from their second mass shooting in two days, Feinstein’s office reintroduced the historic 1990s assault weapon ban she had championed.

Three days later, Feinstein couldn’t remember her own measure. .

Abortion confusion

Last year, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision that effectively overturned Roe v. Wade nationally while leaving abortion policy to each state, Democrats coast-to-coast cheered after Kansas residents voted to keep abortion legal.

It took a few moments for Sen. Feinstein to remember the earth-moving news from the Great Plains.

Once she remembered, Feinstein was optimistic as she told Raw Story that upending Roe was an "enlightened finding" by the right wing of the Supreme Court.

These kinds of forgetting often are signs of early demential or Alzheimer's. 

Articles about what was speculated to be her cognitive decline go back at least to 2020: Dianne Feinstein ‘seriously struggling’ with cognitive decline, NY Post Cognitive decline is a general term usually referred to older people who have a form of dementia. (Note: Alzheimer's and dementia: What's the difference?)

I live in a continuing care retirement community and know many people going through the stages of dementia. Of course lots of people have to deal with this with loved ones and friends. I see that some people grasp that this is happening to themselves and most tragically others are in denial. I have seen both. 

If Feinstein deteriorates rapidly and enters the middle or end stages of dementia or Alzheimer's what will happen then?

Related articles:

Sen. Dianne Feinstein faces first calls to resign from members of Congress NBC News

Dianne Feinstein vows to return to her post as Democrats call for her to resign, The Guardian