How stupid is Trump?

Thank you.

When I first read it I thought it was a Quixote inspired piece of satire.

I5's like when David Cameron was reported to have had sex with a pig.

That was when Dara O' Brian announced comedy is dead, reality will always trump whatever bizarre jokes you can come up with.

"Trump is there to tell you that democracy is a joke. Trump is there to tell you that the rules don't apply to everyone equally; they don't apply to him."
--Timothy Snyder

"So January 6th, apart from else, leads directly to the war in Ukraine because it looks like not just America is morally discredited, it looks like America is weak."
--Timothy Snyder

It was almost like a go ahead signal from Trump to Putin to invade ukraine. And then when Putin invades Ukraine, Trump praises him.

“I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius.’ Putin declares a big portion of the Ukraine — of Ukraine — Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful,” Trump said in a radio interview with “The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show.” “He used the word ‘independent’ and ‘we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.’ You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.” https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/23/trump-putin-ukraine-invasion-00010923

"And, of course, trump doesn't care at all about democracy. He doesn't care about American democracy, and he doesn't care about democracy anywhere. He's a gift not just to Putin but to all dictators around the world, especially the great ones who came out of a quasi-democratic background because he seems to show you can start with democracy and end up in tyranny."
--Timothy Snyder

45 gets kicked off Forbes 400 list of richest Americans
(cnn)

Leave that to the paedos.

It must be Builder's bedtime.

These kinds of "lists" are why the wealth equality spread is so severe in the US compared with other countries.

There are people who want to be on these lists of the most wealthy. The way you get there mostly include...charging too much for your products; paying the people who help you make your product too little; and doing the kind of grifting some notables have been doing for decades.

This bullshit has to stop. In the current economic environment of the US, being on the list of the "richest" Americans should NOT be something to be proud of...but something to be ashamed of.

Yep. 6'-3" and 215#. Right.

Go Ahead, Psychiatrists: Diagnose Donald Trump

BY JEFFREY KLUGER
UPDATED: JULY 26, 2017 2:25 PM ET | ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: JULY 25, 2017 4:45 PM EDT

Barry Goldwater wasn’t crazy. He was exceedingly conservative by the standards of his time—and that sometimes got him into trouble. In 1964, when he was running for the Republican presidential nomination, he suggested that maybe it wouldn’t be a terrible strategy to use just a few of the atomic bombs in the U.S. arsenal to defoliate forests in North Vietnam and give Americans a fighting edge. Was that extreme? Sure. Crazy? No. And, in the face of furious blowback, Goldwater was smart and sane enough to walk back his very bad idea.



That, however, didn’t stop the ironically named Fact magazine from running a sensational story with the provocative headline, “1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater is Psychologically Unfit to Be President!” The story was junk: A questionnaire had been sent to 12,356 psychiatrists, nearly 10,000 of whom had simply ignored it. Of the 2,417 who did respond, a majority of 1,228 pronounced then-Senator Goldwater perfectly sane. The minority said he wasn’t — and the minority got the headline. Goldwater, who went on to win the GOP nomination only to get trounced by Lyndon Johnson, later sued the editor of Fact for libel, and he won. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) responded by adopting what it straightforwardly called the Goldwater Rule, forbidding members from offering a diagnosis of a public figure they have not themselves examined — and even then, not without that person’s consent.

But that was then. And then was before the age of Donald Trump. It was before the early-morning tweetstorms, before the febrile conspiracy theories, before the grandiosity and impulsiveness and the serial counter-factualism. It was before, in short, Americans made a man who at least appears unstable to a great many observers the most powerful person in the world. That has led a lot of people to argue that we may have over-learned the lesson of the Goldwater Rule and that it’s time to scrap or at least suspend it.

That is precisely the position another professional group, the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA), has now taken. In an internal email, the association urged its 3,500 members to speak their minds on the matter of presidential mental health, and if they consider Trump unwell, to say so. According to the health and medicine website STAT, some members of the group have gone so far as to conclude that not only is it alright to weigh in on the matter of Presidential sanity, but that doctors have an affirmative “duty to warn.”

In an email to TIME, the APsaA stressed that it is not suggesting that its members “defy” the Goldwater Rule—especially since it is not their rule to begin with. In its official guidelines on public figures, the organization instead urges members to “avoid the appearance of ‘wild analysis,'” to avoid overstepping “the bounds of psychoanalytic knowledge” and generally to comment with extreme care. The American Psychiatric Association quickly made clear it stands by the Goldwater Rule.

By way of disclosure, more than three years ago, I opened my book, The Narcissist Next Door, with five pages devoted to Trump. It was not a diagnosis — I’m not a clinician — but it was a description, and I continue to believe it’s a good one. I also believe the psychoanalytic group is right to take the muzzle off its members.


Consider first that we live in a far more psychologically savvy era than we did even 30 years ago, to say nothing of half-a-century back in the Goldwater years. During the 1988 Presidential campaign, Michael Dukakis took a lot of heat from the GOP over the fact that he had sought psychological counseling after the 1973 death of his brother. Would voters care if a grieving sibling — presidential nominee or not — sought such help today? Not likely. America hasn’t necessarily gotten more compassionate, but we have gotten smarter, and we have a better understanding of the difference between routine mental health problems and a truly debilitating psychopathy. If the President — any President — exhibits signs of clinical illness, we’re better able to weigh the evidence and understand the implications.

What’s more, it doesn’t take professional training or particular insight to recognize that certain human behaviors are psychic red flags. If you can’t eat a meal without first washing your hands until they bleed, it would be fair for your family to suspect that you just might have OCD. If you can’t have a single drink without then having 15 more, it doesn’t take a clinician to suggest that you may — may — be an alcoholic. Presidents have exhibited worrisome behavior before: Johnson’s exhibitionism, Richard Nixon’s seeming paranoia. But they projected a fundamental groundedness too, a basic understanding that certain actions would lead to certain results, and an ability to pursue desired ends in a linear and disciplined way.

Finally, the Goldwater Rule, while masquerading as enlightened, actually betrays an outdated divide between physical and mental health. If President Dwight Eisenhower, who at one time had been a four-pack-a-day smoker, had shown any outward symptoms of cardiovascular disease before his 1955 heart attack, it’s unlikely anyone would have been reluctant to ask whether the 60-year-old veteran of a World War was up to campaigning for reelection. Certainly no one was reluctant after he did get sick. So why stay decorously silent when behavioral symptoms are just as obvious?

It’s indeed impossible for anyone but a professional who is treating Trump to say with certainty what his clinical diagnosis is — if any. But when the mental health of one man can have such a profound impact on the lives of 323 million Americans — to say nothing of the 7.5 billion people living on the planet as a whole — it’s irresponsible to not at least have the conversation. And it’s a dereliction for the people who know the most — the doctors — not to lead it.

https://time.com/4872558/donald-trump-goldwater-rule/

Trump Shows Love To 'Hannibal Lecter' In Killer Blunder At Iowa Rally

Trump claimed "The Silence of the Lambs" killer threw his support behind him in an awkward flub on Saturday.

By Ben Blanchet
Oct 8, 2023, 12:29 AM EDT

Former President Donald Trump ate up alleged support from “Hannibal Lecter” in a terrifying slip-up at an Iowa rally.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-hannibal-lecter_n_65222027e4b09f4b8d405989

The former president criticized open border policies on Saturday and claimed people were coming to America from “insane asylums” before bringing up “The Silence of the Lambs.”

“Hannibal Lecter, how great an actor was he?” said Trump in a mix-up between the fictional character’s name and Anthony Hopkins, the actor who played the cannibal in the 1991 film.

“You know why I like him? Because he said on television on one of the – ‘I love Donald Trump.’ So I love him. I love him. I love him. He said that a long time ago and once he said that, he was in my camp, I was in his camp. I don’t care if he was the worst actor, I’d say he was great to me.”

{snip}

6'3" and 215#. Looking good. I wish someone would ask him under oath how tall he is and how much he weighs.

Trump's behavior is exactly what you would expect from a mentally ill malignant narcissist. The question is why anybody would consciously support a mentally ill person for the presidency since a narcissist is incapable of extending their sphere of concern beyond their own self-interests much less the collective interests of the country. Narcissists also lack the empathy needed either for personal relationships or for maintaining the ethics of responsible and competent political leadership. Personally and politically, narcissists are capable of being dictators and authoritarians and nothing else.

There's a case to be made that Donald Trump was not lying about the election being stolen. Prof. Sam Vatnin said that narcissists cannot distinguish reality from their own fantasy, that is, when their fantasy conflicts with external reality, they filter out reality. Occasionally, what Trump says accidentally corresponds to reality, but we assume that he's usually lying, making up lies as he goes along whenever it's convenient. But he may actually be expressing his own fantasy, confusing his fantasy from reality.

The big lie about the stolen election pushes the limit though, and it seems contrived because they are indications that he knew that he had lost the election but instead chose to take a page from Goebbels' book about manipulating massive numbers of people with a big lie. It's possible, though, that he slipped back into his fantasy, which is typical of people with severe narcissistic personality disorder.

The problem is that many of the politicians that support him are well aware that that the election was not stolen, yet they continue to support him and even ape his delerious contention. We assume that these people are not narcissists, not mistaking fantasy for reality. That in a sense makes them more dangerous than Trump because they're willing to forsake reality for Trump's fantasy, becoming gigantic liars for their own security.

The major point, though, is that if Trump is severely mentally ill, he shouldn't be in any position of power, and should be confined to a mental hospital where he can get help rather than jailed in an anachronistic prison system.

Looking back prior to the election:

The New York Review

The Illusion of Invincibility
Michael Greenberg
November 5, 2020 issue

This article is part of the Review’s series on the 2020 US elections.

People who have lived under the rule of a charismatic autocrat—caudillo may be the most precise word—have no trouble recognizing the nature of Donald Trump’s grip on America’s psyche. A talented caudillo drives a stake into his country’s consciousness. He becomes inescapable. You walk around with him in your head, fantasize about him, rage at him, psychoanalyze him. He invades your emotional life, colonizing your very way of thinking, and creating the illusion that he is omnipresent, like an unvanquishable parent.

Chileans used to talk this way about Augusto Pinochet, who held absolute power over Chile from 1974 to 1990. Trump has at his disposal fewer tools of state terror than Pinochet did, which makes his success as a caudillo all the more impressive—an achievement, in Trump’s case, of personality, monstrousness, and bluster. (This is not to minimize the tools of state terror he has managed to deploy, such as federal officers for the suppression of protests, the Department of Justice as a weapon against his political rivals, and ICE as a virtual paramilitary force rounding up and detaining immigrants.)

A demoralizing aura of invincibility surrounds the caudillo—until a glimmer of vulnerability is shown and the aura evaporates. Trump has been able over the past three and a half years to drown out a relatively diffuse opposition and mesmerize or bully the country into believing in his potency. Even our outrage has become a form of submission. He traps us into repeating his lies, though we do so in order to debunk them. When his opponents ridicule him, his presence manages to expand, because the ridicule reaffirms his grip on us. And so the illusion of invincibility grows stronger.

The illusion partly arises from our fear that the caudillo’s viciousness cannot be matched: he and his allies will do anything to retain power, and his opponents, schooled in the niceties of institutional democracy, don’t have it in them to fight dirty enough to stop him. The caudillo depends on our exaggeration of his power. When he says he will overturn the results of the election if he loses, we believe him. Historical knowledge may inoculate some against demagoguery, but it also provides a rearview mirror of doom. We know that democracies collapse and that built into the US electoral system may be a pathway to its destruction.

Joe Biden’s job is to break the caudillo’s spell and, as unlikely as it once seemed, this middle-of-the-road career politician, not notable for his charisma, appears to be the perfect candidate to do so. When he became the Democratic nominee, he seemed to many the weakest possible choice. His lack of skill at galvanizing constituencies sank his previous presidential campaigns and made him appear, at first, a feeble opponent to Trump. You can see him struggle with his lifelong stutter when he speaks. He has a self-sabotaging habit of interrupting himself mid-sentence, making his thoughts seem garbled and unformed. He is elderly, his eyes water, his gray hair creeps thinly down the back of his neck. He offers himself as the kind of caretaker president in which stable democracies specialize: an unspectacular manager with decent intentions whom most citizens have the luxury of not thinking about for weeks at a time.

Yet there is an undeniable solidity about him, a kind of bedrock ethical sincerity. He has successfully cast himself as an Everyman whose personal misfortunes have imbued him with an uncommon (and occasionally overwrought) capacity for compassion. Listening to voters’ tragic stories, he lowers his head in priestly sympathy. A minute later he will tear at Trump with cold precision, calling him “a climate arsonist,” “disgusting,” “unfit,” careful all the while not to shed too much heat, the temperature Trump thrives on. Forced to engage a rival who has managed to focus—and temporarily unify—the vast opposition to him, Trump seems diminished and exposed.

Even before Trump’s display of deranged indifference toward the Covid-19 pandemic last spring, I had been recklessly predicting a decisive Democratic victory in November. I believed that Americans would recoil from the caudillo’s brute purveyance of hatred and that the Republican Party would feel the fallout for decades. Recent events have strengthened this belief. Trump’s dismissal of Covid-19 has resulted in his contracting the virus himself. If polls are to be trusted, significant numbers of suburbanites are abandoning the caudillo, despite his warning that crazed mobs will be gunning for their homes if he isn’t reelected. To convince voters that the country’s most gentrified, low-crime cities—New York, Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, San Francisco—will become permanent vectors of anarchy and insurrection requires magical abilities that the caudillo does not possess.

The nightmare scenarios have been spun: if he is ahead on election night, the caudillo will declare victory before mail-in ballots have been counted and then, with the support of the Supreme Court, disqualify those ballots; Republican-controlled battleground states will appoint slates of “faithless” electors to defy the popular vote; the caudillo’s attempt to steal the election will provoke mass protests, in response to which he will invoke the Insurrection Act and impose martial law. None of these scenarios is to be taken lightly. But Trump’s thin institutional support, combined with the Democrats’ fortified army of watchdogs and the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling in July against faithless electors, minimize the caudillo’s ability to pull off such a golpe. Allegations of voter fraud will have to be proven in the courts.

The matter now rests uneasily with the electorate. Are 80 million Americans sufficiently racist, sufficiently in favor of the curtailment of equal rights, sufficiently obsessed with culture wars to ignore their health, the environment, their employment, and the quality of their schools? It is far more likely that the caudillo will depart the White House on January 20 as an isolated and despised figure.