By Hal Brown, MSW
The first part of this story is dedicated to my dear early childhood friends and neighbors Gay and Joyce who knew my mother and spent time in my home.
Part one: Hal’s Tantrum
Trump has the power to do real lasting damage before he officially leaves office at noon on Jan. 20th. Suffice to say that clinically he is in the midst of working out what psychotherapists like yours truly would call the experience of having major narcissistic wound or insult by and is reacting by expressing narcissistic rage. In lay terms he isn’t getting his way like he almost always does and is having a prolonged tantrum.
On a personal note, I had one tantrum when I was about six when I wasn't allowed to do something. What I wanted to do is lost in the recesses in my memory. I threw myself on the floor in the threshold between our dining room and our sunroom. I remember where I did this but not what I was so upset. My mother stood briefly in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room and said something to the effect of “no means no” and went back to doing whatever she was doing.
I managed a few last gasps of tantrum, which I was really quite in control of so it wasn't really truly a tantrum rather it was play-acted for appearances sake, and then I slinked away upstairs to sulk in my bedroom. I thought something to the effect of “oh well, tried that, failed, never will do that again.” Besides my throat was sore from screaming like a banshee.
I never had another tantrum, and even though there were a few times I didn't get my way by the time I was 10 learned to present my case like an annoying lawyer. In fact, my father used to say I was acting like a Philadelphia lawyer, a term I didn’t even know the meaning of. I think he meant it in the second definition. My mother was in therapy for a time and she told me that her counselor told her not to upset herself if she got in an argument with me but just to tell me no. I was, I suppose, to put it bluntly a smart-ass. This worked and I learned to be more reasonable in asking permission to bend the rules just enough to get to do what I wanted to do.
Since I never had sociopathic tendencies there was no danger than not getting my way would result in my burning down our house, let alone trying to set fire to the entire neighborhood. I am sure my dear childhood friends who I dedicated this to will be relieved to hear this.
An unhinged psycho-child with a book of matches and the charcoal lighter daddy used to light barbecue fires for cookouts could do a lot of damage.
Part Two: Trump’s Tantrum
Enough of a stroll down memory lane. Let’s get to the guy in the paper bag in my illustration. I am trying to abide by my promise from yesterday’s story not to subject readers from having to look at Trump’s ugly face.
As it sinks in that no effort to overturn the election will succeed I have no doubt Trump will express more and more rage. The pardons are just the most recent example of his rage but, to paraphrase Rachel Maddow, it’s only Wednesday morning. He couldn't have picked a group of criminals more likely to provoke outrage in some segment of the population. It isn't just in the United States. I’d like to see the families of the Iraqi civilians the Blackwater psychopaths murdered interviewed.
Some of these expressions of Trumpian rage won’t make any sense. His saying he’d veto the stimulus bill by demanding the $2000 payment the Democrats wanted in the first place is an example of this.
I say let him find more criminals to pardon if this provides a vent for his rage. After all this is just a perversion of justice. I doubt any of them are going to go out on a murderous crime spree.
Let him listen to Stephen Miller or to whoever he gets this ideas from (there’s no way he thinks them all up on his own) and appoint as many disrupters as he can to agencies and commissions that don’t require Senate approval.
Let him set up as many booby traps and roadblocks for the Biden administration as he possibly can, not that there’s a way to stop him.
He’s allowing private companies, like those mining lithium (in the news today), and approving their getting permits to mine public lands. Reversing these permissions may be impossible, or at the least will take time and effort.
As for trying to overturn the election, we might as well accept that he’d going to promote the recommendations coming from anyone telling him these doomed efforts have a good chance of succeeding.
If Trump is having fantasies of using the military to force recounts at gunpoint, and I wouldn't be surprise if he is, big deal. It ain’t gonna happen and it will keep him busy. General Flynn wants him to declare martial law. Let him try. If PolitFacts is correct, he can't do this. But if he tried it would take even more days, even weeks, to litigate the legality of this.
I especially hope he is putting most of his eggs in the January 6th basket. To mix metaphors, this doesn't stand a hill of beans chance of success. It will be a waste of time and as a side benefit make Congressional Republicans look even more like the sycophantic fools they’ve proved to be by supporting this unhinged president.
I don't know how long this craziness can put off the official recognition of the Biden/Harris electoral win but I say the longer the better because it puts us closer to January 20th.
When this fails I hope he has some lawyers left who still have standing to file doomed lawsuits. After all, yesterday we read the news that Lin Wood is under fire from a Delaware Judge for election suits. Trump can pardon Rudy Giuliani but he can’t stop judges from revoking his standing in a particular case. (Don’t hold you breath for disbarment, it is rarely done and when it is done it takes a long time.)
The more lawsuits pending as we approach Inauguration Day the better. As long as Trump is delusional he will convince himself he’ll be saved by a Trump judge’s gavel.
The benefit of letting Trump play out all of his delusions about the election being robbed from him is that it may keep him from doing thing he has the actually power to do beyond making provocative tweets aimed at fomenting tension both internationally (about China for example) or nationally (all but saying he wants groups like the Proud Boys to be violent) which would be worse. He can tweet anything. A tweet isn't an executive order.
He's already doing something exceedingly dangerous by downplaying the threat of Covid. You can call it action by inaction. Many thousands of people have died because of Trump’s Covid threat denial. Now that we have a vaccine more will die because they won’t take it because of Trump. However, there are some exponentially more alarming dangerous things he can do, or attempt to do.
Trump could provocative military action by ordering warships in the Pacific Fleet to sail into contested waters in the South China Sea like he did in July is one example. At the extreme he could order actual military action against an Iranian nuclear site which could trigger retaliation and this could actually lead to a Mideastern war.
Such an action would mean that if Trump hadn't been removed as certifiably insane under the 25th Amendment before he could do something like this, Biden would be forced to take the unprecedented and possibly illegal step of working back channels to keep Iran or China from escalating. Undoing this action once he was president and working with Iran would be the number one priority of the administration.
I haven’t even addressed what Trump might do that he hasn’t already done to make his pal Putin very, very happy.
Because Trump is in a delusional state and acting out of rage we need to hope his tantrum plays itself out before he does sometime really and truly dangerous.