A friend emailed me
“It is hardly news that President Trump has deliberately provoked liberal outrage, as a candidate and as president. But in case anyone is still wondering whether his inflammatory language is the result of design or impulse, recent comments from current and former White House strategists are revealing.”
Last month, an unabashed Stephen Miller, Trump’s ever-calculating White House aide, described this tactic to the Atlantic as “constructive controversy — with the purpose of enlightenment.”
“Our thing is to throw gasoline on the resistance,” Steve Bannon, former chief strategist to Trump, told Vanity Fair last December. “I love it. When they talk about identity politics, they’re playing into our hands.”
This is from Tom Edsall’s NY Times OpEd
[I would say that Miller and Bannon are not malignant narcissists, they are white nationalists and sociopaths.]
Asking whether Trump inflammatory language, and I would add, his despotic cruel decisions, are a result of design or impulse is like asking if he is crazy or crazy like a fox.
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Whether Trump is crazy or crazy like a fox is a question pondered by many of those, from duty to warn therapists like me, pundits, or liberals in general who are trying to make sense of his behavior.
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My view is that these aren't mutually exclusive. I think he is both.
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He is crazy because he is a malignant narcissist, the toxic dangerous combination of having a narcissistic personality disorder in extremis and having many characteristics of anti-social personality disorder (or sociopathy).
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He is crazy like a fox because he has learned what works for him to feed his unrelenting hunger for self-affirmation. Even a rat in an operant conditioning experiment quickly learns to differentiate between the reward and punishment behaviors.
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He is able to go full-bore unhinged with his lie strewn rants at minority groups and liberals appealing to the fears of white racists because it has no negative consequences to him. Quite the opposite, in the moment he generates self-affirming adoration from his crowds.
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His far over-the-top unapologetic self-aggrandizement and braggadocio is a nauseating display of unsubtle performance art. We see it as artless but it is eaten up by his brain numb congregation. He's like the mega-church multimillionaire who lives an opulent lifestyle, arrives at his crystal palace church in a goldplated Rolls, and preaches to a congregation that would have trouble finding two dimes to rub together.
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He is a bully, he is cruel, he is sadistic. He expresses his hate and is cheered for it by his crowds because they wish they could get away with such overt displays of their own rage at their perceived enemies.
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He has no moral and ethical core and because of this, toadies who are cut from the same cloth as Steve Miller he listens to as long as they provide him with unrelenting flattery.
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We have all observed how Trump revels in cruelly attacking his rivals with words. Now we see how he revels in inflicting pain on children and families.
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Trump is crazy like a rabid fox.
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