I had an earlier version of this:
Excerpt: But it was Trump's bizarre "chopper talk" press-avail on Wednesday, described by former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson as veering "from topic to topic with utter confidence, alarming ignorance, minimal coherence and relentless duplicity" that had even his own staff alarmed, according to the New York Times.
I also posted this on Twitter. Maybe it will go viral.
I bow down to Heather “Digby” Parton and her way with words. She ends her Salon column:
Trump senses that he's no longer being taken seriously but because they all have smiles plastered on their faces and are being solicitous, he doesn't know how to respond. So, as usual, he lies.
As I write this, Trump is trying to save face, claiming he's winning the trade war because "China called" and wants to make a deal. This isn't quite true either. Chinese officials merely responded that they would like a "calm" resolution to the dispute, so who knows where that's going? World leaders no longer taking him literally or seriously. He's just someone to be managed. Let's hope they have better luck than Americans have had so far.
As I write this Trump and Macron are on TV conducting their news conference. Trump is speaking very quickly in a monotone almost like he’s on speed. There is no pause between his words….
More later….
Monday, Aug 26, 2019 · 3:20:37 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
Pressure of speech… evident in Trump’s remarks today….
a tendency to speak rapidly and frenziedly, as if motivated by an urgency not apparent to the listener. The speech produced is difficult to interrupt.
Such speech may be too fast, erratic, irrelevant, or too tangential for the listener to understand. It is an example of cluttered speech, and often associated with certain mental disorders particularly mania and schizophrenia. It can be unrelenting, loud and without pauses.[1]. Wikipedia
Psychostimulants such as cocaine or amphetamines may cause speech resembling pressured speech in individuals with pre-existing psychopathology and produce hypomanic or manic symptoms in general, owing both to the substance's own qualities and the underlying nature of an individual's psyche. In many psychotic disorders, use of certain drugs amplifies certain expressions of symptoms, and stimulant-induced pressured speech is among them.
Monday, Aug 26, 2019 · 7:30:22 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
Amanda Marcotte doesn’t write with the edgy panache of Digby but I like her a lot. (Of course Chauncey DeVega is the number one writer on Salon covering Trump’s psychopathology). Here’s her afternoon story:
The "debate" over whether Donald Trump has a diagnosable psychological condition that renders him unfit for office never truly dies down. It's been heating up in the past couple of weeks, in response to our president acting even more like a raving nutcase than usual.
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Stelter's piece (on CNN) addresses what is admittedly a real conundrum for journalists. On one hand, it's screamingly obvious there is something deeply wrong with Donald Trump. On the other hand, there's "an understandable aversion to diagnosing a person — any person — based on what's only visible on television and Twitter.”
The truth, however, is that we do know a lot about Trump's behavior, since he's a whirling dervish of narcissism who provides an endless stream of observable information and witnesses. Psychologists who follow the news closely probably have more information about Trump than they do about most patients they diagnosis after an in-person consultation. His symptoms are abundant and inarguably point toward a major personality disorder. For instance, Trump checks off every single item on the sociopathy checklist, and has done so for the decades since he pushed himself into the public spotlight.
Tuesday, Aug 27, 2019 · 12:53:36 AM +00:00
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HalBrown
Commenter Deep Dark put this on. It is new to me but certainly applies to how Donald Trump deals with reporter questions:
The Gish Gallop is the fallacious debate tactic of drowning your opponent in a flood of individually-weak arguments in order to prevent rebuttal of the whole argument collection without great effort. The Gish Gallop is a conveyor belt-fed version of the on the spot fallacy, as it's unreasonable for anyone to have a well-composed answer immediately available to every argument present in the Gallop. The Gish Gallop is named after creationist Duane Gish, who often abused it.
Although it takes a trivial amount of effort on the Galloper's part to make each individual point before skipping on to the next (especially if they cite from a pre-concocted list of Gallop arguments), a refutation of the same Gallop may likely take much longer and require significantly more effort (per the basic principle that it's always easier to make a mess than to clean it back up again).
The tedium inherent in untangling a Gish Gallop typically allows for very little "creative license" or vivid rhetoric (in deliberate contrast to the exciting point-dashing central to the Galloping), which in turn risks boring the audience or readers, further loosening the refuter's grip on the crowd