Opinion by Hal Brown, MSW, My blog features stories of the day that piqued my interest
Written Tuesday, posted Wednesday.
First, I definitely don't expect readers to read the prior the diaries I posted links to here. I put them in this story by way of illustration. The titles and pictures I made really are all you need to see (click here to enlarge image).
Now as to why, out of utter frustration, I am writing this.
Once again a host on MSNBC, this time it was Nicolle Wallace, who was pondering and puzzling over why Trump couldn’t have shown some sincere sounding appreciation to all the doctors who helped him at Walter Reed, who triggered a reaction in me. It was Rep. Donna Edwards who had to school her by explaining that Trump was incapable of empathy.
I don’t want to pick on Nicolle Wallace. I think she does an excellent job. She is just another example of how certain people, hosts and guests, who I see on MSNBC who by now should have learned that Trump is to his very core a malignant narcissist. There are those who still haven't figured it out.
MSNBC hosts who “got it” long ago are Lawrence O’Donnell, Joe Scarborough, and Mika Brzezinski.
I’m just one of countless mental health therapists, some of them could be called eminent like John Gartner, Lance Dodes, Robert Jay Lifton, and Bandy Lee, and others. More are like me, a retired rural mental health center director who went to a state university, who have on one or another public forum tried to explain what makes Trump a manifestation a roiling cauldron of psychopathology so different that I wrote that he probably needs a new diagnosis.
As for the latest incident involving Covid which some are tweeting it as his #Covida balcony moment...
… I can only hazard a guess as to why he didn’t at least mouth some phony words that would lead at least a few people to believe he’s halfway human.
Perhaps he is “merely” so much of a sociopath who incapable of empathy that he doesn’t even know how to feign it even when it would be in his best interest politically to do so.
Trump is the exemplar, a poster baby prince, for the Dark Triad which, I wrote about here. This has been an overlooked explanation for his behavior. Importantly it includes the characteristics of Machiavellianism adding it as the part of a triad to severe narcissism and psychopathy. His Machiavellianism could explain his recent display
Putting it simply, the mad emperor (or prince) doesn't care what anyone thinks, he does what he damn well want to do. He is following the general theme of Machiavelli’s The Prince that “the aims of princes – such as glory and survival – can justify the use of immoral means to achieve those ends.”
"Machiavelli is the only political thinker whose name has come into common use for designating a kind of politics, which exists and will continue to exist independently of his influence, a politics guided exclusively by considerations of expediency, which uses all means, fair or foul, iron or poison, for achieving its ends – its end being the aggrandizement of one's country or fatherland – but also using the fatherland in the service of the self-aggrandizement of the politician or statesman or one's party." Strauss, Leo (1987), "Niccolo Machiavelli", in Strauss, Leo; Cropsey, Joseph (eds.), History of Political Philosophy (3rd ed.), University of Chicago Press
Maybe he is so delusional that he doesn’t understand that learning to read some lines composed by one of his speechwriters trying to sound like he means them would accrue to his benefit.
Maybe he’s such a bully that he knows full well how such a performance will incite severe criticism and he gets a thrill out of taunting the media and then watching the reactions of outrage. Forensic psychiatrist Bandy Lee told Salon that today after the viral photo-op that it "would not be an exaggeration" to say that Trump "delights in putting people in danger. "Sociopathy is dangerous, in part because out of envy of other human beings for having human characteristics, it actively desires people to suffer and die," she said in the Salon interview.
In another Salon interview today media critic James Poniewozik calls Donald Trump the greatest show on TV. He says Trump is a "mediated character," not a real person and that Like Tony Soprano, he'll never admit defeat. He says, in part:
Part of my premise is that Donald Trump is not a person. Donald Trump as we know him and as he matters to us is really more a mediated character and performance. The performance has evolved over time in response to the rewards he has received being a celebrity. If the real Donald Trump does exist, I am not sure that he even knows who he is anymore.
He's not a good actor in the sense that a film actor is. There's an essential difference between what a film actor does and what a reality TV performer does. When you play yourself as a character in reality TV what you are doing is being yourself but louder, presenting an exaggerated version of yourself. As far as acting — a skill that requires empathy and basically imagining that other people are real — you can see Trump's shortcomings whenever he has to visit the site of a tragedy or read off a teleprompter.
What Donald Trump does works pretty well for his particular style of political performance. For him, much of his message is about life as a zero-sum competition, conflict, winning and the idea that for you to get something, somebody else has to lose something. Trump's brand is based on those values.
Trump also has a great off-the-cuff, pugilistic sense of verbal combat. He is very good at throwing up a lot of dust and keeping people off balance. That has worked very well with the kind of persona that Trump was presenting as candidate and then as president. It is not necessarily a kind of performance that might have worked well for another person or a politician with a different message.
We’ll never know whether he planned the performance on South Portico of the White House, otherwise known as the Truman Balcony, in advance, while walking up the stairs, or whether removed the mask on impulse. If the later I have to wonder about his also suffering from an impulse control disorder or a what even a Fox News doctor said might be roid rage due to the dexamethasone steroid he’s been taking. If you have watched doctors on MSNBC we have learned that dexamethasone can cause manic behavior and impair judgement.
It’s also possible he is just basically too stupid to understand basic political optics as well as Melania “I really don’t care, do U?” Trump who tapes revealed really. really doesn’t give a fuck about anyone but herself and let’s hope, her own son.
I suppose it could be some or all of the above.
If this lament about the media sounds familiar it may be due to the fact that you read my April 16, 2020 dairy about Rachell Maddow who, as much as I admire her, still drives me around the bend with her refusal to educate herself about the psychopathology of Donald Trump.
That diary wasn't even the first time I wrote about the same thing regarding the progressive media. I posted this story on August 27, 1019.
It isn’t just the hosts on MSNBC. I write this former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs is telling Ari Melber that Trump missed a moment where he thought he might elevate his Covid experience into something larger and meaningful as if he thinks Trump is capable of doing this.
Michelle Goldberg, below right, knows of what she speaks. She just explained to Joy Reid: “His narcissism even gets on the way of self interest.”
For those of those who go on television and figuratively scratch their heads in puzzlement as to why Trump behaviors in both bizarre and self-defeating ways all I can say is read this book, or if you don't have the time spend and hour and twenty minutes and watch this documentary: