Pictured stories shown above: GOP operatives rush out ad featuring Don Trump Jr. as they fear president’s fans will boycott Georgia runoff, TRIGGER HAPPY Donald Trump Jr. and his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle dress as a ‘witch hunt’ for Halloween after impeachment vote, and Donald Trump Jr. aides launch super PAC as Georgia worries mount. About making the collage: I was going to put a photo of Donald Trump, Jr. holding a dead animal which he’d shot to illustrate this story but looking though them they were both too upsetting to feature and besides most people have seen them before, for example him holding the tail of an elephant he shot or posing with the leopard. I thought the photo of him with his humanoid trophy Kimberly Guilfoyle was a better representation of the personality of this creature, and it fit in with what I wrote yesterday about humor: Goodbye Schadenfreude: After four barren years, healthy humor will be in the White House again.
There’s no way the photo RawStory used to illustrate their brief four paragraph article was merely a reference to the long Politico story was an accident. There are many photos of the junior Trump they could have used. The mouth agape vacant stare Trump is an editorial comment and pretty much is a visual depiction of RawStory saying “if this is the best you got, bring it on.” This is what I thought when I read the headlines and the articles.
There’s no single Yiddish word for delusional or crazy chutzpa. The closest we can come is meshuggeneh chutzpah. This also applies to the apple of her father’s thighs, Ivanka, wanting to run for president and inheriting the throne.
Yiddish has given conversational English many gifts. As a Jewish kid I heard these words all the time. Because they were so descriptive they came into common usage. There are short lists like this, but you can read an exhaustive list here, as well as on the Wiki page for Yinglish. See how many words and phrases are familiar to you.
Yiddish words sometimes are used politically, for example:
In 1998, Charles Schumer and Al D'Amato were running for the position of United States Senator representing New York. During the race, D'Amato referred to Schumer as a putzhead. The New York Times referenced the entry for putz in The Joy of Yiddish and maintained that the phrase did not merely mean "fool", as D'Amato insisted, but was significantly more pejorative: based on that entry, a better translation might be "dickhead". D'Amato ended up losing the race; some observers credit this incident with costing him the election. Wikipedia
Maybe considering what we have seen from the House of Trump there should be a single Yiddish word for delusional chutzpah. For Donald Trump, Jr. putzhead is also appropriate.
Related: This is being formally published in the January issue of the journal Personality and Individual Difference. You can read it now:
Grandiose narcissists and decision making: Impulsive, overconfident, and skeptical of experts–but seldom in doubt
Abstract
A substantial body of research has documented that grandiose narcissists are characterized by high self-esteem, a sense of personal superiority and entitlement, overconfidence, a willingness to exploit others for self-gain, and hostility and aggression when challenged. We report two studies (N = 452) that explore how these dispositions affect their decision making. We show that grandiose narcissists' overconfidence, impulsivity, and a willingness to ignore expert advice results in a higher likelihood of making a bad decision. In addition, after getting the wrong answer, grandiose narcissists are more likely to blame others and remain self-confident in their judgment.
Trump isn’t referenced until the concluding paragraph:
Finally, more current examples of these effects can be seen in the current political sphere. Several studies have noted that President Donald Trump scores very high on narcissism (Malkin, 2017; Nai and Maier, 2018; Visser et al., 2017). Two New York Times journalists who cover the President and the White House commented on why the U.S government was unprepared for the COVID-19 outbreak. They noted that Trump's “profound need for personal praise, the propensity to blame others, the penchant for rewriting history, the lack of human empathy, the disregard for expertise, the distortion of facts, the impatience with scrutiny or criticism” were at the root of the problem (Baker & Haberman, 2020). The issue was not a lack of information but his overconfidence in his own abilities, his unwillingness to listen to experts, and to his impulsive decision making.
The Poll:
This was published on the day before the election:
Even Trump voters don’t want Ivanka and his sons to run for office in 2024, poll shows — Exclusive: Most Americans don't want the president's children to follow him into politics, an Independent poll finds
This came out two days after the election:
'I hope Don, Ivanka and Eric all run eventually': Trump supporters now look to president's children for 2024 campaign after Biden's 2020 victory
What do you think?