What is a high functioning sociopath?
I got to wondering how many Republican members of Congress actually watch the segments we see replayed on MSNBC showing Trump to be on the edge of lapsing into a totally psychotic-seeming break, to show him slurring his words and exhibiting an involuntary shoulder twitches.
How many see his speaking in the kind of word salad one would expect from an unmedicated hebephrenic (a form of schizophrenia characterized especially by incoherence, delusions lacking an underlying theme, and affect that is usually flat, inappropriate, or silly) who is off his medication?
We have all see clips of Hitler’s speeches to large crowds but unless we understand German we may not know that historians consider him to have been a charismatic and successful orator without resorting to the kind of clownish pandering to his crowds the way Trump does. He manipulated his crowds, whether in person or on the radio, by demonizing the Jews and playing to their need to blame “the other” for their own anti-Semitism and their plight in life. But he never was buffoonish like Trump.
Charlie Chaplin depicted Hitler as a clown but nobody really thought he was not to be taken seriously.
On the other hand Trump has frequently been depicted as a clown, notably in his what was previously his hometown’s biggest tabloid:
"I know that men are won over less by the written than by the spoken word, that every great movement on this earth owes its growth to great orators and not to great writers." —Adolf Hitler, "Mein Kampf," 1925
Read more in Business Insider: “Why Hitler was such a successful orator.”
Hitler, like Churchill, wrote his own speeches. He practiced his gestures. There are no reports of him going off on unscripted, let alone ungrammatical demented rants or asides that had people wondering if he was suffering from early dementia.
It occurred to me that many if not most Republicans in Congress do not watch the segments of Trump demonstrating the most unhinged aspects of his personality, and behaviors leading some experts to wonder about his suffering from early dementia. I wish they would be forced to do so. Democratic House managers played a few of them during the Senate trial but not to take the point that Trump was mentally unstable or worse.
This is why I posted this tweet:
Most of us choose to watch MSNBC and we see clips like these this from his rallies. Below is one from his Wildwood, N.J. rally the other day was also played on Fox, and you can hear Fox personalities actually laughing in the background:
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This one goes back to 2019:
As Republicans are about to assure Trump runs for a second term I hope they realize that they risk putting not only putting a lying, cheating, sociopath into office for four more years, but they are promoting the candidacy of someone who is mentally unbalanced and who is showing more and more signs he could have a dangerous psychotic break. Keep in mind that not only is severely impaired reality testing a hallmark of acute psychosis, but also are auditory command and other hallucinations. This could happen suddenly and have paranoid features (what might the voices be telling his and could they lead him to make irrevocable decisions which could cost many lives.
It would be better he heeded the advice of Sean Hannity than voices in his paranoid psychotic mind.