Excerpts:
American voters view Donald Trump as having traits associated with sadistic personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder, according to new research published in Clinical Psychological Science. The study found that even those who personally voted for Trump perceived him as having a highly disordered personality.
…………
But the researchers did find that both conservatives and liberals perceived Trump as highly sadistic, narcissistic, antisocial, and passive-aggressive, though liberals tended to rate Trump’s personality as more dysfunctional in general compared to conservatives.
The article is by Ian Hughes, the author of Disordered Minds: How Dangerous Personality Disorders Are Destroying Democracy who is a contributing author to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the MaREI Centre at University College Cork in Ireland.
This is a lengthy article featuring quotes from Duty to Warn founder and contributor to “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” Dr. John Gartner. Here’s a brief excerpt.
Add to this toxic mix the fact according to (clinical psychologist John) Gartner that Trump is a sexual sadist. This is scary enough when we’re watching psychopathic killers on shows like Criminal Minds or Mindhunter, but to have a sexual sadist in the Oval Office is a wholly different order of threat. Trump gets gratification — sexual gratification — from hurting people. And as president during a time of pandemic, he can hurt a lot of people. He’s doing so deliberately, because it makes him feel powerful, and, frankly, because he gets pleasure from it. Gartner says:
Professor of psychiatry and psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg called that phenomenon “omnipotent destructiveness.” The bullying, the violence, the destruction, frightening people, humiliating people, getting revenge and the like — such behavior is what Donald Trump has done his whole life. It is who Donald Trump really is. Unfortunately, too many people are still in denial of that fact.
Gartner takes it further:
We are being abused by him. We know that Trump is lying. We know that he’s doing nothing to help us. We feel helpless to do anything to stop him. It is causing collective mental despair. In this way Donald Trump is inducing feelings of rage and outrage — and he keeps doing it. It is not that all Americans are suckers or dupes, it is that Trump is a master at such cruel and manipulative behavior. Donald Trump knows exactly what he is doing to the physical and emotional health of the American people.
Gartner then takes it further than even I had speculated. Trump, he writes, is a “democidal maniac.” Democide, as the link above shows, is “murder by government.” Trump will use his power as the American president to kill thousands — many thousands — of Americans. He is already doing it, having helped kill 63,861 Americans from COVID-19 as I write this. The numbers will be higher by the time you read this.
Another excellent essay by Salon’s Chauncey DeVega
Excerpt.
Here's a first principle: Donald Trump is a character who is playing the real-life role of president of the United States.
In that role, Trump is compulsively watchable, both for those who hate him and his cult members who slavishly adore him. As shown by his fake coronavirus press conferences — which exist primarily to fuel his malignant narcissism and megalomania — Donald Trump is like a tractor-trailer with no brakes, on fire, and carrying volatile explosives as it careens down a steep hill, its driver asleep at the wheel.
We watch because we have to know what happens next: The destruction is both thrilling and terrifying.
In so many ways, the riddle of Trump (one that is actually easy to solve) is best understood and deciphered through the lens of performance studies and cultural studies, not through the tenets of traditional journalism.
Excerpt:
“I saw what he was doing, calling his followers to liberation, especially when they are suffering from the intense lock-downs and loss of jobs,” Lee said. “And now he is using that to test his ability to call out his armed troops, if you will.”
Lee attributed the president’s behavior to what she calls a “mental incapacity” to do his job as president.
“When someone lacks capacity, [they have] difficultly taking in information, taking in advice, processing that information and making sound, rational decisions,” she said. “And those are the kinds of things we are seeing in the president.”
Excerpt:
Before we open the shebeen for our seventh week of self-quarantine, here’s a little something to brighten your morning: the great Brendan Gleeson and his son, Fergus, setting to music the fine words of Jem Casey, the Poet of the Pick, as first transcribed in the novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, by Flann O’Brien, and adapting the words. And I think we’ll all agree that the poem has one quality to it.
Permanence.
Now to the business at hand. Three reporters at The New York Times donned safety gear and proceeded to dissect 260,000 words worth of transcript from the now-semi-defunct Five O’Clock Follies, looking for patterns in the chaos. What they returned with was startling. I mean, we all sensed how off-the-trolley his narcissism was, but to see the cold figures is stunning.
By far the most recurring utterances from Mr. Trump in the briefings are self-congratulations, roughly 600 of them, which are often predicated on exaggerations and falsehoods. He does credit others (more than 360 times) for their work, but he also blames others (more than 110 times) for inadequacies in the state and federal response. Mr. Trump’s attempts to display empathy or appeal to national unity (about 160 instances) amount to only a quarter of the number of times he complimented himself or a top member of his team.
(And do try to survive the accompanying graphic, which looks like a time-lapse video of a spreading fungus.)
Excerpts:
After DeWine (Republican governor of Ohio) stopped subjugating himself to Trump’s malignant narcissism his approval numbers rose. Asked about DeWine’s handling of the pandemic, 85% approved, compared to only half for Trump. That’s not surprising since Trump’s declarations about opening the economy as if the coronavirus is magically vanishing aren’t resonating.
The vast majority of Americans are smart enough to realize that Trump’s nonsensical chatter about injecting disinfectants and somehow focusing ultraviolet light inside our bodies is both dangerous and dumber than dumb. About 80% of Americans, polls show, believe we need to stay home to save lives. About one in six Americans thinks the various and limited lock down orders have not gone far enough.
………….
The awful truth, which I’ve devoted the last five years to showing all Americans, is that Trump is a delusional ignoramus. Central to understanding Trump’s inability to lead or any in this crisis is a simple fact: Trump operates from what he wishes to be true. He incapable of processing new information that contradicts what he imagines.
Trump is so stupid that doesn’t know antibiotics fight bacterial infections but are useless a virus. Here is the official White House transcript in which Trump made statements as bizarre as they are confused and dumb...
.
Below