My Alternate Illustration showing Trump carrying Putin’s water.
The moist salient part of the article is from the following quote from Daily Beast author Matt Lewis, an anti-Trump conservative columnist. He asks "So what explains Trump’s deranged interpretation of events?" and answers in part that Trump “has a soft spot for authoritarians and strongmen who use violence," and elaborates:
"Trump’s brain isn’t normal. He majors in the minors and minors in the majors. He fetishizes feats of strength and obsesses over “process”—how somebody does something—while downplaying the much larger question—should they be doing this in the first place?" he wrote. "At this point, I am sick of debating whether Trump’s praise for Putin is strategic or simply the product of a twisted mind. Either option is disqualifying."
Does Trump have an abnormal brain or a twisted and deranged mind? It isn’t close to a moot question. You say tomato I say tomahto.
Not to be overly shameless ( /s ) in promoting one of my recent diaries, here are some of my opinions about the question posed above (bold) from what I wrote Wednesday:
I addressed the question as to whether Trump’s widely publicized comments praising Putin and his invasion of Ukraine represented such a lack of judgment on his part that it veered into the realm of his not being able to anticipate the negative consequences of what he says (see link to search of Trump praises Putin from Google News and this could be an indication of severely impaired reality testing, a hallmark characteristics of psychosis. Whether we say Trump has a twisted mind and is deranged of use clinical terms like psychosis or delusional, again you say tomato I say tomahto...
Excerpt:
If he (Trump) cares about such negative coverage, his praise of Putin shows an extreme lack of judgment, so severe in fact that it strongly suggests his reality testing is impaired enough to be diagnostic of an important aspect of a psychotic process. If he does understand this it is a manifestation of his being a malignant narcissist.
Perhaps he believes that he can get away with saying everything, the "I can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it" phenomena. Only a malignant narcissist would say something like what he said to a crowd at an Iowa rally:
"My people are so smart -- and you know what else they say about my people? The polls?" I have the most loyal people -- did you ever see that? I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible."
If Pete Hegseth from Fox News is correct (below), then it suggests Trump was acting out an aspect of his malignant narcissism when he said this:
While talking with fellow host Jesse Watters, Hegseth dismissed criticism of the former president for gushing about Putin by claiming he was only doing it to get a reaction out of the American media.
"Vladimir Putin lives rent-free in the minds of our media," he said. "No entity has done more to spread Russian propaganda and to prop up the strongman that is Vladimir Putin than our own media. And Donald Trump was happy to troll them on it, as he continues to do to this moment." Reference
Meanwhile, holding into your britches and taking a journey across the pond and through Europe into Russia and the mind of Vladimir Putin we can pose the same question pretty much with the same words about one of Trump’s role models. In fact, questions about Putin’s possible mental and physical deterioration having led to his decision to invade Ukraine are being posed in the media about Putin's decision to launch a catastrophic new European war. This is combined with the weird language in his recent public appearances. For example:
VLADIMIR Putin could be 'seriously ill', a Kremlin-focused journalist suggested while discussing Russia's invasion of Ukraine's breakaway regions.
Vladimir Putin President of Russia Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, says that he is concerned Russian President Vladimir Putin is dangerous in...
Putin is Mentally Ill: Ukrainian Ambassador on Russia's Sick Leader Download Takeaway Host John Hockenberry (L) speaking with Yurly Sergeyev (R), Ukrainian Ambassador to the United Nations, at the Core Club in New York City on May 14, 2014. ( Schuyler Swenson )
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This illustration was inspired by the comment from sockpuppet.
Poll:
A few days a poll I posted in the diary about whether or not Trump was psychotic showed that 27% of those who took it worked or used to work in a mental health or related profession and 37% considered themselves to be well informed about psychology. Regardless of which category you’re in, take the poll and make your prediction.
Based on a comment change the poll to “within approximately nine months.”