Trump loves to take revenge, is he taking revenge on the world, mortality even God, by creating as much hurt as possible before he goes. He seems to be the type who if he can’t have it, he will make damn sure no one else can either. He seems to be the type to do this, but is he at that point.
Be afraid, be very afraid…
The evidence that Trump is in gravely ill health is circumstantial but ever-growing. He has to live inside his body so he’s got to be aware of it. My body talks to me every moment of every day and I’m not under his stress nor have I abused my body as badly as he has.
Does this mean he’s hurrying his vengeance campaign because he knows he won’t live out his term? Maybe. The other possibility is that too many people are beginning to stand up to him and he’s trying to flood the field to get some of his stuff through. Or maybe both.
Amazingly, both prospects are equally horrifying and comforting. Weird times.
I think that Trump is impulsive and struggles to concentrate.
His political decisions are heavily influenced by who last spoke to him.
He enjoys the power of the President (for matters small and large e.g. bombing Iran and taking over the Kennedy Centre.)
He wants to make money off the presidency (1) and take revenge on those he dislikes (2).
(1) In May, Trump rewarded top investors in his meme coin with a swanky dinner. Trump launched the coin just days before taking office. Fans of the president have also been able to buy crypto-themed Trump merchandise, including $100,000 watches and pricey sneakers.
Trump family crypto empire expands with Crypto.com partnership
(2) Trump’s team has opened investigations of Democrat Letitia James, the New York attorney general who sued Trump’s company over alleged fraud for falsifying records, and Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who as a congressman led Trump’s first impeachment.
A rational person would be aware of it, but Donald Trump. Although I tend to dismiss layperson diagnoses of incipient dementia, Trump has always been kind of self-delusional in the way most narcissists chronically are, and his inchoate ramblings have become even more scattershot and delusional in the last year or so, propped up by grovelers and paracletes who see their own success in Trump’s continued presidency regardless of consequences.
Trump has always been vengeful to people he feels have in some way wronged him (witness his decades-long campaign of hatred toward Greydon Carter for describing him as a “short-fingered vulgarian”, and even more amusingly his offense comes primarily at the description of his stubby digits rather than the characterization as a crude oaf), and he made getting revenge upon political enemies and the media a cornerstone of what passed for a presidential campaign. I highly doubt that he has any genuine religious beliefs in a biblical Apocalypse but he has surrounded himself with Christian nutters who do and some of them, like Mike Huckabee (not a formal member of his Cabinet or presidential advisors but in the inner circle of personal confidants) who believe in and have expressed the desire to bring on the ‘End Times’ because he’s crazy as a fucking bedbug.
I find nothing comforting about a narcissistic imbecile with his finger on the button and being counseled by religious nutters to expand conflict in ‘the Holy Land’ and elsewhere to bring forth their visions of salvation, or even just imposing a totalitarian theocracy described in Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation’s “Phoenix Declaration”.
Stranger
It might be an awareness of his own mortality, or rage that the world doesn’t love and obey him unconditionally. But I wouldn’t be surprised at all if one of his major goals is just to harm the world as much as he can. Spite and sadism are two of his prominent personality features.
I’d honestly be surprised if he doesn’t nuke something, at some point, just because he can.
If Trump stops scamming and trying to steal everything that’s not nailed down, then we should all become very worried.
That’s the only sign that matters. You wouldn’t be able to tell if he decided to destroy everything, because that would look just the same as what he’s always been doing, especially in 2020 and 2025.
This makes sense. We couldn’t really distinguish what he’s been doing since January 20 2025 (and in 2020) from “now he’s actively trying to destroy the USA and the world” because they are pretty much the same.
The idea that Donald would know he’s dying is itself suspect, though. CAN a narcissist form the thought “I’m going to be gone, I’m going to be ending”…? Is that possible?
He’s been told by so many supposed “ministers of God” that he’s equivalent to the Second Coming, that it seems likely he thinks he’s a special case. No matter how his body fails, won’t he just keep on living? Keep on Manifesting Greatness? Being God’s chosen–forever? (To me that seems more his psychology, as opposed to ‘facing his mortality.’)
Even if he doesn’t believe he’s ever going to die, he might still set off some nukes, of course. For the thrill of exercising power and the knowledge of the misery he’ll create. He’d like that.
Yeah, the “Phoenix Declaration” sounds good on the surface, but it’s really one of those “we believe in free speech as long as you agree with us” things.
So much of it seems to be self-contradictory though.
Right out of the gate, they talk about parental choice and responsibility, and then further down they talk about objective truth that is knowable, and science courses that are “grounded in reality, not ideological fads”.
Those don’t go together; if there’s objective truth and science grounded in reality, we shouldn’t let ignorant dipshit parents choose not to educate their kids that way. There has to be ONE truth, so that the debates are about how to handle it, not about what the truth is. I’m guessing that objective truth and “reality” they refer to in the declaration is some religious nonsense, not actually anything science-backed .
This is letting your prejudices override your rationality. As a 75-year-old with multiple health issues, I can attest that no amount of narcissism can ignore everyday realities. I’m not making a definitive statement about Trump because I don’t have sufficient information, mainly because it’s being deliberately concealed, but the ifs are compelling.
Blather. You know very well that the comfort I’m taking is in Trump’s potential dying and the pushback that’s currently increasing.
Word for the day!
There was a Paraclete High School in the Antelope Valley. I went to the ‘progressive’ school, kids a few blocks east from where I lived went to the ‘generic’/’stereotypical’ school (that was once attended by Frank Zappa), and Palmdale seemed to have a lot of riots. I never saw Paraclete, but it is the private Catholic school.
That’s not creepy at all…. /sarcasm
Do we know the name of the staffer generating the IA prompts for these sorts of pictures?
Trump is 79 and in a very stressful job.
I’m not surprised it’s taking a toll. He’s traveled a lot in the past 8 months.
Biden was 78 when he was inaugurated.
Reagan was very close to 70.
Electing anyone older than 70 is a bad idea because they’ll be 78 after two terms in office.
Cite Age at Inauguration | Presidents of the United States (POTUS)
To be frank, although it is speculation I’m pretty sure that Trump is on a cocktail of different pharmaceuticals and likely some kind of anti-senescence treatments (of questionable efficacy) just to keep him upright and quasi-articulate. Donald Trump strikes me as the kind of person who lacks any real introspection and who avoids any discussion or consideration of mortality. I’m not at all certain that he is aware of his state of health and frankly the people around him are probably doing their best to insulate him from being confronted with it. This is not at all an unusual state of affairs for despots and their flappers who are hoping to keep the gravy train going as long as possible before having to negotiate the delicate shift to another godhead.
I’m not sure how what I wrote got your back up but I am extremely concerned about what happens if Trump dies or suddenly becomes aware of his impending mortality. Unlike his first regime where he just surrounded himself with imbeciles who seemed to spend most of their time fighting with one another, this group has divided their control of various functions and the people in most immediate proximity and personal influence over Trump are Christian Nationalists and a handful of certified apocalypters who genuinely want to see cataclysmic war as the precursor to their dreams of biblical Rapture, et cetera. These people are fucking nuts and although Trump clearly started out believing that he was using them to strengthen his base with the 30-40 million Evangelical Christian votes, it now looks like they’re using him. Of course, Trump has long talked about nuclear weapons including allegedly asking an unnamed advisor that if we have them why can’t we use them. It is not beyond plausibility that he might find himself in a situation where he would elect to use nuclear weapons to demonstrate his authority.
As for “the pushback that’s currently occurring” Trump no longer has any reason to concern himself with polls, and the Republican Party is doing everything they can to set themselves up to minimize voting losses, not only including gerrymandering (and not just in Texas) but various efforts in suppressing voter turnout, invalidating poll lists, and already preemptively casting doubts on election integrity in races where they know they are likely to lose, with Trump softening up the country to expect military and Homeland security presence in ‘sanctuary cities’. In essence, Trump and the GOP are doing everything to set aside elections that do not favor them, which is actually something he tried to do in 2020 but he didn’t have the ‘true believers’ to do the groundwork to make it feasible. That is all being laid out this time and even though the corporate media doesn’t really want to say it, historians and scholars of autocracy from Jason Stanley, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Timothy Snyder, and Heather Cox Richardson are laying it all out plainly for anyone to see. The rhetoric, the scapegoating, the militarization and expansion of a quasi-law enforcement agency outside of the Department of Justice, the use of federal agents from other agencies to essentially be seconded to immigration enforcement instead of their critical duties, the deployment of federalized militia and the actual Marines (ostensibly to protect federal buildings or support law enforcement, actually just to show that he has that legal authority),…all of this is classic getting-ready-to-turn-a-soft-autocracy-into-a-genuine-dictatorship staging.
And even if Trump keels over tomorrow into a bucket of fried chicken, none of this stuff goes away. The GOP has had their taste of authoritarian blood and they really like it, which anyone who objects being sidelined, marginalized, censured, or even threatened. This is a party that has expelled Liz Cheney, previously one of the biggest advocates for turning the Republican Party into an autocratic-leaning-and-loving polity for the sin of not playing into Donald Trump as their leader.
Stranger
Trump is not all that unusual or extreme as dictators go. If Lee Kuan Yew, the Singapore strongman was at one end (mild dictator) , and Hitler/Mussolini were at the other end (fascist), Trump’s in the middle.
He’s not trying to create as much hurt as possible. That’s why he stands accused of TACO (Trump Aways Chickens Out). It’s true that after the TACO acronym became popular, he really did impose some tremendously high tariffs. But if there was a big stock market collapse, he would scale back some.
Also, he genuinely thinks some of what he is doing will work, not just for him and his friends, but also for middle America. It is other than insane to think that sending in the National Guard to cities will cause some criminals to slow-walk their crimes. Look at El Salvador. I am personally against strongman rule, but it doesn’t hurt every middle class individual. Some it helps. That’s one reason why there’s risk of MAGA continuing to win elections.
Trump fears nukes. Apparently someone made him understand that nuclear war is the end of his administration, probably starting with him, so the notion “nukes kill Trump” is one of the few ideas that ever penetrated his cranium and stayed here.
This is why I don’t think Trump ever launches nukes. Even on his deathbed he’ll be expecting a loophole to open, some last-minute hail mary. He may fear death constantly, but he will never expect death because he’s never faced any final consequence in his charmed life. He sees death as just another consequence that he must and will outrun.
Of course if he gets dementia, and there’s some corruption in the ol’ 5 1/4” floppy upstairs where his existence resides, all bets are off.
What if the Rapture is actually people being vaporised by nuclear weapons, and the ‘left-behinds’ are the ones who survive?
I agree that although trump is totally focused on himself, he has no true self-awareness. I see his current behavior as a case of
Check out the historical context and see if this sounds familiar:
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The French defeat at Rossbach [Battle where 41K French soldiers were killed] came just a few months after a shocking assassination attempt on Louis XV by Robert-François Damiens, a disgruntled domestic servant, who had attempted to stab the king to death as he entered his carriage at Versailles.In the wake of these two jarring events, the king – sensing impending doom for his monarchy and an end to the existing order – wryly commented to one of his courtiers, “après moi, le deluge” (“after me, the flood”).
His prediction proved prescient. Republicanism, which had gained momentum during his reign, gripped France after his death, and the “flood” – when it came in 1789 – ravaged France for decades.
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Either way, his dismissive attitude, perfectly epitomized by his nihilistic “flood” remark, was a critical component of the culture that ultimately led to the unravelling of the French monarchy. His abiding concern appeared to have been for his own circumstances to be preserved until his demise – and whatever happened afterward didn’t matter, at least not to him.
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