Not at all. You probably know a lot of people with Social Narcissism tendencies, but most of them don’t get an international spotlight shining on them for years, have it to the degree Trump does, or combine it with dementia.
A lot of the things people find suprising about Trump are “oh, hi Mom!” for me. She wasn’t academically or professionally successful, but socially? One of the worst parts of being her daughter was how many times I was told what a woooooonderful person she was.
The one thing she’ll regret about dying is that she won’t be able to enjoy being the centerpiece at the funeral.
I like the theory that a co-worker opined a couple of months ago- basically that he’s had too much money all his life, and that it’s insulated him from the consequences of his actions.
I suspect this is the root of all his problems. Where another kid growing up in NYC in the 1950s and 1960s would have had to deal with the occasional or not-so-occasional ass-kicking for acting entitled, mouthing off, or generally being a pest, not so for rich-kid Donny.
Most people when they’re employed have to toe the line to a great extent and behave a certain way, or they get fired and their livelihood is imperiled. Not so for rich-guy Donny.
You learn over time how to behave, and in conjunction with that, you learn how to overcome setbacks and develop a certain amount of grit and reserve. Not so for Trump; he’s never had to actually suffer any consequences, and it shows- no filter on what he says or does, because he’s never held accountable.
This is what I can’t figure out. There have been sociopaths before. There are pathological liars. More narcissists than you can shake a stick at. Trump is all those things and has a long history of various other reprehensible and arguably criminal behavior. He is a fundamentally irredeemable person with relatively few influential friends and even fewer powerful peers who have any respect for him. Relegated to clown status by most of society, he has been is a punchline for years. So:
How the FUCK has he gotten away with everything for as long as he has and ended up being rewarded for his demonstrable incompetence?
What is wrong with the American public that allowed for this to even be a remote possibility let alone this absurd reality?
Where are the checks and balances we’ve all been assured exist to prevent this kind of corrupt and wholly unqualified individual from becoming POTUS?
Will anyone take American politics and democratic institutions of government seriously again? How can they?
Trump was on TV for 12 years. So he was not some outsider he was a TV celeb. If you look into it almost every celeb who has run for office has won - Arnold S, Sonny Bono, Jesse Ventura, Love Boat gopher, and so on. Celebs start out with so much name recognition.
And the story line was always “Donald Trump, fabulous business genius”. So that is what is embedded in the national consciousness. There are easily accessible stories showing that it is basically all just a story for the show, but it is extremely hard to dislodge something like that. How many people believe that Washington cut down a cherry tree, after all?
Trump fans don’t mind at all that he cheats on his wives, is a jerk, curses, bashes people , etc. They like that stuff because most of it he does to Dems/liberals.
NPD does sound like it fits Trump. I also see signs of mental deterioration. If you listen to clips of him 10 or 20 years ago, he speaks coherently, and he can hold onto a thought for more than a few seconds. Big change now, where we all have to try to guess what he meant.
Gas station is normally where I see it. It’s not Starbucks or Peet’s, but it’s about average for a diner or similar.
He is a useful fool. He will say and do anything and his opponents will devote their lives to picking it apart. He will never fully understand how he got to where he is or who put him there, so he will never accidentally give them away. Unfortunately, Trump, like Beeblebrox, does not wield power. He draws attention away from it.
Trump is a troll’s troll. Many Americans are trolls, or at least maladjusted childlike adults who enjoy schadenfreude perhaps too much. They lack empathy and enjoy testicular trauma humor as long as they’re only watching. If you get hurt, it’s because you were not paying attention/asking for it.
The Founding Fathers were pretty smart, but they didn’t have a good appreciation for team sports. If you approach DC as a team, over time you can skew the Judicial Branch to favor your team, you can get loyal and disciplined team members to dominate the Legislative Branch, and you can install loyal team members in other key positions. the positions all complement each other, so as long as everyone toes the line, everyone wins.
As long as we have nukes and a military that can operate with an open checkbook the world will take us seriously enough. We’re getting good at hegemony. And while they are taking us seriously, America might just pull its head out of its ass and do something cool for the rest of the world to counter some of the uncool stuff we’ve gotten up to recently. If Trump has taught us anything, it is that people have short memories when something shiny is placed in front of them.
Too much money and as a kid he was biggger, stronger and more aggressive than his classmates in that military school he attended. What’s the best way to avoid being the target of the class bully? Being the class bully.
Hence that famous complaint, “he’s doing it to the wrong people!”
Well to be fair, a vote “for” does not necessarily mean “approval of” in a presidential election. It only means she was slightly more appealing than an overprivileged bag of festering shit. That she wasn’t able to soundly defeat Trump is a pretty clear indication she didn’t do a good job of convincing anyone that she was much different from an overprivileged bag of festering shit. Of course, it also stands that about half of us enjoy proximity to an overprivileged bag of festering shit.