The reluctance to diagnose someone you haven’t personally examined, to me, applies to a person about whose personal thoughts and private life you don’t know much. Someone who has a public persona and a very private persona that the world does not see. Nixon is an example–a statesman in public, a crude, vindictive vulgarian in private.
Sometimes when people first go to therapy, they don’t “come clean” on what’s really bothering them, or what their issues really are. This might be because they’re ashamed, or they don’t yet trust the therapist, or because they don’t really know what’s driving them and their problems.
None of these considerations applies to The Donald. He is Out There. Every day. Many times a day. He is totally PUBLIC. He doesn’t know the meaning of an unexpressed thought (I use the term “thought” with disclaimers). It seems to me that he doesn’t have an inner life. Something pops into his head, and then it pops out on Twitter. He doesn’t care about consistency or accuracy. He lies. He holds grudges. His mental acuity is declining so much that those of us who watched parents with dementia decline are seeing the same behaviors and deterioration in language. He’s a word-association dream-- he opens his mouth (or picks up his phone) and just urps it out. He is a living, breathing example of stream-of-consciousness.
I can’t imagine that any one of these mental health professionals would learn anything about thump in a year’s worth of daily sessions that the world doesn’t already know about him. This is not rocket surgery.
So this book seems perfectly legitimate to me, as it did when I cited it when it was first published.
That argument seems quite reasonable to me (though admittedly it’s not my field). I’d be interested to know if anyone in the 100 or so new pages of this second edition mentions it or something similar.
Certainly Trump has benefited tremendously from the prohibitive rule, given how many professionals of top reputation might otherwise have spoken out about him (from the moment he came down that escalator, possibly).
C-SPAN carried a panel discussion of the new edition of the book, dated the day of publication. I watched most of it then; it contains some solid information:
Of course Trump loves that modus operandi. After all, isn’t that how he got his current job?
During the campaign (the first one, not this disaster of an administration that Trump is treating as campaign 2.0), a lot of people I know were incredulous that I referred to Trump as a Nazi. Look, fools; he is a Nazi, and he doesn’t care about hiding that fact.
Ditto.
What? Why should they give more credence to a New York birth certificate than to a Hawaii birth certificate? You underestimate the extent to which his followers will support–and even come t0 believe–his nonsense.
Hmmmmm. If Obergruppenführer Miller is involved in this… And Vitiello was not “tough enough” to head ICE;
And now, according to sources, "Nielsen “believed the situation was becoming untenable with the President becoming increasingly unhinged about the border crisis and making unreasonable and even impossible requests,”
I am seriously starting to think that the next step for Herr Miller is some sort of Kristallnacht, and or a wholesale stuffing of brown people into camps.
No exaggeration - this shit is starting to get serious.
I wonder what Miller thinks will happen when the next president sends him packing. Is he expecting some sort of 1000-year permanent majority or something?
He doesn’t have a border plan, except to do whatever he can to make sure that the border is still an issue going into the next political campaign. Again, Trump needs the deplorables, and the deplorables need Trump, which is why they have no choice but to support each other. Nielsen was actually trying to take her job seriously - that was never her job. Her job was to be so cruel to migrants that it provoked outrage from the left, which she’s done already. But Trump and Miller need to keep this issue alive going into 2020. Finding an actual solution that resolves the border crisis means political suicide for Trump, which is why we can expect more shocking cruelty against migrants.
But understand something else: cruelty against Hispanic migrants is only the beginning.
In case people don’t get it, the president is deliberately encouraging his cabinet to break the law. The president is, quite literally, shredding the Constitution. He absolutely does not care what the laws say, what the Constitution says. He knows what he is doing (on so many fronts) is patently illegal. He knows it, and simply does not care. If anything, Trump, like many aspiring despots, delights in flaunting the law and says it as a direct challenge to the power of the opposition. He is daring his opposition to stop him.
I know a lot of us here wanted to believe that electing a Democratic House would rein him in a little, and it has in terms of his ability to achieve what he wants through the usual legislative process. But the law will not stop him. Only consequences will stop him. Only popular will can stop him. He blinked over closing the border because he ultimately accepted that it would be politically dangerous. Same for Obamacare. But he will find things that are outrageous to us but not felt directly, like torturing migrants, and he will do it to inflame the debate, which is what he wants and needs going into 2020’s election.
Trump is unlike any other presidential incumbent in recent memory in that he has decided that he needs polarization as a strategy to win re-election. He assumes (probably correctly) that it’s too late to try to rebrand himself as a bipartisan, or as someone who can cross over and appeal to minorities. Trump needs culture wars to win. Trump needs to light the fire of rage under his supporters asses so that they’ll have something to vote for in 2020. Don’t expect this to get any better; it’s probably going to get much worse.
The Hill is citing a report in WaPo (I’m out of free articles for WaPo or I’d cite it directly) that Trump has apparently told his staff that Stephen Miller will be in charge of all immigration initiatives.
[aside]If you have Amazon Prime, a digital WaPo subscription is really cheap. I know it’s free for 6 months, but I’ve had mine for several years. I get it on my kindle for $.99/month. 'Cause Bezos owns both. Anyhoo, look into it if you’re interested.[/aside]
