Tag Archives: Trump

The Voices In His Head….

Let’s be candid: anyone running for President of the United States by definition has an enormous ego. Believing that you can discharge the enormous responsibilities of that office requires that you think pretty highly of yourself.

And let’s also acknowledge that past Presidents have had mental and emotional problems–think Nixon’s paranoia, Reagan’s Alzheimers, Clinton’s sexual issues….

But.

What Americans are facing now, in the third year of Trump’s Presidency, is absolutely unprecedented. Previously, damaged occupants of the Oval Office at least had offsetting talents. They also knew the Constitution constrained the executive branch, and when they tried to circumvent those constraints, they acted strategically. Trump is far and away the most ignorant and intellectually limited person to hold the office, and even worse, too ignorant to know he’s ignorant–a walking, talking example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Ignorance and stupidity aside, there is ample evidence of severe mental illness, as Sarah Burris explains in an article for Raw Story. 

Dr. Lance Dodes warned that things were going to get worse under President Donald Trump in 2017. That’s precisely what happened….

“Donald Trump, because he has a fundamental need to be all-powerful and all loved, can’t stand challenges,” Dr. Dodes said. “And the nature of democracy is that it challenges people. We have more than one opinion. So the more — it was predictable once he got into a position where people would challenge him, there are two parties, he would become more unhinged.

Wednesday’s press availability on the White House South Lawn showed exactly that, he explained.

“As you watched him respond to people, the more they challenged him, the more he ranted,” Dr. Dodes continued. “He stopped responding to the questions, and instead, he started to talk about how people were agents of fake news. He said that they would go out of business soon. They would die…This is the same kind of thing that he did when he was a candidate when he suggested someone protesting at his campaign rally be taken out and beaten up.”

According to the psychiatrist, Trump simply cannot handle situations where people disagree with him. And of course, there has never been a Presidency–or any political campaign–without disagreement. Elections are intended to be a forum for disputes, with voters choosing which side of the dispute “wins.”

 “The more he is challenged, the more he can’t stand anything that disagrees with him, and the more you challenge him, the more unhinged he becomes, the more paranoid, and the more violent, potentially,” he said.

In the interview, Dr. Dodes was asked about Trump’s look heavenward and his statement  that he was “the chosen one. ” Dodes explained it was just another example of Trump’s excessive grandiosity. As he noted, many people in public life have a grandiose sense of self, but Trump’s is on a far bigger scale.

 “There is a fundamental way in which he’s empty. There’s something fundamentally different about him from normal people. It’s a psychotic-like state. The more you press him, the more you see how disorganized and empty he is. The more he flies into a disorganized rage. So yeah, and by the way, in terms of being God, he also made several what you might call Freudian slips during the interview today. He kept mixing up who he was and who the country was. He said, ‘I have the best economy.’ I, not the country. ‘I defeated the caliphate.’ It’s not just a slip of the tongue; he really doesn’t get it. He thinks of himself as a dictator, and it’s all him and no one else really matters.”

Dodes is far from the only mental health professional to warn about Trump’s delusions. (For that matter, you needn’t be a psychiatrist to recognize that he occupies an alternate reality.) The question is: how much damage will he inflict before he is ejected from the Oval Office?

This Presidency has one redeeming element (if we survive it)–it has illuminated several major problems America faces: the lack of a realistic mechanism to remove a dangerously unfit President (the 25th Amendment doesn’t operate in a highly partisan environment);  the widespread civic ignorance that enables such a person to maintain the support of a base of unhappy and angry citizens; and the civic apathy that got us to this point.

In 2020, we need to elect someone sane. Then we have a lot of cleanup work to do.

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Does Deutsch Bank Have The Goods On Trump?

A journalist friend tells me that some early “newspapers”– more accurately described as pamphlets compiled from recently circulated broadsides–used to have a tag line beneath their mastheads. It read “Interesting, if true.”

Lawrence O’Donnell recently supplied us with a humdinger of “interesting if true” news.

According to Raw Story–and subsequently, several other news outlets, including Salon–Deutsche Bank may have the evidence the Mueller investigation was unable to find.

Fast-tracked impeachment hearings will occur this fall if the bombshell report is true that President Donald Trump had loans with Deutsche Bank co-signed by Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin.

 “The source close to Deutsche Bank says that the co-signers of Donald Trump’s Deutsche Bank loans are Russian billionaires close to Vladimir Putin,” MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell reported Tuesday.

If true, this would explain why Trump was so agitated (I know, he’s always agitated, but this was notable even for him) when Congress issued a subpoena to the bank for records of their loans to Trump and the Trump organization. It would explain the lawsuit he filed in an effort to quash that subpoena.

It would also explain his slavish attention to Putin’s interests, most recently highlighted by his behavior at the recent G7 meeting. According to several reports, Trump cornered the other heads of state and aggressively lobbied for Russia’s re-admittance to the group.

Finally, it would explain why Deutsche Bank continued to make loans to Trump after American banks would no longer do so. After several of Trump’s business disasters and bankruptcies left lenders with enormous unpaid obligations, American bankers cut Trump off. That cutoff is not speculation, and Don Junior has been widely quoted for a speech in which he bragged that the Trump Organization no longer needed homegrown lenders, because Russia was supplying all the cash they needed.

Salon quoted journalist and tax expert David Cay Johnston, who has covered Trump for years.

“Deutsche Bank, in making these loans, had to have someone in the background that was guaranteeing these loans. It would be surprising if they’re actually co-signers,” Cay Johnston said in response to the news.  “That would be absolutely astonishing, and I would think mandate his removal from office.”

The only thing Deutsche Bank has confirmed (to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals) is that the bank has possession of the tax returns of at least one member of President Donald Trump’s family.

A lawyer for Trump has now threatened to sue O’Donnell for “false and defamatory” statements. It would be extremely difficult to win such a suit, since O’Donnell himself cautioned that his bombshell report was based upon information provided by a single source–a person who works with Deutsche Bank–and that he had been unable to verify it. (He may have breached journalistic ethics by reporting an unverified accusation–spreading gossip, essentially– but proving intentional defamation would be extremely difficult given his transparency about the source and his inability to confirm that source’s account.)

That said, the information seems so accurate, because it’s so incredibly plausible. Russian oligarch guarantors or co-signers would explain a number of otherwise inexplicable things…

It’s VERY interesting…if true.

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Just Get Them To The Polls…

These days, good news is rare, so a recent article in The Atlantic–-one of my favorite publications–brightened my entire week.

It appears that Trump has “reshaped” American public opinion, but not in the way I  feared he would.

Recent polling shows that Donald Trump has managed to reshape American attitudes to a remarkable extent on a trio of his key issues—race, immigration, and trade.

There’s just one catch: The public is turning against Trump’s views.

The article noted Trump’s increasingly obvious racism, characterizing it as a strategic effort to firm up his base. (I’m less inclined to apply the word “strategy” to anything Trump does–I think as he gets more and more out of his depth, he becomes more unhinged and his true “character” emerges…) Whatever the impetus, however, instinctive or strategic, it isn’t working.

Quite the opposite, if survey research is to be believed.

The Reuters analysis also found that Americans were less likely to express feelings of racial anxiety this year, and they were more likely to empathize with African Americans. This was also true for white Americans and whites without a college degree, who largely backed Trump in 2016.

Among the details, the number of whites who say “America must protect and preserve its White European heritage” has sunk nine points since last August. The percentages of whites, and white Republicans, who strongly agree that “white people are currently under attack in this country” have each dropped by roughly 25 points from the same time two years ago.

The article reports that there has been a 10 percent drop in the number of Americans who espouse white identity politics since Trump entered office, and that Trump’s increasingly explicit racist rhetoric turns off voters who may express some degree of racial anxiety, but who aren’t classical bigots.

The article also notes that Trump has radicalized Democrats, especially white Democrats. By several measures, they have become more liberal on race –on some measures, more liberal than Democrats of color.

Reuters found that more Democrats say blacks are treated unfairly at work and by the police than in 2016—remarkable given how coverage of police violence toward African Americans has dropped in the past few years—while Republican attitudes have remained unchanged.

When it comes to immigration, which the article calls “Trump’s signature issue” (and which is clearly race-based),

Reuters found that white Americans are 19 percent more supportive of a path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants than they were four years ago, and slightly less supportive of increased deportations. Other polls find related results. A record-high number of Americans—75 percent—said in 2018 that immigration is good for the United States. Although the Trump administration took steps last week to limit even legal immigration, the Trump presidency has seen an increase in the number of Americans who support more legal immigration—not just among Democrats, but even slightly among Republicans.

Ironically, as the article reports, although Trump has managed to force a national conversation around the issue of immigration, rather than bringing more people to his anti-immigrant views, he has convinced them he’s wrong.

And it isn’t simply his bigotry. His obvious ignorance on issues of economics and trade has also moved public opinion.

One big problem for Trump is that voters have now gotten a chance to see him implement ideas that seemed novel or at least worth a shot during the campaign, and they don’t like what they’re seeing in practice. A trade war with China might have seemed worthwhile in summer 2016, but now that there’s actually one being fought, the public is having second thoughts, and fears of a recession are growing. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released yesterday found that 64 percent of Americans think free trade is good, up from 57 in 2017, 55 in 2016, and 51 in 2015. Meanwhile, the percentage who say free trade is bad has dropped 10 points since 2017.

As reassuring as these results are, they won’t mean diddly-squat unless the people who hold anti-Trump opinions go to the polls in 2020. As I have insisted ad nauseam, the name of the electoral game is turnout, and in 2020 that is truer than ever.

Fortunately, the Atlantic article even had some encouragement on that score.

Raw polling can, admittedly, be somewhat misleading on its own. Progressives have for years lamented the gap between the fairly liberal policies that the public says it favors and those that its elected representatives actually pursue. One reason for that is not everyone votes, and those who don’t vote tend toward the left.

But the Reuters poll offers reason to believe that the shifts it documents are directly relevant to the coming election. The poll found that “people who rejected racial stereotypes were more interested in voting in the 2020 general election than those who expressed stronger levels of anti-black or anti-Hispanic biases.” That wasn’t the case in 2016, when Americans who held strong antiblack views were more politically engaged.

Again, I repeat: we shouldn’t waste time talking to voters in Trump’s base. Anyone who still supports him is clearly beyond reason. Instead, we need to get every non-racist, non-crazy person who cares about this country–especially those who took a pass in 2016– to the polls!

America’s future depends on turnout.

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Speaking Of Foreign Policy

Yesterday, I posted about our truly frightening Secretary of State, and the infusion of fundamentalist religious doctrine into America’s foreign policy. But our international  challenges–which are mounting as quickly as our global influence is declining–are not limited to the results of Pompeo’s zealotry.

That’s because, in foreign affairs, the President has the last word. And when delicate and complex international issues are being decided by an erratic buffoon who is monumentally ignorant of world affairs and the way governments function, America’s interests can take quite a beating.

Just this week, Business Insider–a “non-lefty” publication that has been admirable in its coverage of the disaster that is the Trump Presidency–devoted considerable space to a scathing Penagon report that places the blame for the resurgence of ISIS squarely on Trump.

A report from the Pentagon inspector general found that President Donald Trump’s decision to rapidly pull troops out of Syria and divert attention from diplomacy in Iraq has inadvertently aided the Islamic State’s regrouping in Syria and Iraq.

The Department of Defense’s quarterly report to Congress on the effectiveness of the US Operation Inherent Resolve mission said that “ISIS continued its transition from a territory-holding force to an insurgency in Syria, and it intensified its insurgency in Iraq” — even though Trump said ISIS was defeated and the caliphate quashed, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Many officials and experts have repeatedly warned that a rapid US withdrawal from Syria would enable ISIS to regroup into an insurgency after their battlefield defeats by the US-led coalition.

The IG’s report also explicitly said the troop drawdown in Syria, which Trump announced at the end of last year, contributed to instability in the region. The drawdown, which prompted the resignation of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, left the US’s Syrian partners in the lurch, without the training or support they needed to confront a resurgent ISIS. In Iraq, the Iraqi security forces lack the necessary infrastructure to fight off ISIS for sustained periods.

Trump was warned that his focus on Iran–one of his numerous efforts to reverse agreements entered into or regulations passed by Obama, no matter their reasonableness or value– would erode U.S. capacity to counter ISIS in Iraq and Syria, according to Brett McGurk, the former special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIS. McGurk served under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

McGurk, like Mattis, resigned his post after Trump announced his drawdown. In a January op-ed, he warned that Trump’s policies in the region would give “new life” to ISIS and other US adversaries, and that the decision would “precipitate chaos and an environment for extremists to thrive,”exactly what the IG’s report said was happening on the ground.

But of course, Trump boasts that he knows more than the Generals. (This is the man who assured us that trade wars are “easy to win,” and who recently explained that we shouldn’t use windmills to generate electricity, because televisions won’t work when the wind isn’t blowing…among many, many other expressions of idiocy.)

A link to a one-page summary of the Pentagon report is here. Read it and weep….

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Trump And Netanyahu

Every once in a while, we Americans need to remind ourselves that our problems are not unique. As we agonize over the daily offenses against sanity, humanity and ethics emanating from the Trump White House, other countries are also suffering under “leaders” concerned more for their personal aggrandizement than the interests of their citizens. Some of them–like Trump– were even elected.

Which brings me to the recent acquiescence of Israel’s Netanyahu to Trump’s demand that Israel bar two American lawmakers from entering the country.

Trump babbled nonsense about his support of Israel and the “weakness” Bibi would show if he allowed the two to enter the country. The reality–as usual with Trump–was far different; refusing U.S. lawmakers’ entry was an unprecedented and offensive act against elected officials of a close ally. In fact, it was so unprecedented–and so harmful to Israel’s own interests–that even AIPAC issued a reproof. (If you are unfamiliar with AIPAC, it is Israel’s most devoted lobby in the U.S., known for slavish defense of virtually anything Israel does.)

I think it is notable that some of the most severe criticisms have come from AmericanJewish organizations and pundits. If Trump assumed he would get plaudits from American Jews, he was sadly mistaken. (That mistake probably explains yesterday’s anti-Semitic outburst questioning the loyalty of any American Jew who dares to criticize his position on Israeli leadership or policies, let alone any American Jew who has the gall to vote Democratic.)

Tom Friedman pulled no punches in the New York Times:

Trump — with the knowing help of Israel’s current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu — is doing something no American president and Israeli prime minister have done before: They’re making support for Israel a wedge issue in American politics.

Few things are more dangerous to Israel’s long-term interests than its becoming a partisan matter in America, which is Israel’s vital political, military and economic backer in the world.

I particularly liked this column by Josh Marshall. Marshall is Jewish, and the editor of Talking Points Memo. 

Let me comment on Israel’s apparent decision to bar entry to Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

Israel is supposedly doing this because the two support BDS. As it happens, I’m not even sure this is entirely true. Tlaib, who is Palestinian American and has relatives in the territories, does. Omar has actually made contradictory or equivocal comments about BDS. Regardless, it simply doesn’t matter. They are elected members of the United States Congress. They are part of the US government and their treatment bears directly on the respect accorded our system of government or interference with our democratic system. The idea that a government which has long benefited from US protection and aid would do such a thing is outrageous….

This betrays an established and dangerous pattern with Donald Trump: his personal alliances always come before allegiance to country, law and Constitution. This is not surprising and it is of a piece with his collusion and tacit alliance with Russia during the 2016 election.

What you think about Omar and Tlaib is irrelevant. I have criticized Omar when I think it is merited. All that matters here is that they are elected representatives. Punishing or excluding them is a strike against our democratic system. An ally should never do such a thing.

Marshall also pointed out that this pettiness was emphatically not in Israel’s own interests.

One final, important point. This does not even make sense from the point of view of narrow Israeli self-interest – not in Israeli or Zionist terms. The US has two major parties and they frequently rotate in power. Omar and to a lesser extent Tlaib are controversial in US politics but they have many ardent supporters in the Democratic Party. They are both women of color. The Israeli government under Netanyahu has increasingly identified itself with the GOP and actively worked with the GOP against Democrats as the GOP has become more associated with white nationalism. Democrats will be back in power again. The party is increasingly based on a multiracial political coalition. Sowing antagonism at a level so deep and visceral is obvious folly.

Marshall’s final paragraph draws a painfully obvious parallel to the occupant of the Oval Office:

The truth is that this isn’t Israeli policy or even precisely Netanyahu policy. This is an electoral gambit. Israel has an election next month and Netanyahu is in a fight for his political life. He may even be in a fight for his freedom since remaining in office is his best play to delay or quash corruption charges. This is an effort to juice outrage and support from the Israeli far right.

When countries are governed by people whose mantra is “It’s all about me,” the interests of the country take a back seat.

Far, far back.

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