I’m just here to present ideas. And this is far too important not to ask. Just asking the question, somebody’s got to. If it looks like a sick duck and it walks like a sick duck, well, you got to ask. Is Donald sick?
One of my very best buddies unfriended me on FaceBook, because I was ‘too controversial.’ Next day, an old runner did the same for different reasons – I think different – as he called me ‘a stupid fucking racist asshole.’ He’s a white guy. I identify as ‘white’ myself, so maybe that makes me controversial.
I grew up in an all-white town. We weren’t segregated, simply no Negroes. None. What I knew about black people I learned from the New York City media and the Amos ‘n’ Andy show. From Willie Mays before the Giants moved west. We liked Pat Boone’s version of Tutti-Frutti.
An African-American family moved into town, my junior year, I think. As true with the two Jewish families I knew as a child, the Jordans seemed like better people than my own folks. Smarter and better dressed.
Like Ruth Bader Ginsberg, I believe in freedom and equality. A hundred years from now, I bet white men will depend on such beliefs for their own enjoyment of life. Survival even. Why else would Mitch McConnell act like that?
When legendary Olympian and above-average Native American Billy Mills tells me “redskin” is racist, I’m gonna take his word for that. I am gonna thank him for the education and not use the word nor support a certain NFL team.
Taking a knee for freedom and equality and peaceful protest.
Black Lives Matter. Ben Carson offends me.
Wash your hands. Wear a mask. Nothing about the virus has changed.
Trump Tries To Explain Awkward West Point Walk That Lit Up Twitter Critics
Mary Papenfuss for HuffPost. June 14, 2020.
President Donald Trump tried to explain away his awkward walk down a ramp Saturday after addressing West Point graduates by saying he was being extra careful to avoid a fall that the “Fake News” would “have fun with.”
“Trump is not well” began to trend on Twitter after video of the president’s tentative walk was posted on social media. Check it out above.
Trump said in a tweet that the ramp was long, steep and “very slippery.” He claimed he “ran” to level ground the “final ten feet” — which did not exactly appear to be the case.
Donald J. Trump✔@realDonaldTrump
The ramp that I descended after my West Point Commencement speech was very long & steep, had no handrail and, most importantly, was very slippery. The last thing I was going to do is “fall” for the Fake News to have fun with. Final ten feet I ran down to level ground. Momentum! Jun 13, 2020 178K people are talking about this
Earlier, during his address to cadets, Trump took an awkward sip of water: He used his right hand to lift a glass, then used his left hand to push the glass, still clutched in his right hand, all the way to his mouth.
Aaron Rupar✔@atrupar · Jun 13, 2020 Replying to @atrupar
Trump’s bone spurs must’ve flared up when he said “Vietnam” here.
Trump still hasn’t totally figured out how to drink water. – Jun 13, 2020 17K people are talking about this
Both incidents caught the eye of Twitter users, with many raising questions about Trump’s health, and wondering again about his unannounced visit late last year to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The White House said at the time that it was for a routine exam.
West Point cadets were called back from their homes across the nation to prepare for the graduation ceremony after Trump informed surprised officials in late April that he would be giving the commencement speech. The Army hadn’t yet determined whether or not to have cadets back for a graduation ceremony because of the risks of COVID-19. They had all been ordered to stay home after spring break and continued their studies online.
At least 15 of the 1,106 cadets who returned to the campus, which is about an hour’s drive north of New York City, tested positive for COVID-19 when they arrived weeks ago, and were placed in quarantine. None were symptomatic. The rest were allowed to stay in their dorms under what the Army called a “soft quarantine” before the commencement. All were tested.
Cadets were in chairs spaced 6 feet apart for the ceremony, and families had to watch remotely.
The president promised in his speech that the cadets would not have to fight “endless wars” in “far-away lands.”
https://twitter.com/hashtag/TrumpIsNotWell?src=hashtag_click
Trump Is Not Well
Accepting the reality about the president’s disordered personality is important—even essential.
By Peter Wehner for The Atlantic. September 9, 2019.
During the 2016 campaign, I received a phone call from an influential political journalist and author, who was soliciting my thoughts on Donald Trump. Trump’s rise in the Republican Party was still something of a shock, and he wanted to know the things I felt he should keep in mind as he went about the task of covering Trump.
At the top of my list: Talk to psychologists and psychiatrists about the state of Trump’s mental health, since I considered that to be the most important thing when it came to understanding him. It was Trump’s Rosetta stone.
I wasn’t shy about making the same case publicly. During a July 14, 2016, appearance on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, for example, I responded to a pro-Trump caller who was upset that I opposed Trump despite my having been a Republican for my entire adult life and having served in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations and the George W. Bush White House.
“I don’t oppose Mr. Trump because I think he’s going to lose to Hillary Clinton,” I told Ben from Purcellville, Virginia. “I think he will, but as I said, he may well win. My opposition to him is based on something completely different, which is, first, I think he is temperamentally unfit to be president. I think he’s erratic, I think he’s unprincipled, I think he’s unstable, and I think that he has a personality disorder; I think he’s obsessive. And at the end of the day, having served in the White House for seven years in three administrations and worked for three presidents, one closely, and read a lot of history, I think the main requirement for president of the United States … is temperament, and disposition … whether you have wisdom and judgment and prudence.”
That statement has been validated.
Donald Trump’s disordered personality—his unhealthy patterns of thinking, functioning, and behaving—has become the defining characteristic of his presidency. It manifests itself in multiple ways: his extreme narcissism; his addiction to lying about things large and small, including his finances and bullying and silencing those who could expose them; his detachment from reality, including denying things he said even when there is video evidence to the contrary; his affinity for conspiracy theories; his demand for total loyalty from others while showing none to others; and his self-aggrandizement and petty cheating.
It manifests itself in Trump’s impulsiveness and vindictiveness; his craving for adulation; his misogyny, predatory sexual behavior, and sexualization of his daughters; his open admiration for brutal dictators; his remorselessness; and his lack of empathy and sympathy, including attacking a family whose son died while fighting for this country, mocking a reporter with a disability, and ridiculing a former POW. (When asked about Trump’s feelings for his fellow human beings, Trump’s mentor, the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, reportedly said, “He pisses ice water.”)
The most recent example is the president’s bizarre fixation on falsely insisting that he was correct to warn that Alabama faced a major risk from Hurricane Dorian, to the point that he doctored a hurricane map with a black Sharpie to include the state as being in the path of the storm.
“He’s deteriorating in plain sight,” one Republican strategist who is in frequent contact with the White House told Business Insider on Friday. Asked why the president was obsessed with Alabama instead of the states that would actually be affected by the storm, the strategist said, “You should ask a psychiatrist about that; I’m not sure I’m qualified to comment.”
We have repeatedly heard versions of that sentiment over the course of Trump’s presidency. It’s said that speculating on Trump’s mental health is inappropriate and unwise, especially for those who are not formally trained in the field of psychiatry or psychology.
That’s true, up to a point. Yes, it is best to leave it to experts to determine whether Trump satisfies the criteria for a clinical diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, some combination of both, or nothing at all.
But if a clinical diagnosis is beyond my own expertise, Trump’s psychological impairments are obvious to all who are not willfully blind. On a daily basis we see the president’s chaotic, unstable mind on display. Are we supposed to ignore that?
An analogy may be helpful here. If smoke is coming out from under the hood of your car, if you notice puddles of oil under it, if the engine is overheating and you smell burning oil, you don’t have to be a car mechanic to know that something is wrong with your car.
Accepting the reality about Trump’s disordered personality is important and even essential. For one thing, it will help us to better react to Trump’s freak show.
Even now, almost a thousand days into his presidency, the latest Trump outrage elicits shock and disbelief in people. The reaction is, “Can you believe he said that and did this?”
To which my response is, “Why are you surprised?” It’s a shock only if the assumption is that we’re dealing with a psychologically normal human being. We’re not. Trump is profoundly compromised, acting just as you would imagine a person with a disordered personality would. Many Americans haven’t yet come to terms with the fact that we elected as president a man who is deeply damaged, an emotional misfit. But it would be helpful if they did.
Among other things, it would keep us feeling less startled and disoriented, less in a state of constant agitation, less susceptible to provocations. Donald Trump thrives on creating chaos, on gaslighting us, on creating antipathy among Americans, on keeping people on edge and off balance. He wants to dominate our every waking hour. We ought not grant him that power over us.
It might also take some of the edge off the hatred many people feel for Trump. Seeing him for what he is—a terribly damaged soul, a broken man, a person with a disordered mind—should not lessen our revulsion at how Trump mistreats others, at his cruelty and dehumanizing actions. Nor should it weaken our resolve to stand up to it. It does complicate the picture just a bit, though, eliciting some pity and sorrow for Trump.
But above all, accepting the truth about Trump’s mental state will cause us to take more seriously than we have our democratic duty, which is to prevent a psychologically and morally unfit person from becoming president.
The office is too powerful, and the consequences are too dangerous, to allow a person to become president who views morality only through the prism of whether an action advances his own narrow interests, his own distorted desires, his own twisted impulses. When an individual comes to believe his interests and those of the nation he leads are one and the same, it opens the door to all sorts of moral and constitutional devilry.
Whether or not his disorders are diagnosable, the president’s psychological flaws are all too apparent. They were alarming when he took the oath of office; they are worse now. Every day Donald Trump is president is a day of disgrace. And a day of danger.