Saturday, September 5, 2020
Sunday, August 30, 2020
Trump's Over-riding Pathology Is Psychopathy
But as Vince Greenwood, Ph.D., argues in a recent Medium article, too many opinions have become the problem. It’s like when Rick Perry called Trump a “cancer on conservatism” and every other Republican countered with their own assessments: “Con artist.” “Kook.” “Insane.” “Pathological liar.” “A textbook racist.” “A national disgrace.”
We discussed all the other diagnoses. And the cancer grew. Dr. Greenwood believes that clinically diagnosing Trump as a Psychopath, based on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist — Revised (PCL-R), renders all other diagnoses obsolete—and allows us to focus on the real problem. Seriously.
We saw what four years of a cancer on conservatism did to the GOP. The cancer has metastasized. Stochastic terrorism is the new norm—we’ve seen the party shrug at the MAGA bomber, the El Paso shooter and now the Kenosha killer. We’ve seen the President exchange love letters with dictators, defend wife beaters, endorse pedophiles, and hail the success of QAnon candidates.
Imagine what four more years led by a psychopath who no longer has to worry about getting himself re-elected would do to the country and the world. With less than 10 weeks to the election, America is facing a choice: Divorce Trump. Or renew its vows. If America was your friend, and you knew it had married a psychopath, wouldn’t you urge it to get the divorce?
"Trump’s ‘Weird Shit’ Is Rotting Our Democracy"
Donald Trump’s acceptance speech Thursday night, a deranged Fidel Castro parody of maniacal gaslighting proportions, could not be mistaken for an American president’s. In his bizarro unreality, 180,000 dead and rising is public health. Divisive hate mongering is law and order. Historic unemployment and inequity is strength. Police brutality is a race war. Protests for civil rights are anarchy. Still he attempted to inject himself into the American tapestry of Lincoln, Jackson, and even Roosevelt, of course making zero correlation between their actions and his own in office. That’s because Trump has employed the only strategy he knows: Fake it til you make—or unmake—it, and these past years have fundamentally unmade America.“I alone can fix it” turned out he alone could kill it. Trump is not, as he dreams, “one of the larger-than-life figures” like his predecessors, “who rallied Americans to bold visions of a bigger and brighter future.” He’s the one who’s divided and literally plagued us into our current misery. (snip)
Beyond rhetoric, it is Trump’s conduct that makes him the abnormality of our times: Trump is the first president to use the White House grounds and presidential pardons as props for political theatre. The first president to “take no responsibility…at all” for American sacrifice. The first to solicit foreign assistance to hack his U.S. opponents in successive presidential elections. The first to try to kill the Constitutionally created and protected post office. The first to intimate repeatedly that he would like to serve as president forever. The list goes on, and on. Most Americans realize this “weird shit,” as President Bush remarked about Trump’s inaugural, is no longer fleeting bizarreness. It is the making of an un-American America.
That’s why those seeking to defeat Trumpism have to turn to an opposition playbook outside of the American paradigm. Yes, there has been no dearth of compelling and cathartic anti-Trump ads. But there is also a real concern that voters are increasingly desensitized to the negativity and need to imagine not just overthrowing Trump but what the future will look like without him. There is a useful anti-authoritarian playbook to employ, tracking the phrase “Vamos a decir que no… la alegrÃa ya viene” (or “We’re going to say no… happiness is coming”). The “No” campaign to oust Augusto Pinochet in the 1988 Chilean national plebiscite models how to expose the monstrous cruelty of an autocratic regime and then project an uplifting image for happier days ahead. Their successful television ad campaign, documented in the 2012 film No, was a one-two punch. They first decried the inhumanity of the Pinochet regime—the authoritarian rhetoric, the chilling and killing of the opposition, and the body bags —and then beamed the sunny faces free of Pinochet. The compelling ad campaign helped galvanize a record-setting voter registration campaign and a coalescing of opposition leaders, much like Democrats saw this year in Bernie Sanders’ and Elizabeth Warren’s full-throated support for the Biden-Harris ticket. The Chilean lesson—as the plebiscite successfully unseated the dictator and set the groundwork for a return to liberal democracy—is clear: On the campaign trail, Democrats must remind the American people that Donald Trump, through his governance, has proven to be the most anti- and un-American president in our history. Biden and Harris should not be afraid to reiterate why he is an exception to American democracy: A president impeached for corruption, and whose continued corruption denied our country protection against the virus. Then they must embody in these closing days of the campaign what exactly American democracy looks like, that would make America once again move toward a more perfect union, and how a vote for them will be a vote to let America be America once again.