- 08 Dec 2018 17:05
#14970392
OK. So OD dodged the question by trying to divert attention to one comment by one organization deliberately chosen because it is an outlier. It is in no way indicative of the opinions of Trump's opposition. Trump is opposed by democrats and independents, both of which are, by and large, center right.
Nobody has addressed the perfectly legitimate question posed by the OP. It has nothing to do with what other people have said. So we can stop with the straw men. Setting aside PITA and the even more absurd artist looking for publicity the question stands unanswered. Is President Trump psychotic?
Probably not. Psychotic (psychosis) is a disconnection from reality that so profound that the victim looses touch with external reality. I doubt this is the case. I work with people who frequently display psychosis and they are truly out of it. He is not like them.
The bigger question is "has he some other underlying mental disorder?". This is another thing altogether. There is evidence that he has. Never rule out that his behavior is carefully calculated to "fool" the easily fooled. A good example of this is his response to the sentencing documents of Cohen yesterday. Faced with an unambiguous statement by federal prosecutors that he probably committed one or more felonies (short of inditing him) he proclaimed that the document "totally absolved the president". So.
This could be one of several things happening. The first is that he did not read the document. It could be that he simply does not have the ability to understand it. It could be that he is a pathological liar who simply cannot tell the inconvenient truth. Or it could be a canny attempt to divert his followers who are so tribal in their views that they dismiss any notion that they could have been wrong about someone in whom they have invested so much of their personal credibility. I am inclined to believe it is the latter.
When it comes to his political and even criminal survival I believe that Trump knows, and has known from the start, that he is completely invested in some not to smart but very malleable followers. He is still the president because, even though mainstream republican elected officials know that he is dangerous and unqualified, he controls a fuck of a lot of voters in specific districts.
Would the republican leadership, in a perfect world, rather have Pence? Almost certainly. (They would even more want Jeb Bush but that is for another discussion.) They are simply stuck. What happened?
The republican party completely outsmarted the democrats in the past decade or more. They very quietly moved to control governorship's and state legislators thereby creating, through gerrymandering, very right wing but unassailable congressional districts. In doing so they sought to remove any balance from the districts that might put them in play. What happened with Trump is that these districts came back to bite them. As Trump is the darling of the far right (a testimonial to just how far that definition has moved from the truth) he now can decide which of the congressmen in these districts can be reelected and which can't. He pulled several of them out of the fire in the mid terms. So now the republicans can't put the genie back in the bottle.
So I think that Trump's life experience has shown him that the objective truth does not serve him well. He has been a flim flam man from the very beginning of his business career. He is a showman who has always relied on the stupidity of others. He is a master manipulator who realizes that "you can fool some of the people some of the time and all of the people some of the time and jerk the rest of them off".
Of course he is a narcissist and to what extent that is debilitating I certainly can't tell. It is hard to separate it from the behavior above. But my answer is no. He is most certainly not psychotic. He is probably acting on a cold and dispassionate appreciation of what it is that make him successful right from the start. And the republican party is just stuck with him.
Footnote:
In 30 days the landscape changes profoundly. Here is a what-if. What if Mueller has something very bad on BOTH Trump and Pence? So bad that the survival of the republican party required that they both be impeached. It is not beyond the realm of possibility. Would the party sacrifice its existence defending them? Probably not. They just might impeach both of them and bet on running against the new president in 2020. And who would that president be? Nancy Pelosi.
To believe in God is impossible not to believe in Him is absurd.
Voltaire
God is a comedian playing to an audience that is afraid to laugh.
Voltaire