We learned in 2016 that it is not over until it is over and you can’t underestimate Trump
But you cannot ignore that the public understands what they get with Trump and that the political landscape against Trump politics has changed in the last three years.
Not counting Trump out, but this could also be a political backlash against Trump and his party
Especially when the moron brings in the military
Show where he brought in the military for the riots other than DC, which is federal, not a state...
I would also like to know what Eddie thinks he should do instead. If he's got a grand plan to resolve what's happening that's SO MUCH BETTER, let's hear it.
Cecillie the man you'll vote for
o paraphrase Shakespeare's Mark Anthony, I come to understand Caesar, not to attack him.” Attacking Trump is a popular blood sport. But in all
that vitriol, something is getting missed. There has
always been something missing in the psychologically-based critiques of Trump that focus on his very
evident personality disorder. There is no doubt that
he fits the diagnostic criteria for narcissistic personality with antisocial features perfectly. But there is
something more.
This morning I was reading the transcript of one
of his recent speeches, at the Ford plant in Michigan. Here is a brief excerpt, “The company founded
by a man named Henry Ford. Good bloodlines, good
bloodlines. If you believe in that stuff, you get good
blood. They teamed up with the company founded by
Thomas Edison. That’s General Electric. That’s good
stuff. That’s good stuff. And you put it all together.
That they’re all looking down right now.” Now, Edison and Ford were indeed friends, but they never
worked together. But the point is not Trump’s misinformation. It is his use of vocabulary and syntax.
His vocabulary is primitive, and when he discovers a clever phrase or a polysyllabic word it often
appears again and again over a short period of time.
His thought process is jerky, with what we call track
switching, jumping from topic to topic with no clear
line of connection. His speeches have been analyzed by learning experts and he speaks at an 8- to
10-year-old level.
We measure cognitive impairment with, among
other tests, the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale,
what most folks know as the IQ test. Although clinicians don’t like to admit it, (we love to complexify)
generally the most accurate subtest in that battery
for measuring overall IQ is the vocabulary subtest.
Our vocabulary tends to remain stable with aging. Trump’s language problems have nothing to do
with his age. An adult with an 8-year-old’s vocabulary used to be considered very mildly retarded, before that term went into disuse. Now we call it cognitive impairment. Combining that understanding
with his personality disorder begins to give a context
to some of his actions.
He hates expert s reports because he cannot understand them, and he needs to cover that up so others do not see his cognitive deficits.
He attacks his critics because he fears they will expose him. He lacks the cognitive capacity to understand the complexity of situations, so he resorts to simplistic explanations and conclusions. He lacks the cognitive capacity to reality-test information, so he resorts to his own, unanalyzed opinions, or borrows the opinions of commentators on Fox News, so that he can appear informed and thoughtful. I imagine that, if someone tried to give him an IQ test, he would walk out, because he has known about this deficit his whole life. The whole arrogant, bombastic façade he constructed was to hide the shameful truth that he cannot understand what so many others seem to have no problem understanding. This is the man we put in charge of our country. What have we done? A London epidemiologist estimates that over 200,000 Americans will die before we have a vaccine. I invite you to blend in a tiny touch of the compassion that you would feel towards any disabled person, with the rest of our reactions towards this man, our anger and horror engendered by his uninformed, arrogant, abhorrent, and sometimes criminal acts.
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