Sunday, June 07, 2020

As Police Terrorism Continues Across US, Trump Says "Everything Is Under Perfect Control"

Dr. Lance Dodes, a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and now a training and supervising analyst emeritus at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute:
When Donald Trump took office there was a lot of talk about how he would "become presidential" and grow into the office and its responsibilities. But he could not change his behavior because, as a sociopath or psychopath, he has a severe personality disorder. People with personality disorders don't change depending on the job they hold. The hope that Donald Trump would stop being sadistic, that he would develop the human quality of empathy for others, that he would value the rights and feelings of others, was never realistic. ...

When mental health professionals warned that he has an antisocial personality disorder, that he is a sociopath or psychopath, they were communicating that there is something fundamentally wrong with him. He is expert at conning people, pretending to care about them, lying to get what he wants. But this ability to fool and cheat people falls apart when he is forced to be real, as when he's confronted with his lies or indeed any disagreement. Then the façade of the con man disappears and we see the uncaring and violent man underneath. He is unable to hide this true self when cornered. ...

What really struck me was his telling the governors that they need to "dominate" the protesters. "Dominate" is a very important word in this context. It's one thing to triumph in a contest, to have superior knowledge or to convince somebody that your point of view is correct. The word "dominate" here means something very different: It means to destroy, subjugate, humiliate. ... His efforts to destroy anyone who disagrees with him, claiming they are "fake," incompetent, or bad — as in his declaration that the press is "the enemy of the people" — is a well-known technique of other psychopaths in their rise to power. ...

[L]ying thousands of times is a lot of work. It is not work for Donald Trump. Again, even though it's often hard for folks to grasp, Donald Trump is different from normal human beings. We've all seen his utterly false statements, which he insists are facts. The degree of his insistence, regardless of the evidence, is essentially delusional. It's one factor that makes him so very dangerous. ...

It's normal to care for how other people think and feel. That's a key component of human relationships. Trump has proven he's not capable of empathy. Closely linked with this, there is the enormous body of evidence, from his cheating, lying, harming and threatening to harm others, that he has no conscience. When he said, "I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue because I'm so popular," what he was saying was, "I don't care that I'd be shooting somebody; the death of another person is no problem to me. What's important to me is whether I would be caught or prosecuted." ...

Trump is much more dangerous right now, and he will become increasingly dangerous as the 2020 election approaches if he's losing. Criticism, disagreement or opposition means to him that he is being attacked by evil people. This capacity to sink into paranoid rage is another aspect of his disorder. We should expect that he will try to turn America into a police state, or declare martial law and suspend the Constitution. He will likely try to prevent or overturn the 2020 election if he loses. In order to have an excuse for ending democracy, he is likely to have his own "Reichstag fire" incident, perhaps via starting a war with China or Iran. Like Hitler, he can then announce, "You must turn to me as your leader. I'm the only one who can save us in the time of this disaster."
Or: "I alone can fix it."

Last week, Trump's 2020 re-election campaign sent an email to supporters that referred to a "Trump Army":
The President wants YOU and every other member of our exclusive Trump Army to have something to identify yourselves with, and to let everyone know that YOU are the President's first line of defense when it comes to fighting off the Liberal MOB.
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"Everything Is Under Perfect Control."
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