Is He From Mars? Pence Will Have To Try To Make This Sound Normal Tonight

The other day, Keith Olbermann recorded a telling little segment about dogs and Trump. To anyone who's ever been a friend of a dog-- and who, besides Trump, hasn't been?-- it's bad enough on it's own. But when you look at it in a broader context, Trump's psychological unfitness for leadership, it becomes even more interesting. Monday morning, NY Times columnist Charles Blow took a turn psychoanalyzing Trump, dubbing him a terroristic man-toddler.

Donald Trump is a domestic terrorist; only his form of terror doesn’t boil down to blowing things up. He’s the 70-year-old toddler who knows nearly nothing, hurls insults, has simplistic solutions for complex problems and is quick to throw a tantrum. Also, in case you didn’t know it, this toddler is mean to girls and is a bit of a bigot... devoid of fixed principles, willing to do anything and everything to gain fame, fortune and power. He has an endless, consuming need for perpetual affirmation. This is a bully who just wants to be liked, a man-boy nursing a nagging internal emptiness.

He’s fickle and spoiled and rotten.

So, when he loses at something, anything, he lashes out. When someone chastises him for bad behavior, he chafes. This is the kind of silver-spoon scion quick to yell at those he views as less privileged, and therefore less-than, “Do you know who I am?”

We do now, sir.

...This man is a brat whose money has stunted his maturation.

He shouldn’t be ushered into the White House; he should be laughed into hiding. His querulous nature shouldn’t be coddled; it should be crushed.

America is in need of a leader, not a puerile, sophomoric sniveler who is too easily baited and grossly ill-behaved.

Go to your gilded room, Donald. The adults need to pick a president.

Down the coast a ways, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne was having many of the same thoughts at the same time, explain that "he is far too nasty, immature and frighteningly undisciplined to be president" and has now "unleashed the ugly inner Donald-- the man whom the candidate and his handlers have been trying to hide."

This should be a wake-up call to political analysts who have gone out of their way since Trump announced his candidacy to pretend that he was the ingenious creator of a political special sauce who deserved our respect for “speaking his mind.” No, Trump all along has been a clinically self-involved con man who never took the issues, the presidency or the future of our country seriously. Can there be any doubt that his campaign is a branding exercise gone, quite literally, mad?

...Every time Trump has shown us how outlandishly ill-suited he is for the presidency, his outrages have been allowed to fade. Again and again he has been given opportunities to normalize his candidacy. Many can’t believe that a major party nominated someone like him. Their solution is to pretend he’s someone else.

If an onslaught against a Gold Star family didn’t stop him, why should his wee-hours-of-the-morning storm of vicious invective be any different?

The answer is that this episode should finally force everyone to say: enough. Trump is neither normal nor stable. He is manifestly dangerous to our country and erratic in everything except his unrestrained meanness. He should not be given fifth, sixth and seventh chances. He has shown us who he is. We should believe what we see.

These two columns bring up, once again, the mental health of a candidate for president. Is Trump psychologically stable? Fit to serve as president? The American Psychiatric Association told it's members to refrain from diagnosing Trump from afar. (DWT's resident school psychologist, Helen Klein took a swing at it back in early August, asking, pointedly, What is narcissistic personality? What is a sociopath? Take away the bizarre personality traits that Trump can't control and how different, really is Mike Pence from Trump. Sure, Pence is a more doctrinaire and extreme right-winger but on actual policy... they could be the same horrible person-- horrible for America, horrible for working families, horrible for human decency.



And for the moron deplorables who cleave to him-- or them-- they might want to think about their responsibilities as parents and grandparents and what kind of an example Trump is for impressionable children. America's biggest teachers' union, the National Education Association, is kicking off a campaign this week about the example Trump sets as a bully.

Citing a growing number of reports by its membership of Trump-like bullying in classrooms across the country, the National Education Association is planning to make the issue a centerpiece of its argument against Trump in ads and mailings in battleground states.

“We are going to do everything humanly possible to make sure that we have a president who will be a good role model for children,” NEA President Lily Eskelsen García said. “Donald Trump is not on that list, but Hillary Clinton is.”

Beginning on Monday, the union will hold conference calls and press conferences with teachers, principals and psychologists who link Trump’s comments on the national stage to a rise in bullying in the classroom. The union's outreach will also contrast Trump and Clinton's plans for education.

According to Eskelsen García, their members are reporting children threatening classmates that they might be deported by Trump or calling other classmates terrorists.

“Kids feel like they have been given permission, and they are invoking the name of Donald Trump,” she said.

...The push coincides with National Bullying Prevention Month in October, an effort that is normally part of NEA’s annual activities. But with Trump, the issue has gathered more steam.

Eskelsen García said that their concern about Trump’s impact on the younger generation extends beyond the election. “What we’re seeing is not something that will go away after Election Day," she said. “We’re seeing millions of people who seem attracted to this message, and those folks are still going to be here.”

...And NEA’s membership isn’t predominantly Democratic. A third identify as independent and another roughly one-third of its membership identifies as Republican. Critically for Clinton, the union’s membership is composed of about 75 percent women, voters with whom Trump has struggled.