What's Really Wrong With Trump? Want To Know? Stare In The Damn Mirror

Can you just chalk Trump up to extraordinarily bad genes? Extraordinarily bad parenting? A really, really diseased mind? For sure, no one ever taught him/he never learned/he's incapable of being... someone who isn't a sociopathic malignant narcissist.

Dean Heller, like most Republican senators, figured out Trump is a truly dangerous sociopath early on. He toyed with opposition but weighed his options-- a primary from the right versus a stiff general election in a swing state-- and his calculus led him to button up his pie hole, smile, nod and back Trump. After all, he had never lost an election. His Senate career ended with Heller at a 91.6% Trump adhesion score, good enough to prevent a primary but no-good enough to prevent defeat by an utterly worthless Democratic opponent (who outspent him $25,463,471 to $15,119,555 and whose outside backers threw $34,814,754 against him, while his own outside backers only threw $20,685,500 against her). It was also not good enough to prevent Trump from taking a dump on his political grave this week. Debra Saunders reported in Adelson's Las Vegas newspaper that Trump told reporters on Wednesday that Heller lost because he had been "extraordinarily hostile" to the man at the center of the universe.

“What happened with Dean Heller is, I tried for him,” Trump said during a sit-down with regional reporters in the Oval Office. But he said hard-core voter base “did not believe me. They wouldn’t go for him.”

...Trump accused Heller of leaving the impression that he had voted for Hillary Clinton for president in 2016.

“But the worst he said was ‘no comment,’ which is essentially the same” as saying he voted for Clinton, Trump contended. “When a senator walks out of a voting booth and he’s a Republican and he says ‘no comment,’ that’s not a good sign.”

...It was for that reason, Trump said, that he did not nominate Heller to be his next Interior secretary. Heller had been considered a leading candidate to replace former Secretary Ryan Zinke, but on Monday, Trump nominated acting Secretary David Bernhardt for the job.

“I just could never get my base excited on him,” Trump said, before he added, “I like him a lot.”

"A lot," huh? Imagine if Trump only liked him a little! Writing yesterday at Time, Nancy Gibbs wonders if the clown in the Oval Office "has so accustomed us to surprise that any script, however sincere, sounds phony and forced" and worries because before any honest-- or at least normal-- politicians "can start talking about vital needs or fresh ideas, candidates have to persuade us to listen. That task has perhaps never been harder, and not because we don’t care. We may just no longer know how."

Elections have consequences; so do campaigns, and Trump’s never actually stopped. Unlike his predecessors, he saw no need to shift from running to serving, never moved past the performance art of his massive rallies where he could repeat the same outlandish promises over and over, thrilling the crowds, appalling the fact checkers, confounding his adversaries. The universe of political discourse swelled, crashing through boundaries of truth, tradition and at times decency. The audience grew too, as people never much interested in politics were drawn to the dazzle. Meanwhile, traditional gatekeepers have found themselves at a loss for how to react, other than to overreact, overread messages, overplay hands. Shared stupefaction binds us like an audience at a horror movie, our lizard brains alight.

Trump is not responsible for our attention economy. He just got in early and looked to corner the market. All this had been a long time coming, the technologies hooking us on cheap and constant stimulus, our reflective reflexes weakening to the point that the last remaining political sin is now uncertainty.

Our political conversations have become not just dismal and mean but also way too focused on the combat instead of the context-- like which problems most need solving, who has the best solutions and whether there is enough common sense left anywhere to find common ground.