Trump Is Doing The Only Thing He Is Capable Of In A Crisis-- Driving Americans Apart

Rasmussen never comes off as a legitimate polling firm and is often considered an arm of the Republican Party committees. Not this week, though. They reported that 23% of Republicans wish the GOP had another nominee instead of Trump. An even great percentage of Democrats wish there was an alternative to Biden-- 28%, but that's to be expected far more than those numbers for an incumbent president. The wish that someone else was their nominee is greatest among Republicans of color and Republicans under 40. Why?

Well, it could be the debilitating insanity (of Trump, not his supporters). Or maybe it's just the horrifying inability to rise above his self interest and lead the country. Salon reporter Chauncey DeVega has often speculated on Trump's various mental illnesses. Wednesday he invited psychiatrist Justin Frank-- author of the president "on the couch" series-- to join him. Frank-- like most educated people-- thinks Trump is dangerously insane and DeVega wrote that the pandemic "has only encouraged his worst impulses and behavior. There is no bottom to Trump's addiction to cruelty, mayhem, lying and overall evil." Frank told him that "Trump is driven by 'the unstoppable conviction of his neuroses'" and talked with him about the "origins of Donald Trump's lack of empathy, care or concern for other human beings, as well as his troubling appetite for confrontational exchanges with female reporters. He warns that Trump is engaging in a powerful and pathological act of psychological projection and self-deception when he accuses the Democrats of not caring about the coronavirus pandemic and suggests that they have failed the American people during this time of crisis."

DeVega began the interview by asking Frank where Trump learned values that have led him to appear "not to care about the tens of thousands of people-- soon to be more than 100,000-- who have died from the coronavirus pandemic," repeatedly showing that "he lacks empathy and human care and concern for others." Frank had a simple answer:

Trump learned from his father such values as being on time, being dressed for dinner, always obeying your father and not arguing with authority. Trump learned those values early on when he was a young boy.

Trump then learned from his father that if you are going to cheat, do it subtly. For example, Trump saw how his father was able to milk the government for money. Trump learned how to do that from his father. In learning that lesson from his father, Trump also learned that the government is naïve and like a type of cash cow. Trump's father made money in real estate through shady deals where he was able to get money from the government of the City of New York and not just the federal government. Trump learned how to play those games and to be a legal delinquent until he gets caught.

Trump also learned from his father that life is about money. Trump's values are centered around an assumption that people are aggressive and selfish, and they are always out to get you. Therefore you have to attack them first, strike first before they betray you. Ultimately, for Donald Trump the most important goal in life is winning. In total, Trump's core values in life are winning, having money, and tricking and outsmarting other people.

...Trump does not see human life as having any abstract value. However, Trump does feel that if he knows you very well then you have value to him. If you are in his family or close circle of friends, then your life has some value to him. But even then, it is fleeting. It is very hard for most people to understand the depth of his paranoia and rage at other people. Trump has lived his life always looking around for anybody who might be out to get him.

...What is most important is that we understand the power of projection and Trump's unconscious mind. In his Fox News interview last week at the Lincoln Memorial, Trump said the following about the Democrats: "I think they don't mind having lots of people get sick from a coronavirus. And the reason is, to make me look bad. That they would rather have people get sick, as a way to make me look bad. That's what they want."

Donald Trump does not care about the people who are getting sick from the coronavirus. Therefore, Trump projects his indifference and his lack of concern about the health of the American people onto the Democrats. In reality, the Democrats have wanted more testing and better safety protocols. The Democrats are upset that Trump has, for example, dismantled the CDC and so many other programs that would have prevented, or greatly lessened, the deadly impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

Donald Trump is very gifted at projecting his sentiments on to other people. In that regard, he has a quality that I have not really seen except on in-patient psychiatric wards. Whatever Trump says, he ultimately ends up blaming other people when he is held accountable. Trump's mind is very powerful in that way. Deep paranoia is central to how his mind works.

...A paranoid person like Donald Trump engages in behavior that reinforces other people's criticisms of him. That in turn justifies Trump's feelings of always being under attack. It is not just that paranoid minds and people have enemies-- that is true-- but what is very important is how paranoid people like Donald Trump create enemies. Moreover, Donald Trump goes out of his way to do it, because that is his strength and his food for life.

Donald Trump has two fundamental sources of energy. One of them are his rallies, where he can feel loved, triumphant and omnipotent. The other source of Trump's energy is a feeling of always being embattled, accused and being a victim in his own mind. Trump loves those feelings, that dynamic. Such feelings do not fit together. Nonetheless those feelings are an essential part of Donald Trump.

...Trump loves obedient women. Trump's love of obedient women is what broke up his first marriage. Ivana Trump worked at one of his hotels which meant that she did always have his dinner prepared on time-- and it was him who wanted her to get a job. Trump would fly into a rage every time his dinner was not made on time. Ivana was an independent woman. This meant to Trump that she was no longer a woman of the 1950s, which is what he wants.

But understand that Donald Trump likes sparring with the female reporters at his press conferences and briefings. He likes the situation because he is safe because of the Secret Service, the television broadcast format and the expectations of how the reporters will behave towards him. It is not like Trump being confronted in private, where he doesn't have those protections.

Trump loves sparring with the reporters who are women. For Trump, being combative with them is like a type of aggressive fighting and jousting. It is very sexual for Trump on an unconscious level. He is aroused by the female reporters who stand up to him. It is a great turn-on for Trump. Conflict in general is a turn-on and arousing for Trump, but conflict with a woman is even more exciting.

  Trump has a fantasy of dominating these women. I also think that Donald Trump also has a deep desire, perhaps passive or latent, to be dominated by a confident strong woman. Donald Trump has a very complicated relationship with women where he likes to fight with them but also wants them to be submissive to him.

Donald Trump has even written about how women are more powerful than men because he believes that women can use their sexuality to get their way. Trump also believes that women are more comfortable being deceptive than men are.

Trump is constantly watching women. He can describe a woman's body in great detail, and he likes talking about their bodies in those terms. The way that Trump talks about women dehumanizes them. Trump turns women into objects of lust, almost like they are a piece of meat. Again, this is a reflection of Trump's core traits and values, because he is a man who hates regulations and limits. In his mind, he should be able to do whatever he wants.

...Attaining real power is never enough because it is driven by a fantasy. The problem with a person like Donald Trump is that when they get real power they do not stop. The issue for them is not having the power. Instead, the real issue is going after power and then getting it. That is another example of the "courage" of Trump's psychopathology.

No matter how much power Trump has, he will feel that at any moment he can be victimized and attacked. That fear keeps him alive and awake. I believe that is the real reason why Trump sleeps only for a few hours at night. Trump does not want to be in danger. Sleeping means that Trump feels that he is not going to be safe.

That is why he locks his bedroom door. He's the first president in the history of this country to lock the door to his own bedroom. Even the Secret Service cannot get to him.

...Trump is the Jim Jones of American presidents. I have said that before. He keeps providing examples. I believe that Donald Trump is a sadist, a paranoid and a narcissist. Trump's psychopathology means that he will never back down. As shown by Trump's interview in the New York Post, Trump hates for people to have minds of their own. That is why Trump suggested putting detergent and cleaning supplies in people's bodies to fight the coronavirus. Trump is making an extreme request as a way of undermining people's free will.

Trump's neuroses have a lot to do with why this time of extreme emergency is not bringing the country together but driving us further apart from each other. Jon Pavlovitz wrote yesterday this week that "You think that we would be so consumed with the staggering and swift loss of humanity that our extraneous pursuits and petty prejudices would fall away, leaving nothing but the essential bedrock stuff of who we are and why we’re here and what America is supposed to mean when the rubber meets the road to hell."

Ummm... no. "America," he wrote "is somehow managing to become more fractured as the death toll rises, less united while being uniformly brutalized. As infectious and pervasive as it is, this pandemic is proving to be the least of our sicknesses." Solidarity and unity are not what MAGA is all about. MAGA "is a movement whose only fuel is discord. It is incapable of running on selflessness and collaboration and mutuality-- which is why its leadership has no interest in such things. It’s why the President’s twitter feed is as filled with partisan attacks and as absent of empathy as it was in January."

In this time of collective trauma, we are experiencing a toxic, trickle-down enmity flowing from the highest places of leadership, flooding into the trenches of our families and friendships and workplaces-- and we are all drowning in it.

Our tribalism is growing more entrenched, our prejudices more profound, and the gaps between us are widening, which makes the stratospheric loss of life more wasteful than it would be, were we being moved to decency by it, were we grieving it properly, were we rising to the moment in the wake of it.

For so many of us, the passing of thousands of people doesn’t merit any urgency. The hills worth dying on are not actual lives anymore, they’re the straw man battles of attacks on “personal freedom,” in the form of wearing masks and getting haircuts and cramming themselves into coffee shops and doing workouts in the street-- and imagining they’re being courageous and noble. These are the wars they’re waging while an unprecedented virus becomes a murderous footnote on the back page.

I think that’s what’s tearing me up about this time more than anything; that this historic shared suffering isn’t enough for some people on its own; that they can’t simply say, “We’re being decimated by a natural disaster and we’re all in it together so let’s get through it together,” rather, they need to weaponize it as friendly fire against the walking wounded around them; they need to repurpose the pain as a political statement.

I wish these people realized:

This virus is nonpartisan. Republicans are dying as fast as Democrats.

Everyone wants to go back to work and normalcy, but killing tens of thousands more isn’t a fair price to many of us.

It’s being both for America and pro-Life to be grieved by 83,000 89,000 dead Americans so much that you want to alter your lifestyle to make sure more people don’t die.

Friends, if we don’t alter the path we’re on, we’re going to see these nightmare months as simply the beginning of a slide into the chasm; a titling toward an abyss of tribalism that we can’t ever come back from-- heck, maybe we’re already there.

If we can’t find anything redemptive about what we’re going through right now, if we allow it to sever the last, tenuous tethers between us-- the 83,000 89,000 irreplaceable human beings who have died since February will have done so for nothing, and the ones who die today and tomorrow and into the Fall will be squandered as well.

This pandemic, as horrifying as it is, has done the only good thing unfathomable days like this cans do: it’s given us a chance to pull closer to one another.

I think we’re blowing that opportunity.

I think we’re missing this moment.

I think we’re wasting this disaster.