Folie à Millions-- Nearly Half The Voters Looked At The Last 4 Years And Decided They Want More Of The Same

 

The Sound Of Music Revisited by Nancy Ohanian

As Charlies Pierce noted in his Esquire column on Wednesday, "He Got More Votes Than Last Time. Almost half of the country looked at the way Donald Trump has functioned as president since 2017 and said, definitively, that they wanted four more years of it. Yesterday, while writing about Kushner and other predatory landlords working towards evicting hundreds of families in the middle of a pandemic, I stumbled across a horrifying pattern of statistics: Trump's support had grown over the last 4 years, at least in the 13 states with the worst COVID caseloads per capita.

This morning I decided to see if that was holding up in other states as well. Obviously, as the vote counting continues, there will be changes, especially since many of the votes coming in are absentee ballots that are overwhelmingly Democratic. Maybe we'll have to look at this again in a couple of weeks when the dust has settled. But here's what we have so far just as Biden is about to be named president-elect. (I'm only including states where at least three-quarters of the vote-- 75%-- is already counted, so no Alaska, Maryland or New Jersey).

• Alabama- 62.3%, down from 62.8%
• Arizona- 48.5%, down 48.7%
• Arkansas- 62.7%, up from 60.6%
• California- 33.0%, up from 31.6%
• Colorado- 42.2%, down from 43.2%
• Delaware- 39.8%, down from 41.7%
• Florida- 51.2%, up from 49.0%
• Georgia- 49.4%, down from 50.8%
• Hawaii- 34.3%, up from 30.0%
• Idaho- 63.7%, up from 59.3%
• Illinois- 43.0%, up from 38.8%
• Indiana- 57.0%, up from 56.8%
• Iowa- 53.1%, up from 51.1%
• Kansas- 56.7%, up from 56.6%
• Kentucky- 62.7%, up from 62.5%
• Louisiana- 58.5%, up from 58.1%
• Maine- 43.3%, down from 44.9%
• Massachusetts- 32.4%, down from 32.8%
• Michigan- 47.9%, up from 47.5%
• Minnesota- 45.4%, down from 44.9%
• Mississippi- 59.7%, up from 57.9%
• Missouri- 56.9%, up from 56.8%
• Montana- 56.7%, up from 56.2%
• Nebraska- 58.7%, same as 2016
• Nevada- 48.5%, up from 45.5%
• New Hampshire- 45.4%, down from 46.6%
• New Mexico- 43.6%, up from 40.0%
• New York- 40.4%, up from 36.5%
• North Carolina- 50.0%, up from 49.8%
• North Dakota- 65.0% up from 63.0%)
• Ohio- 53.3%, up from 51.7%
• Oklahoma- 65.4%, up from 65.3%
• Oregon- 40.3%, up from 39.1%
• Pennsylvania- 49.3%, up from 48.2%
• Rhode Island- 39.2%, up from 38.9%
• South Carolina- 55.1%, up from 54.9%
• South Dakota- 61.8%, up from 61.5%
• Tennessee- 60.7%, same as 2016
• Texas- 52.2%, same as 2016
• Utah- 58.5%, up from 45.5%
• Vermont- 31.7%, up from 30.3%
• Virginia- 44.5%, up from 44.4%
• Washington- 38.0%, up from 36.8%
• West Virginia- 68.6%, up from 68.5%
• Wisconsin- 48.8%, up from 47.2%
• Wyoming- 70.0%, up from 67.4%

Only 9 states saw Trump's proportion of the vote go down: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Georgia, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota and New Hampshire. This is generally a function of less interest this year in third party candidates. But, look at Texas (where 97% of the votes are counted). Trump got 5,876,777 votes do far. His total in 2016 was 4,685,047. Or take Vermont, where 95% of the vote is counted. In 2016 Trump got 95,369 votes. This year he got 111,131 votes. Read 'em and weep.

Yesterday, John Pavlovitz spoke for many people when he wrote, "The fact that it was even close, the fact that more people voted for him a second time, the fact that a higher number of white women inexplicably affirmed him-- it is all confirmation that whether we remove the very visible, unsightly symptom or not, the pervasive disease is still horribly afflicting us... I was certain we were better than him, but we are not."

Numbed by a cocktail of optimism and ignorance, many of us imagined this was a sick, momentary aberration; a temporary glitch in the system that would surely be remedied: after so much ugliness, such open disregard for people of color, such inhumanity toward migrant children, such a sickening failure in the face of this pandemic-- sanity would surely come to the rescue.

We were certain that we would collectively course-correct; that the pendulum that had so wildly swung toward inhumanity would come roaring back to decency in these days; that we would presently be basking in the glory of a radiant dawn referendum on all this bloated bigotry.

We thought we would be dancing on the grave of fascism.

We thought, of course the good people of this nation would come to their collective senses, leaving behind political affiliations and superficial preferences and ceremonial ties, to rescue us from a malevolence that had proven itself unworthy of its position and toxic to its people.

We were certain there would be a mass repudiation of the racism that this man has revealed and the violence he’s nurtured, because for all its flaws we really believed America was better than this.

We were wrong.

...We believed the best about this nation and we were mistaken.

To many oppressed and vulnerable communities, to people who have long known the depth of America’s sickness because they have experienced it in traffic stops and workplace mistreatment and opportunity inequity and the bitter words of strangers-- this may be less shocking news than it is to those of us with greater privilege and more buffers to adversity and the luxury of naiveté.

But this is the sober spot in which we stand now: realizing that our optimism about the whole of this nation was misplaced,
our prayers for the better angels of so many white Christians were unanswered, our childish illusions that people were indeed basically good and decent, seared away in their reaffirmation of something that the rest of the watching world finds reprehensible.

Brandy X Lee is an author and psychiatrist working at Yale, a specialist in violence prevention. Yesterday, writing for Raw Story, she predicted that "The coming weeks and months will be the most dangerous period of this presidency" and noted that there's a sickness in America that goes beyond just Trump. "'What is wrong with 68 million Americans?' is a question many are asking the day after the election. Why should the race even be close? Why did 48% of voting adults choose to remain with a president who leaves a trail of hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths, the nation bankrupt, children in cages, and our natural habitat under existential threat? It makes no rational sense-- unless we correctly identify the problem. For almost four years, mental health professionals have been urging the nation to bring a mental health perspective to a mental health problem, instead of assuming that everything is political. All substitute approachess have failed, just as the best pandemic control comes from infectious disease specialists, not from a radiologist or economists. We have also anticipated the current situation as a product of having mental pathology in power for a prolonged period.

In mental pathology, where higher functions are impaired, an individual taps more easily into “the primitive brain,” which is irrational but very powerful, as it is survival-driven. Illegitimate power is like oxygen to the narcissistically- or sociopathically-disordered mind, and such a person would be driven to do anything-- including annihilate himself and the world-- for his psychic survival. Losing an election would, therefore, not at all be like a healthy person’s experience of defeat. In fact, we know how much Donald Trump fears it through his readiness to call others “losers” and “suckers”, in order to separate himself and to disavow qualities he cannot tolerate.

Many of his followers will equally experience his downfall as a life-or-death matter, since he has conditioned this into them. Their bond is pathological to start, based on developmental wounds or regression to an earlier stage of development under stress, which led them to seeking a parental figure. They are thus vulnerable to someone manipulative and exploitative enough to say he will take care of them and protect them in unrealistic ways that defy reality. And once they do,  they often give up their agency and rationality. Recent footage of his followers chanting, “Fire Fauci!” is disturbing in its depiction of their conformity, loss of personality, and alignment with Donald Trump’s thinking-- to suggest proactively that he remove the reminder of his unwanted reality: the pandemic. Delusions, paranoia, and violence-proneness are among the most contagious symptoms, and we see all these tendencies in his followers.

Under these emotional bonds, his followers will likely experience any threat to his position as an existential threat to themselves, which is why negative facts about him only activate defensive denial and disavowal, rather than abandonment. Abused children rather blame themselves than the parent as a survival impulse, for the parent is their lifeline, and it is easier to believe that he or she could never do wrong-- and the more untrue this belief, the more insistently they cling to it.

“Shared psychosis” or “folie à millions” (madness by the millions) has been well-documented by renowned mental health experts such as Carl Jung and Erich Fromm. This contagion of symptoms dissipates when exposure to the primary person is reduced, which is why Donald Trump holds rallies as if his life depended on them-- psychically, it does. It is also the reason why he cannot leave the presidency-- in addition to the possibility of prosecution.

None Dare Call It Fascism... Except Jamie Raskin

I Can't Breath by Nancy Ohanian

Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin is widely considered the top constitutional scholar in Congress. He began an e-mail to his supporters yesterday with a quote from Benito Mussolini, a fascist dictator who dragged Italy into the sewer and was eventually brutally murdered and hung upside down in a Milan square while the whole city cheered: "If you pluck a chicken one feather at a time, no one will notice." It isn't unrelated to this quote by Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels:

Referencing Madeleine Albright's new book, Fascism: A Warning, which he described as "chilling," Raskin wrote that "fascism is not a political ideology but a strategy for taking and abusing power. The active ingredient in the strategy is the relentless and casual dismantling of the rule of law and the rights of the people." He then enumerated how we're seeing that from the Trumpist Regime: "the formation of a secret police force by President Trump and Attorney General Barr to crush civil rights protesters; unidentified agents sweeping people off the street and detaining them without due process; overt illegal use of the White House and other federal property for campaign purposes; the endless promotion of hate, propaganda and dangerous lies; corruption and vandalization of government for private moneymaking purposes; massive assault on the Post Office to sabotage the election; and provocative presidential rhetoric encouraging civil violence and disorder."

He came right out and called what we're seeing, exactly what it is, though few members of Congress would dare: "We will have our hands full defending a November victory against every trick in the fascist playbook...These brutal times are trying to our souls."

Now, when it comes to Trump's systemic corruption of the federal government-- his "strategy for taking and abusing power"-- ProPublica's exposé on the way Trump makes it appear that he is sending relief packages of food paid for with taxpayer dollars and authorized by Congress is relatively small potatoes... one of Mussolini's single barely noticed or noted feathers. "Millions of Americans who are struggling to put food on the table," wrote Isaac Arnsdorf, "may discover a new item in government-funded relief packages of fresh fruits and vegetables, dairy and meat: a letter signed by President Donald Trump. The message, printed on White House letterhead in both English and Spanish, touts the administration’s response to the coronavirus, including aid provided through the Farmers to Families Food Box Program, a U.S. Department of Agriculture initiative to buy fresh food and ship it to needy families. The letter is reminiscent of Trump’s effort to put his signature on stimulus checks and send a signed letter to millions of recipients. It’s the latest example of the president blurring his official duties with his reelection campaign, most prominently by hosting Trump’s acceptance speech for the Republican nomination last week on the White House lawn. Democratic lawmakers have gone so far as to say the USDA letter violates the federal Hatch Act. The law prohibits government officials from using their positions or taxpayer resources to engage in electioneering. Though the president himself is exempt, the ban applies to White House staff and agencies such as the USDA."

Jonathan Chait made the relevant and overarching point at New York Magazine yesterday though: Trump’s Reelection Campaign Is Corrupting the Entire Federal Government. Trump's illegal activities in using the government for his own ends have caused what Chait called "a flurry of recent reports on new and unprecedented government activity. All of these developments follow the same theme." He mentioned right-wing nut and Trumpist DNI John Ratcliffe announcing his agencies would end the traditional briefings to Congress on election security, even as Russia continues trying cripple America by helping the Trump campaign win the election. He also mentioned the government will be sending out relief checks to coincide with voting, while Trump pressures a weak FDA bureaucracy to rush-release a vaccine before the election whether it kills people or not. Chait reported on an HHS quarter billion dollar campaign "slush fund" and reminded his readers that on Monday Trump announced a joint Justice Department–Homeland Security task force to "investigate violent left-wing civil unrest."

Chait wrote that "Trump’s unhinged rhetoric would just be a Trump problem, were it not for the fact that the government appears to be following his lead. Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf told Tucker Carlson last night he is 'working' on a plan to arrest leaders of Black Lives Matter, who he claims are instigating a violent plot. Trump’s Homeland Security officials have already ignored or downplayed threats involving right-wing terrorism, which has resulted in a number of deadly shootings... [T]here is a pattern in all these events: They describe recent actions by the federal government; they all serve the purpose of enabling Trump’s election; and they all conscript the power of the federal government in novel ways. It has the appearance of coordinated action-- as if Trump has ordered every arm of the government to generate whatever tools can be placed at the disposal of his reelection."

Something To Laugh About In The Midst Of A Deadly Pandemic!

Señor Trumpanzee doesn't listen to advisors much, does he? What if Michael Spicer was called on to snazz up the White House's daily coronavirus press briefings a little and make Trump sound... well, worth listening to? I think you'll enjoy the video above. And... a bonus, my old pal Roy Zimmerman-- from The Foremen-- did a musical presentation you'll probably enjoy too:




OWNING THE LIBS!

Yesterday, Trump suggested that MAGA-people-- who are generally as functionally illiterate as he is-- inject themselves with "the disinfectant that knocks [coronavirus] out in a minute." If MAGA-people run around without masks refusing to social distance in churches and barbershops, many will get sick and some will die. Sounds good-- except when they get sick, they will infect normal people, so that's a bad way to kill off the MAGA-strain. But this bleach drinking thing... This is the best of all worlds. They basically just commit suicide and its a mitzvah for society and, ironically, a step towards making America great again. And since they don't read, they are likely to read this statement from the company that makes Lysol:

As a global leader in health and hygiene products, we must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route).

As with all products, our disinfectant and hygiene products should only be used as intended and in line with usage guidelines. Please read the label and safety information [The company believes it has a] responsibility in providing consumers with access to accurate, up-to-date information as advised by leading public health experts.

Hours after he spoke, Trump's own EPA issued a simple statement for his simpleminded followers: "Never apply the product to yourself or others. Do not ingest disinfectant products."

Chip Proser, the artist responsible for the poster below, calls it a Darwin Award Celebration. I just think of it as COVID-palooza... for Trump's America.

Not everyone thinks this is funny. Brandy X Lee, the author and Yale psychiatrist who has been warning about Trump's deteriorating mental state for a few years, wrote that "the office of the U.S. presidency has become a locus of grave psychological dysfunction. Seldom do we see our warnings realized in real life with such recurrent, precise confirmation, as if on schedule. The president’s latest suggestion that injecting bodies with disinfectant, or irradiating them with ultraviolet light, could help with COVID-19 is only the latest, blatant example of his malady: His boundless willingness to place the nation in harm’s way for his slightest gain. Given our track record, the world should know that we were not speaking frivolously of his dangerousness and that, were  Trump to continue in the presidency, not only the United States but the world would see vast, unnecessary increases in suffering and death."

She brought up what many people are thinking but what you almost never hear in the mainstream media: "We will never know to what degree the COVID-19 pandemic could have been attenuated or contained altogether, like other near-pandemics in the past, had Trump not disbanded the nation’s global pandemic response system two years earlier, out of pathological envy of his predecessor, President Barack Obama. It was a system that experts lauded throughout the world and voiced outcry for when it was dissolved... We should recognize the president’s behavior for what it is: a mental problem... His pathological drive to deflect blame and to attribute his errors to an outside 'enemy' will continue to exert greater emotional force than any rational planning, as well as to have a powerful, hypnotic effect on his followers, as is the characteristic of pathology. As his other mismanagements contribute to what seems will be a Great Depression-level economic devastation, he has called for armed insurrection against Democratic governors who are unwilling to reopen the economy."

These are truly frightening developments that likely foreshadow potentially catastrophic international crises to come. Amid a worldwide economic depression on top of major misery and death from the pandemic, geopolitical confrontations that this president has already brought to a brink are likely to explode.

While it is likely he will use his presidential powers and the current health crisis to try to postpone the November elections or to annul the results, it is also likely that he will turn to creating new crises if this does not seem workable in his mind. We simply cannot risk these greater dangers while a seriously mentally compromised person is wielding the powers of the presidency. Past behavior is a reliable predictor of future behavior, and the remaining nine months of his presidency are looking to be the most dangerous of all, for the United States and for the world.

Because these patterns are familiar in mental health settings, thousands of mental health professionals have tried to fulfill our professional responsibility to protect society by speaking up. Recently, a giant in our field, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, has joined us in stating that the president is “crazy.” We believe that prevention is important, and we have issued a prescription. Just as we can choose whether to coordinate our fight against the novel coronavirus or stubbornly stay with a lethal course, we can choose whether to address the greatest mental health emergency of our time or not. The healthy choice seems clear.

How Dangerous To The Rest Of Us Is Trump's Mental Illness?

An old friend of mine worked for a firm that bought the medical practice of one of Trump's doctors. I'm sure it was unethical and possibly illegal, but my friend examined Trump's medical records, which is how, back before he won the Republican nomination, I was able to report that his sniffling and his bizarre mental swings were due to a long habit of crushing up adderall and snorting it, something the medical personnel taught him to do. Today, that friend, suggested I write a post called "Trump and Amphetamine Psychosis." He added that Trump "is also on Cialis, which is why he is red and puffy; it does that. Trump gets his energy from Adderall; he never sleeps and is up early. Hitler was pumped full of large doses of amphetamines as you may recall. Adderall is an amphetamine, and there is a condition called Amphetamine Psychosis." Do these symptoms of Adderall abuse sound like they belong to anyone we all know and loathe? "Snorting Adderall is common among users looking for immediate effects. They crush up their pills into a fine powder, sniffing Adderall into their sinus cavity. This often leads to a more intense high, but snorting Adderall comes with its own side effects. Snorting pills cause destruction of the nasal and sinus cavities. The longer someone continues taking Adderall in this way, the more damage that can be done. Snorting also amplifies other Adderall side effects such as irregular heartbeat. Those snorting Adderall also have a heightened risk of overdose.

• Being overly talkative
• Unusual excitability
• Social withdrawal
• Financial troubles
• Aggression
• Secretive behavior
• Memory loss
• Incomplete thoughts
• Relationship problems
• Decline in personal hygiene
• Frequently taking pills
• Disorientation
• Mania
• Impulsive behaviors

Chauncey DeVega, writing over the weekend for Salon, reported on Trump's mental illness. HIs version in his podcast (below) is far better; be sure to listen. But the basics are that Dr. Bandy Lee. a Yale professor of psychiatry and editor of the bestselling book The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, convened a panel comprised of leading mental health experts to evaluate Trump based on his behavior as detailed in the Mueller report. "Their definitive conclusion: Trump is mentally unfit, a threat to the United States and the world, and as such should have his powers severely restricted. At the invitation of several Democratic members of Congress, Lee and other mental health professionals will present their findings about Donald Trump's mental health at what they hope will be a bipartisan congressional meeting in Washington next month." Here are a few excerpts from the latest interview DeVega did with Dr. Lee. Again, the podcast is better.

DeVega: Trump appears to be pure unrestrained id. He is driven by greed. Trump does not read and is proudly ignorant. He possesses no ideology. Beyond greed, how much of Trump's behavior is a function of his own desires and how much is because of manipulation by others?

Lee: It's a form of co-dependence. It is a mutual phenomenon where you have a person who is mentally disordered. Trump would have remained psychologically disordered as an individual, and therefore not doing much harm, if he had just remained a private citizen. As a real estate builder and a reality TV personality, Trump's power to do harm to society would be vastly limited. But because he rose to the level of president of the United States, this is why I and other health professionals have a medical obligation to speak publicly, to sound the alarm about this whole situation. Donald Trump is the center of vast levels of harm being done to a wide segment of society. This is a public health and public safety issue.

The health paradigm has no room for politics. This has nothing to do with politics. Our concerns are purely about public health and safety, and whether or not American society will choose a destructive route versus a life-affirming, constructive route. Disease by definition is destructive. What we are witnessing with Donald Trump's presidency are all signs of destruction. These symptoms are the dismantling of democracy, rampant corruption, thwarting the rule of law and even the loss of a shared sense of what reality actually is.




The ability to distinguish what is real from what is unreal is very important. With mental pathology, the afflicted person starts to see delusions and hallucinations as real. This mentally unwell person will actually do whatever they can to bulldoze over reality as it actually exists and the people who believe in it. This is why a sick, delusional person will force family members and those around them to abandon their own sense of reality and espouse the sick person's delusions and conspiracy theories.

This is what Donald Trump is doing to the United States and the American people. People who have their grounding in reality and rationality are now losing ground to him.

DeVega: Recently Donald Trump threatened a list of public servants with charges of treason, a crime which is punishable by death. Trump did this out of apparent rage at the Mueller report. A few days before, Trump paraded out all his sycophants to say that Nancy Pelosi is a liar and that he had not thrown a temper tantrum during a recent meeting with her-- despite witnesses who confirm those accounts. One would think that a healthy person would be cowed by the Mueller report and now proceed with great caution. Instead, Donald Trump is acting even worse.

Lee: A mentally unwell person like Donald Trump can no longer see reality for what it is. Instead he has to believe in false beliefs. A person like him has to lie to himself and lie to others. They have to distort the truth. They have to espouse conspiracy theories in order to even tolerate existing in this world, let alone facing reality. A mentally unwell person like Trump cannot accept facts for what they are. He cannot accept the results of the Mueller report as they are. People around Trump sense this.

That is why Attorney General Barr, who is supposed to represent the law, actually distorted the law in order to buttress and protect Donald Trump. Perhaps Barr thought this ploy was necessary for Trump to continue on mentally? Trump would likely not be able to accept the Mueller report if it was presented to him factually. I have been highlighting this fact repeatedly: There is institutional complicity with the leader, who is the center of power in a destructive regime.

DeVega: You and your colleagues have done something that is likely unprecedented in American history. You convened a panel of the world's leading mental health experts to evaluate the president, based on the findings of a special prosecutor's report. What were the conclusions?

Lee: We assembled a group of renowned mental health experts as quickly as possible. We combed through the Mueller report and treated it like the information that we generally have when a court orders us to do a mental capacity evaluation of a person who has shown a lack of mental capacity. This could be a military officer, a police officer or a chief executive officer-- anyone who has been flagged by any of their employees or employers because they show signs of possessing an inability to carry out their duties.

Of course the president has his own employers, who are the American people, who have pointed this out. Other specialists have highlighted these concerns about Trump as well. In essence the group of experts we assembled to evaluate Donald Trump were volunteering as expert witnesses in this case, working pro bono in order to provide a formal conclusion to the people and other concerned parties.

With the Mueller report and other information, we believed that we had enough to come to a conclusion. But we wanted to give the president enough of an opportunity to submit to a personal examination. If Trump believes himself fit to be president, we believe he should submit to an examination. We have information that Donald Trump received our request but he did not respond affirmatively. We then issued our conclusion after the three-week period. Our conclusion was damning. The president failed to meet all four criteria that we outlined as the standard, most basic criteria for mental capacity.

The first specific criterion is the ability to take in important information and advice. To be capable of taking in new information to make decisions, given how that is one of the primary and most important roles of a president.

The second criterion is the ability to process that information unimpeded by emotional needs or false beliefs or the need to lie to yourself or others. The ability to simply use the information you have and process it in ways that are normal, unimpeded by all those other emotional factors and needs.

The third criterion is to be able to make sound, rational, reality-based decisions without undue influence by impulsivity, other false beliefs, delusions and conspiracy theories. It's the ability to stay with a decision in a stable way and not to go back and forth depending on the other influences you receive. In essence, to be sane, to be connected to reality.

The fourth is to not put yourself and others in danger. This includes not inciting people to commit dangerous acts. Not to engage in aggressive acts yourself. Not to threaten nations by inciting war. We have found that President Trump was not able to refrain from those acts in many circumstances. Trump has put himself and the nation in danger, and putting yourself or others in danger is also a very important criterion in determining a person's capacity to serve-- in this case, Trump's fitness to be president. There is overwhelming evidence in the Mueller report showing that Donald Trump is not able to meet these criteria. Likewise, there is very little evidence showing that Donald Trump is able to meet those criteria.

DeVega: Do you think that Donald Trump should be impeached? What advice would you give Nancy Pelosi if she reached out to you?

Lee: I do not involve myself in direct discussions about impeachment or the political process because that is outside of my realm of expertise. My expertise is medical. In that capacity I can state that unless Donald Trump is contained or removed, he is posing a danger to public health and safety. As president, Trump represents a condition of imminent danger to the country and the world. Therefore my recommendation is that Donald Trump be immediately contained and certain powers are taken away from him.

I would like to highlight two of our greatest concerns. Immediate removal from access to nuclear weapons. The fact that an individual with access to thousands of nuclear weapons which have the capacity to destroy humanity and the world many times over is certainly an unacceptable situation with Donald Trump's level of mental incapacity. The war-making powers are vested in a president. We ask that Donald Trump's ability to make war be removed because he certainly is not in a position to have such powers.

DeVega: What do you think is most likely to happen next with Donald Trump, if his behavior continues along this path?

Lee: We can be quite certain of certain things based on probability and Donald Trump's pattern of behavior. The American people will be in far greater danger. With Donald Trump there will be unacceptable levels of danger of him either destroying the United States or perhaps even human civilization. Donald Trump is a national emergency. That should be the No. 1 priority at this time. The American people and the country's leaders are not treating this dire situation with the attention it demands. The fact that this is not being treated as a national and global emergency is the greatest sign of danger.

And there's more, that the shrinks gathered about the mentally unstable occupant of the White House. "The Special Counsel’s report, they wrote in the report, "provides an uncommon wealth of information regarding the President’s mental capacity, begging for a mental health interpretation. Pursuant to our ongoing, primary professional responsibility to society to protect public health and wellbeing, and to warn against potential dangers to the public’s safety and security, we have embarked upon this report. Mental capacity refers to the mental soundness that is necessary to fulfill a task and is a fundamental and necessary component of fitness for duty. It is a functional, not a diagnostic, assessment, focused less on the President’s personal mental health than on his capacity to fulfill the duties of his office as observed by co-workers and close associates. The information in the Special Counsel’s report, deriving from multiple sources under sworn testimony, yields an assessment with uncommonly high confidence. We found evidence in the report of:

1. Compromises in comprehension, or inability to take in critical information and advice;

2. Faulty information processing, in the form of mendacity, rigidity, self-occupied notions of “fairness,” and poor memory;

3. Interferences to sound decision making, including loss of impulse control, recklessness, and inability to consider consequences; and

4. Proneness to placing himself and others in danger, including encouraging, recommending, or inciting violence on the part of his followers.

"[W]e we believe that the preponderance of evidence overwhelmingly supports the conclusion that this President is incapable of making sound, rational, reality-based decisions free of impulsivity, recklessness, paranoid and other demonstrably false beliefs, with most notably an absorption in self-interest that precludes the consideration of national interest. These characteristics not only affect the overall unfitness of this President; they also indicate a profound danger to national and international security in the nuclear age. Whereas we would still like to see the results of a proper, in-person evaluation, as stated above, a personal interview does not necessarily yield the most useful information in a functional assessment. In fact, we believe that we already have enough information to conclude that the President lacks the mental capacity to discharge the duties of his office, and that his incapacity in these respects represents a profound risk to public health and safety... While the information in the Special Counsel’s report has been deemed insufficient for criminal determination, it provides, even in redacted form, a wealth of relevant information regarding the President’s mental capacity. Not having the mental capacity to make sound decisions and to refrain from violence, whether by encouraging, recommending, or inciting it on the part of his followers, whether or not he meets the criteria for being diagnosed as mentally ill, is dangerous as long as he remains President and constitutes a medical emergency that health professionals are obligated to respond to... The Special Counsel’s report offers an extraordinary level of high-quality information on the President’s apparent lack of mental capacity: compromises in comprehension (inability to take in critical information and advice), faulty information processing (mendacity, rigidity, self-occupied notions of 'fairness,' and poor memory), interferences to sound decision making (loss of impulse control, recklessness, and inability to consider consequences), and proneness to placing himself and others in danger."

Who Will Stand Up To Hatred And Bigotry-- Trump? Bernie?

We've covered her quite a bit before but in case you've forgotten, Brandy X. Lee is a forensic psychiatrist at Yale, best known for the bestseller, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. Friday she penned an OpEd for the New York Daily News, Trump’s mental condition seems to be getting worse: He should subject himself to a rigorous assessment now. She wrote that in the two years since she organized the conference at Yale "about how mental health professionals could warn the public ethically and effectively" about what Trump is, their "predictions have borne out to be true: Donald Trump in the office of the presidency has proven more dangerous than people suspected, has grown more dangerous by the day, and, without proper treatment, is becoming increasingly uncontainable."

She points to many easy to recognize symptoms of his increasing mental impairment-- the more frequent and more vitriolic tweets, the vicious and violent rallies, the crackpot conspiracy theories that show him unable to tolerate reality but "most markedly," she wrote, "he has of late been growing less and less coherent. His two-hour Conservative Political Action Conference speech revealed many rambling sentences, tangential thoughts, repetitions and word-finding difficulties. There was also the 'Tim Apple' episode a few weeks ago, and then his calling Venezuela a company, confusing his grandfather’s birthplace with his father’s, mispronouncing 'oranges' for 'origins,' and stating, out of the blue, 'I’m very normal.' These are signs of cognitive decline, the source of which we cannot know without examining him, but there is no question he needs an evaluation... If an employee showed the kind of impulsivity, erratic thinking and belligerent behavior that the president does, the employer would likely have demanded testing right away before the employee could resume work. In the United States, the people are the president’s employers. An unprecedented Washington conference on fit leadership revealed that even non-mental health professionals agree that the president needs urgent mental health intervention. So the choice now seems clear: the president needs to submit to a proper, independent evaluation of fitness, or if not, he can always resign."



Yesterday I watched him at Sheldon Adelson's Kapo Convention in Las Vegas (video up top). Right after he introduced a slew of far right Republicans from Georgia, South Carolina, Bakersfield, North Dakota-- not exactly Jewish-friendly places but very Israel-friendly (see the difference and why here), he launched into a typical cheap shot, slandering Ilhan Omar (D-MN), soon after Patrick Carlineo, one of his supporters, was arrested by the FBI and charged with threatening to kill Congresswoman Omar. The Trumpist told authorities that he's a patriot who loves Trump, and "that he hates radical Muslims in our government." Trump always refers to Rep. Omar as a "radical Muslim," which isn't true. Carlineo told them that he had told Omar's office that "If our forefathers were still alive, they'd put a bullet in her head." [You can contribute to Ilhan's reelection campaign here.]

Trump spreads hatred and rancor whenever he goes and whenever he speaks. Bernie, an American Jew from Brooklyn-- we grew up a few blocks from each other and went to the same elementary school (PS 197) and high school (James Madison)-- has a different way of approaching people. Please, please, please watch this video. "Love Will Conquer Hate: Bernie Visits Islamic Center in California." That's the likely choice we'll be making in 2020. I can't tell you strongly enough how important this short video is: