The Art Of Getting One Over On The Suckers Who Are Born Every Day

Tony Schwartz helped spread the disease of Trumpism... he regrets it

Did Trump forget to get a non-disclosure agreement out of Tony Schwartz, the guy who wrote The Art of the Deal for him? Schwartz would like to change the name of the book to The Sociopath and told the New Yorker's Jane Mayer in an interview sure to bring on a lawsuit, "I put lipstick on a pig. I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is... I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization."

Schwartz, who spent almost 2 years getting to know Trump inside and out for the book, was more the author than a ghost-writer. Edward Kosner, the former editor and publisher of New York, where Schwartz worked as a writer at the time, says, "Tony created Trump. He’s Dr. Frankenstein." Unlike Trump's other books, the #1 best seller had Trump's name and Schwartz's name splashed across the front cover in equal size. They split the advance and the several million dollars in royalties equally. Trump didn't write a word.

Schwartz knows his successful business will take a hit if speaks out about Trump now, as he just did with Mayer. "But," she wrote, "the prospect of President Trump terrified him. It wasn’t because of Trump’s ideology-- Schwartz doubted that he had one. The problem was Trump’s personality, which he considered pathologically impulsive and self-centered... Schwartz decided that if he kept mum and Trump was elected he’d never forgive himself. In June, he agreed to break his silence and give his first candid interview about the Trump he got to know while acting as his Boswell." Schwartz immediately discovered Trump has no attention span and is basically unable to concentrate or focus for any length of time. Schwartz explained that "it’s impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then . . . If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time." Mayer wrote that "Schwartz believes that Trump’s short attention span has left him with 'a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance.' He said, 'That’s why he so prefers TV as his first news source-- information comes in easily digestible sound bites.' He added, 'I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.' During the eighteen months that he observed Trump, Schwartz said, he never saw a book on Trump’s desk, or elsewhere in his office, or in his apartment." The Washington Post reported yesterday that "Trump said that he does not need to read extensively because he reaches the right decisions 'with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had, plus the words common sense, because I have a lot of common sense and I have a lot of business ability.'"

Schwartz had written about Trump before. In 1985, he’d published a piece in New York called “A Different Kind of Donald Trump Story,” which portrayed him not as a brilliant mogul but as a ham-fisted thug who had unsuccessfully tried to evict rent-controlled and rent-stabilized tenants from a building that he had bought on Central Park South. Trump’s efforts-- which included a plan to house homeless people in the building in order to harass the tenants-- became what Schwartz described as a “fugue of failure, a farce of fumbling and bumbling.” An accompanying cover portrait depicted Trump as unshaven, unpleasant-looking, and shiny with sweat. Yet, to Schwartz’s amazement, Trump loved the article. He hung the cover on a wall of his office, and sent a fan note to Schwartz, on his gold-embossed personal stationery. “Everybody seems to have read it,” Trump enthused in the note, which Schwartz has kept.

“I was shocked,” Schwartz told me. “Trump didn’t fit any model of human being I’d ever met. He was obsessed with publicity, and he didn’t care what you wrote.” He went on, “Trump only takes two positions. Either you’re a scummy loser, liar, whatever, or you’re the greatest. I became the greatest. He wanted to be seen as a tough guy, and he loved being on the cover.”

...Schwartz sat about eight feet away from him in the Trump Tower office, listening on an extension of Trump’s phone line. Schwartz says that none of the bankers, lawyers, brokers, and reporters who called Trump realized that they were being monitored. The calls usually didn’t last long, and Trump’s assistant facilitated the conversation-hopping. While he was talking with someone, she often came in with a Post-it note informing him of the next caller on hold.

“He was playing people,” Schwartz recalls. On the phone with business associates, Trump would flatter, bully, and occasionally get mad, but always in a calculated way. Before the discussion ended, Trump would “share the news of his latest success,” Schwartz says. Instead of saying goodbye at the end of a call, Trump customarily signed off with “You’re the greatest!” There was not a single call that Trump deemed too private for Schwartz to hear. “He loved the attention,” Schwartz recalls. “If he could have had three hundred thousand people listening in, he would have been even happier.”

This year, Schwartz has heard some argue that there must be a more thoughtful and nuanced version of Donald Trump that he is keeping in reserve for after the campaign. “There isn’t,” Schwartz insists. “There is no private Trump.” This is not a matter of hindsight. While working on “The Art of the Deal,” Schwartz kept a journal in which he expressed his amazement at Trump’s personality, writing that Trump seemed driven entirely by a need for public attention. “All he is is ‘stomp, stomp, stomp’-- recognition from outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things that go nowhere in particular,” he observed, on October 21, 1986. But, as he noted in the journal a few days later, “the book will be far more successful if Trump is a sympathetic character-- even weirdly sympathetic-- than if he is just hateful or, worse yet, a one-dimensional blowhard.”

...“More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” Often, Schwartz said, the lies that Trump told him were about money-- “how much he had paid for something, or what a building he owned was worth, or how much one of his casinos was earning when it was actually on its way to bankruptcy.” Trump bragged that he paid only eight million dollars for Mar-a-Lago, but omitted that he bought a nearby strip of beach for a record sum. After gossip columns reported, erroneously, that Prince Charles was considering buying several apartments in Trump Tower, Trump implied that he had no idea where the rumor had started. (“It certainly didn’t hurt us,” he says, in The Art of the Deal.) Wayne Barrett, a reporter for the Village Voice, later revealed that Trump himself had planted the story with journalists. Schwartz also suspected that Trump engaged in such media tricks, and asked him about a story making the rounds—that Trump often called up news outlets using a pseudonym. Trump didn’t deny it. As Schwartz recalls, he smirked and said, “You like that, do you?”

Schwartz says of Trump, “He lied strategically. He had a complete lack of conscience about it.” Since most people are “constrained by the truth,” Trump’s indifference to it “gave him a strange advantage.”

When challenged about the facts, Schwartz says, Trump would often double down, repeat himself, and grow belligerent. This quality was recently on display after Trump posted on Twitter a derogatory image of Hillary Clinton that contained a six-pointed star lifted from a white-supremacist Web site. Campaign staffers took the image down, but two days later Trump angrily defended it, insisting that there was no anti-Semitic implication. Whenever “the thin veneer of Trump’s vanity is challenged,” Schwartz says, he overreacts-- not an ideal quality in a head of state.

When Schwartz began writing The Art of the Deal, he realized that he needed to put an acceptable face on Trump’s loose relationship with the truth. So he concocted an artful euphemism. Writing in Trump’s voice, he explained to the reader, “I play to people’s fantasies. . .  People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration-- and it’s a very effective form of promotion.” Schwartz now disavows the passage. “Deceit,” he told me, is never “innocent.” He added, “‘Truthful hyperbole’ is a contradiction in terms. It’s a way of saying, ‘It’s a lie, but who cares?’” Trump, he said, loved the phrase.

...In his journal, Schwartz wrote, “Trump stands for many of the things I abhor: his willingness to run over people, the gaudy, tacky, gigantic obsessions, the absolute lack of interest in anything beyond power and money.” Looking back at the text now, Schwartz says, “I created a character far more winning than Trump actually is.” The first line of the book is an example. “I don’t do it for the money,” Trump declares. “I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” Schwartz now laughs at this depiction of Trump as a devoted artisan. “Of course he’s in it for the money,” he said. “One of the most deep and basic needs he has is to prove that ‘I’m richer than you.’ ” As for the idea that making deals is a form of poetry, Schwartz says, “He was incapable of saying something like that-- it wouldn’t even be in his vocabulary.” He saw Trump as driven not by a pure love of dealmaking but by an insatiable hunger for “money, praise, and celebrity.” Often, after spending the day with Trump, and watching him pile one hugely expensive project atop the next, like a circus performer spinning plates, Schwartz would go home and tell his wife, “He’s a living black hole!”

...Schwartz told me that he has decided to pledge all royalties from sales of The Art of the Deal in 2016 to pointedly chosen charities: the National Immigration Law Center, Human Rights Watch, the Center for the Victims of Torture, the National Immigration Forum, and the Tahirih Justice Center. He doesn’t feel that the gesture absolves him. “I’ll carry this until the end of my life,” he said. “There’s no righting it. But I like the idea that, the more copies that The Art of the Deal sells, the more money I can donate to the people whose rights Trump seeks to abridge.”

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that savvy Republican politicians-- including the party's last 4 nominees, a dozen senators, 4 governors and countless congressmembers are staying as far away from the Trump convention as they can. Rob Portman (OH) and Ron Johnson (WI) are the only senators up for re-election in battleground states attending the convention, although Rubio sent in a video. And the list of speakers, starting last night, was strictly B-list-- hysterical hate mongers Rudy Giuliani and Michael Flynn, underwear model-turned soap actor Antonio Sabato Jr, washed up '70s actor Scott Baio (Chachi)... and still to come: Tim Tebow, con-artist and drug pusher Michelle Van Etten and Trump's family of monsters. Palin was supposed to speak but she's stuck in Alaska trying to get her kid out of jail after he beat his girlfriend up again. But at least there was Melania Trump last night... and her plagiarized speech she claimed she wrote herself:


The Art of The Steal

Virtually all the Blue America congressional candidates are urging their supporters to watch the Republican convention. Southwest Michigan's Paul Clements wrote to his supporters yesterday that "Today in Cleveland, Ohio the coronation of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee begins. His line-up of loony guest speakers demonstrates just what kind of government he would run. One filled with people like a Duck Dynasty star, an NRA executive, the Ultimate Fighting CEO, an oil industry executive... and Rev. Jerry Falwell. We must do everything we can to stop Donald Trump, and we will."

Similarly, our candidate in Nevada, Ruben Kihuen, told his supporters that "with Republicans poised to nominate a racist, misogynistic bully as their nominee for President later this week, accidental Congressman Cresent Hardy is now steering clear of Cleveland and praying Nevadans forget about his steadfast support for Donald Trump. His staff must have read this Roll Call article ranking Hardy the second most vulnerable House incumbent in the country, in part because Trump 'will likely be a liability down-ticket.' But here’s the truth: Hardy has been an unwavering supporter of Trump’s disgraceful campaign since he became the GOP’s presumptive nominee, and he’s even promised an official endorsement in the near future. When it comes to Trump’s offensive rhetoric, Hardy says: 'His tone doesn’t bother me… He’s speaking the truth.'"

A new poll released by Morning Consult just as the convention was getting underway indicates that 46% of Republicans say the GOP has "pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track [and] 23 percent definitively say that party leaders do not care about people like them. One-fifth of Republican voters say the party doesn’t represent their views." Ominously, though, 29% of Republicans feel that Trump best reflects GOP values among Republican politicians. Bush II came in second with 17% and Paul Ryan third with 12%.

A family of cheats? How could it be otherwise?

Did Trump Perfect His Skill At Deceit While At Wharton?

The Ugly: Sin #1 by Tim Atseff

In May, we ran an explosive guest post by Charles Krause, editor-in-chief of the Daily Pennsylvanian, Penn's student newspaper, in 1968, the year young Donnie Trump, as he was known then, received his under-graduate degree from Penn's Wharton School of Finance. Krause is genuinely offended that Penn's most famous grad has a 6th grade vocabulary; less than a passing acquaintance with proper English grammar and spelling; no apparent interest in, or knowledge of, history, literature, the arts, science or, most dangerously, Constitutional law.

Without any doubt, Donald Trump's degree from the Wharton School is a disgrace to the University; an insult to Penn alumni, especially those of us who graduated in the 60's and early 70s; and one of the alternative facts Candidate Trump used, shamelessly, to persuade those who voted for him that he was qualified to be President.

Yesterday, Michael Kranish, reporting for the Washington Post, wrote that "Trump has referred to his Wharton degree as ‘super genius stuff.’ An admissions officer recalls it differently. James Nolan was working in the University of Pennsylvania’s admissions office in 1966 when he got a phone call from one of his closest friends, Fred Trump Jr. It was a plea to help Fred’s younger brother Donald Trump get into Penn’s Wharton School."

“He called me and said, ‘You remember my brother Donald?’ Which I didn’t,” Nolan, 81, said in an interview with the Washington Post. “He said: ‘He’s at Fordham and he would like to transfer to Wharton. Will you interview him?’ I was happy to do that.”

Soon, Donald Trump arrived at Penn for the interview, accompanied by his father, Fred Trump Sr., who sought to “ingratiate” himself, Nolan said.

Nolan, who said he was the only admissions official to talk to Donald Trump, was required to give Trump a rating, and he recalled, “It must have been decent enough to support his candidacy.”

For decades, Trump has cited his attendance at what was then called the Wharton School of Finance as evidence of his intellect. He has said he went to “the hardest school to get into, the best school in the world,” calling it “super genius stuff.” Last month, President Trump pointed to his studies there as he awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to conservative economist Arthur Laffer.

But Trump, who questioned the academic standing of then-President Barack Obama, has never released records showing how he got into the school-- or how he performed once he was there. And, until now, Nolan’s detailed account of Trump’s admission process has not been publicly disclosed.

Nolan, who spoke to The Post recently at his apartment here, said that “I’m sure” the family hoped he could help get Trump into Wharton. The final decision rested with Nolan’s boss, who approved the application and is no longer living, according to Nolan.

...At the time, Nolan said, more than half of applicants to Penn were accepted, and transfer students such as Donald Trump had an even higher acceptance based on their college experience. A Penn official said the acceptance rate for 1966 was not available but noted that the school says on its website that the 1980 rate was “slightly greater than 40%.” Today, by comparison, the admissions rate for the incoming Penn class is 7.4 percent, the school recently announced.

“It was not very difficult,” Nolan said of the time Trump applied in 1966, adding: “I certainly was not struck by any sense that I’m sitting before a genius. Certainly not a super genius.”

The White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump, as a young man looking ahead to a career in real estate, viewed entry into a top college as his ticket out of the boroughs of Queens and Brooklyn, where his father had built housing largely aimed at the working class. But the idea of going to Penn, as his father wished, was daunting.

Indeed, Trump needed to look no further than his older brother’s experience to realize the potential difficulty. Fred Trump Jr. had hoped to go to Penn with his friend Nolan. Fred Trump Jr. and Nolan were best friends, having gone to high school together and spent many hours in the Trump family home in Queens... Nolan recalled that Trump’s father never talked to him during this period, preferring the boys stay in the basement. But the plan for the boys to be roommates at Penn failed: Nolan got in, but Fred Trump Jr. was rejected. The two nonetheless remained close.

Ten years later, in 1966, it was Donald Trump who applied to Penn’s Wharton School, having already attended two years at Fordham University in the Bronx, leading to the interview with Nolan. Nolan, who later became director of undergraduate admissions at Penn and now is an educational consultant, said he has not previously been quoted on the record about his role. A 2000 biography, The Trumps, by Gwenda Blair, cited a “friendly” admissions officer who was friends with Fred Trump Jr., without identifying or quoting him. Fred Trump Jr. died in 1981.

It was common during this period for the children of wealthy and influential people to be accepted ahead of other applicants, especially if the parent made a substantial donation to the school. There is no evidence, however, of such donations in Donald Trump’s case.

Records in the University of Pennsylvania archives provided to The Post do not show any donation from Fred Trump Sr. or other family members to the school during the period that Donald Trump applied for admission or was a student. However, some of the donations from that period were made anonymously, so it is not possible to say conclusively whether any Trump family donation was made. The records show donations of $1,000 or more.

The university declined to release records that would explain the decision to accept Trump, or to provide his grade transcripts, citing confidentiality restrictions.

Trump graduated from Penn in 1968. Before long, a legend was born. A 1973 article in the New York Times said Trump graduated “first in his class” from the Wharton School and then quoted his father as saying, “Donald is the smartest person I know.”

The claim that Trump was the top student was repeated in a more widely noticed 1976 profile in The Times, again including his father’s quote about being the “smartest person.” The Times later published stories that questioned whether Trump was a top student at Penn, noting that transcripts are private.

In fact, Trump’s name was not among top honorees at his commencement. Nor was he on the dean’s list his senior year, meaning he was not among the top 56 students in his graduating class of 366. All that is known for certain is that Trump received at least a 2.0 average, or C, enabling him to graduate. A 4.0 is equivalent to an A.

Penn officials said they are prohibited from releasing Trump’s grades unless he allows it.

Trump has said that it is crucial to evaluate a candidates’ educational background to determine whether they are qualified to be president.

For example, in addition to questioning whether Obama was born in the United States, Trump said in a 2011 interview with the Associated Press that he “heard” Obama was “a terrible student, terrible. How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?”

Then he challenged Obama to release his college transcripts: “I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records.”

Trump has not applied his standard to himself. He has declined to release his college transcripts, and during his 2016 presidential campaign his personal attorney, Michael Cohen, threatened colleges with lawsuits if his academic records were released.

The idea that Trump was the top performer has persisted partly because the president has continued to let it stand, despite the many times it has been debunked. Trump acknowledged as much last year, saying that he “heard I was first in my class at the Wharton School of Finance. And sometimes when you hear it, you don’t say anything. You just let it go.”

The common thread in the early stories about Trump was that he had performed so well at Wharton that he was ready to take the family business to a higher level.

Yet Trump is remembered by some classmates as a middling student.

Louis Calomaris, who spent considerable time with Trump during real estate classes, said in an interview that he headed a weekly study group. Trump had attended two or three of the study sessions when, one day in class, the professor announced that the most important thing was to attend his lectures.

“Out of the corner of my eye, I see Trump close his book. And he never came to another study group, but he never missed class,” Calomaris said.

He recalled Trump standing in his three-piece suit and announcing that he planned to be one of the greatest real estate developers in New York City.

Calomaris, who has worked as a business consultant and restaurateur and taught marketing at the University of Maryland, said that he thought Trump was “a bright guy” but that “he was always lazy-- he wouldn’t read a book. I never considered him stupid; I considered him opportunistic. . . He cared about making money, and he knew that the most prestigious school was Wharton, and that worked with his opportunistic nature.”

In a 1985 biography of Trump, Jerome Tuccille wrote that Trump hardly viewed his attendance as a priority.

“Donald agreed to attend Wharton for his father’s sake,” Tuccille wrote. “He showed up for classes and did what was required of him but he was clearly bored and spent a lot of time on outside business activities.”

By the time Trump released his autobiography, The Art of the Deal, in 1987, he had embraced the idea of what he called “truthful hyperbole.” The key to promotion, he explained, “is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. . . People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.”

Without addressing his class rank or the circumstances of his acceptance, Trump was blunt in his autobiography about the value he found in promoting his time at Wharton.

“Perhaps the most important thing I learned at Wharton was not to be overly impressed by academic credentials,” Trump wrote. “In my credentials,” Trump wrote. “In my opinion, that degree doesn’t prove very much, but a lot of people I do business with take it very seriously, and it’s considered very prestigious. So all things considered, I’m glad I went to Wharton.”

Trump continues to cite his Wharton background, sometimes in misleading ways. Awarding the Medal of Freedom to Laffer on June 19, Trump claimed that “I’ve heard and studied the Laffer curve for many years in the Wharton School of Finance.”

Trump graduated from Wharton in 1968, and Laffer did not outline his tax-cutting theory on the back of a napkin until 1974, according to Laffer’s account in a book he co-wrote called The End of Prosperity. Thus, studying the Laffer curve during Trump’s time at the school would have been impossible.

Is Trump Really Getting A Concise, Definitive Message Out To Voters... Beyond Just, "I'm A Racist?"

Not having ever watched an episode of Trump's TV sit-com, I started examining his 4th grade vocabulary and his manipulative/infantile way of addressing audiences last year. During the Republican debates he understood the audience better than his opponents and spoke at a 3rd or 4th grade level, according to the Flesch-Kincaid grade-level test. His comments from an August 11 news conference in Michigan earned only a 3rd-grade score.

Flattening the English language whenever he speaks without a script, Trump relies heavily on words such as “very” and “great,” and the pronouns “we” and “I,” which is his favorite word. As any news observer can observe, he lives to diminish his foes by calling them “losers,” “total losers,” “haters,” “dumb,” “idiots,” “morons,” “stupid,” “dummy” and “ disgusting.” He can’t open his mouth without bragging about getting the Clintons to attend his wedding, about how smart he is, the excellence of his real estate projects, the brilliance of his TV show, his generous donations to other political campaigns and so on. In a freakish way, Trump resembles that of Muhammad Ali at his prime-- except the champ was always kidding (even when he was right) while Trump seems to believe his claims (and often is wrong). Or perhaps he is afflicted with binary vision disorder, which renders all within his eyeshot either great or rotten.

It’s obvious that Trump’s verbal deficit, as grating as it may be on the ears of the educated class, has not caused him much political pain. The media has noted the opposite: Trump’s overreliance on sports and war metaphors in his public utterances, his reductionist, one-dimensional policy prescriptions-- including nuanced geopolitical arguments such as get tough with China and Mexico, which are killing us!-- inspire trust in many rather than distrust. Trump’s rejection of “convoluted nuance” and “politically correct norms,” mark him as authentic in certain corners and advance his cred as a plainspoken guardian of the American way. By not conforming to the standard oratorical style, he distinguishes himself from the pompous politician. Less is more when you’re speaking Trumpspeak.

Wednesday, right-wing journalist Byron York, writing for the right-wing website, Washington Examiner examined how Trump speaks for his right-wing audience. Right-wing operatives were flabbergasted by Trump's crazy, rambling hour-plus stand-up routine in Cincinnati Wednesday. Rory Cooper, one of the Eric Cantor aides who never quite got what Cantor was facing, seemed exasperated: "We shouldn't be talking about anything but Clinton's flagrant abuse of classified info but Trump wants to exercise his right to word vomit."

Any hostility to Trump aside, there appears to be a serious disconnect, a communications gap, between those who cover and comment on Trump and those who support him and come to his rallies. Trump is simply so far outside the conventions of political oratory that his style is sometimes hard for political professionals to grasp.

The first thing to remember is that Trump does not give a speech in the sense that veteran political strategists or reporters recognize and understand a speech. From the very beginning of his campaign, Trump has expressed contempt for the entire genre of political speechmaking.

Speaking at a giant rally in Dallas last September, Trump started off by noting that he wasn't using a teleprompter. "That would be so much easier," he said. "We read a speech for 45 minutes. Everybody falls asleep, listening to the same old stuff, the same old lies. So much easier."

On many other occasions-- at rallies, debates, other appearances-- Trump has expressed a fear of boring his audience, of putting everyone to sleep. He is determined not to do that.

Instead of a prepared stump speech that he gives over and over again-- the standard diet for political reporters covering the presidential race-- Trump instead has chosen to deliver a stream of consciousness performance designed to capitalize on his celebrity, to entertain, to attack opponents, and to address the actual issues in the race. And most of all, to keep his audience awake and paying attention.

Trump wanders all over the lot. In any given speech, he will talk about his businesses, his golf courses, his friends, his TV ratings, his children, all the Republicans he has defeated in primaries, the club championships he has won, and much, much more. (Trump used to talk incessantly about polls when he was leading the GOP race; now, not so much.) He will talk about anything that comes to mind. This goes on for 10, 20, 30, 45 minutes, and often more than an hour.

There's a lot of bragging in Trump's speeches. He can seem strangely needy, repeatedly asking the audience to affirm that he did a good job with this or that. But mostly he's telling voters how great he is, how everything he does and everything he possesses is the best, and how he will be a great, great president.

It's all part of the show. As Rush Limbaugh, who probably understands Trump as well as anybody, has pointed out (in what Limbaugh called a "Trump Shtick Explainer") Trump "knows he's putting everybody on, and the trick is that he knows his audience knows." It's all part of the performance, and amid all the bombast, Trump makes it a practice on two or three occasions, in Limbaugh's words, "to go all humble, go total humility." He tells people he's honored to be in their presence even as he dwells at great length on his own wonderfulness. People aren't offended by the bragging because they sense it's part of the act, and they appreciate the occasional touch of humility. Trump almost never expresses a complete thought without going down some side road.

...Trump devotes an enormous amount of time in each speech to bashing the media. They're liars, dishonest, the worst sort of people. In Cincinnati, he spent about four and a half minutes defending himself on his infamous Star of David tweet, but the defense was almost an entirely an attack on the journalists who were making a big deal of it.

Trump also spent a lot of time in Cincinnati re-telling the story of his recent trip to Turnberry, his golf course in Scotland, and all the media flak he took for it. He went on and on complaining about his treatment, arguing that he only took the trip to show support for his son Eric, who had restored the famous golf resort.

Why does Trump think the audience wants to hear that stuff? In part, he is playing on the crowd's antipathy to the media, which is strong. But he's also playing to the public's appetite for celebrity gossip. When Trump talks about his plane and his golf courses and his oceanfront estate, there's a good chance the audience is interested for the same reason that it reads stories like "Matt Lauer buys Richard Gere's $36 million Hamptons compound" (to cite a recent headline from the New York Post). A lot of people like to hear about celebrities and their high-flying lifestyles.

Occasionally Trump's detours get him into trouble. Near the end of May, at a speech in San Diego, Trump went off on a ten-minute rant about the Trump University lawsuit. He discussed the plaintiffs by name. He offered his assessment of various law firms. He analyzed the question of summary judgment. And in the course of all that, he said, "So what happens is the judge, who happens to be, we believe, Mexican..." With that, Trump was off to the races for another controversy that consumed his campaign for many days.

Still, amid it all, Trump manages to cover some of the bases of a conventional political speech. In Cincinnati, he devoted the first part of the speech to attacking Hillary Clinton in light of the Obama Justice Department's decision not to charge her in the email affair.

"I just heard the news, because it just happened, with the Attorney General of the United States saying no problem, no problem," Trump began. "You know, I wrote out a couple of things about Hillary, Crooked Hillary, crooked, so crooked. She made so many false statements." Trump proceeded to go through Clinton's lies about why she had a secret email system, about the tens of thousands of emails she erased, about the emails she turned over to the State Department, about her handling of classified material, about the the security of her private server.

"Rigged system, folks," Trump concluded.

The Hillary section was the longest single part of Trump's speech, not counting the several times he returned to her later. And yet, even with that juicy material, Trump the showman was still worried about putting the audience to sleep. "There are many," he said of the particulars against Hillary Clinton, "I just don't want to bore you with too many of these things."

Describing an interview on Meet the Press, Trump suggested the audience doesn't want to be overloaded with any one thing. "[Meet the Press] wanted me to talk about Hillary for hours," Trump explained. "Hours. Fifteen minutes-- she's Crooked Hillary, that's all you have to know, she's crooked as hell."

Trump interspersed issues throughout the Cincinnati speech. As always, he never discussed specifics of how he would handle any given issue, choosing instead to talk in terms of goals. When he said, for example, that he would keep the air conditioner company Carrier from moving its operations to Mexico, or at least make Carrier pay a heavy price for leaving, he was doing what Limbaugh described when he said, "This is the way Trump telegraphs his preferences and his support for people." Anyone looking for details will be frustrated.

All the while, Trump told the audience he wants to talk more about issues, but the press is too focused on extraneous controversies to focus on what he discusses. Describing his speech the night before, Trump said, "We talked about terrorism. We talked about trade. We talked about terminating Obamacare and replacing it with something great, which we're going to do, too. We talked about getting rid of Common Core and bringing our education locally and taking it away from Washington. We talked about borders. We talked about building a wall, right? We talked about our depleted military, right?"

So what do the voters get from Trump's act? That depends on whether they are inside the room or out. Trump still draws big crowds-- bigger than any of his Republican rivals and now, bigger than Hillary Clinton. In Cincinnati, he drew a reported 7,000. (Trump is competitive in the key swing state of Ohio, trailing Clinton by 2.5 points in the RealClearPolitics average of polls, which is almost precisely the margin-- 2.6 points-- by which Mitt Romney trailed Barack Obama at the same time in 2012.)

But of course, while drawing 7,000 on a Wednesday night in Cincinnati is good, it's nothing compared to the 62 million Americans Trump will need to vote for him if he is to win the White House.

In the room, Trump has devoted followers who hang on every word, while others have come mostly to see what all the fuss is about. Of the latter group, it's not at all unusual to see people head for the exits when Trump hits the 30 or 40 minute mark. Ask them why they're leaving, and they usually say they have to be at work in the morning.

But here's the striking thing, whether the attendee is a loyal Trump fan or not: After all of Trump's rambling and meandering, after one discursive aside after another, many of those attending still manage to come away from Trump's speech with concise and focused takeaways. Asked what Trump is going to do, they'll say: He's going to build a wall, he's going to bring our jobs back, and he's going to knock the hell out of ISIS. Somehow, in long and winding performance, Trump got his message across.

He communicates in a way far different from what the political world is used to-- but he communicates.

The (far) bigger question is those 62 million voters. What do they hear? Mostly they hear what journalists want them to hear, if they're even listening to that. And in Cincinnati, the media message was that Trump had given a speech about the Star of David tweet.

The New York Times' headline was, "In a Defiant, Angry Speech, Donald Trump Defends Image Seen as Anti-Semitic." The paper reported that "the bulk of Mr. Trump's energy was spent on the Twitter post." It might be hard for other observers to come away from the hour-plus performance convinced that the bulk of it was the four-and-a-half minutes spent on the tweet, but that is what the Times said.

The Washington Post's headline was, "Trump says campaign shouldn't have deleted image circulated by white supremacists."

Given reporting like that, multiplied many times by other news outlets, it's clear Trump faces an enormous, perhaps insurmountable obstacle in getting his message out. He clearly believes he is a great communicator, and he is in fact a very good one. But as a political speaker, Trump is so far outside the box that he has virtually overwhelmed the senses of those reporting and analyzing the news, making it difficult for some voters who haven't actually seen him to get a clear picture of his appeal to supporters.

How Senile Is Trump?

In the clip above, David Parkman makes the case that Trump, the oldest person to ever occupy the White House, may be suffering from Alzheimer's disease-- like his neo-Nazi father-- or some other form of dementia. Last week Sharon Begley posted a piece at STAT headlined Experts Say Trump's Deteriorating Speech Could Be Sign of Early Dementia. "STAT," she wrote, "asked experts to compare Trump's speech from decades ago to that in 2017. All noticed deterioration, which may signal changes in Trump's brain health." This is also the only plausible reason I can think of for why Trump has made himself so dependent on Ivanka and Kushner-in-law, who are hardly brain surgeons but are family members who he can count on to abide by the Code of Omertà.

It was the kind of utterance that makes professional transcribers question their career choice:

" … there is no collusion between certainly myself and my campaign, but I can always speak for myself-- and the Russians, zero."

When President Trump offered that response to a question at a press conference last week, it was the latest example of his tortured syntax, mid-thought changes of subject, and apparent trouble formulating complete sentences, let alone a coherent paragraph, in unscripted speech.

He was not always so linguistically challenged.

STAT reviewed decades of Trump's on-air interviews and compared them to Q&A sessions since his inauguration. The differences are striking and unmistakable.

Research has shown that changes in speaking style can result from cognitive decline. STAT therefore asked experts in neurolinguistics and cognitive assessment, as well as psychologists and psychiatrists, to compare Trump's speech from decades ago to that in 2017; they all agreed there had been a deterioration, and some said it could reflect changes in the health of Trump's brain.

In interviews Trump gave in the 1980s and 1990s (with Tom Brokaw, David Letterman, Oprah Winfrey, Charlie Rose, and others), he spoke articulately, used sophisticated vocabulary, inserted dependent clauses into his sentences without losing his train of thought, and strung together sentences into a polished paragraph, which-- and this is no mean feat-- would have scanned just fine in print. This was so even when reporters asked tough questions about, for instance, his divorce, his brush with bankruptcy, and why he doesn't build housing for working-class Americans.

Trump fluently peppered his answers with words and phrases such as "subsided," "inclination," "discredited," "sparring session," and "a certain innate intelligence." He tossed off well-turned sentences such as, "It could have been a contentious route," and, "These are the only casinos in the United States that are so rated." He even offered thoughtful, articulate aphorisms: "If you get into what's missing, you don't appreciate what you have," and, "Adversity is a very funny thing."

Now, Trump's vocabulary is simpler. He repeats himself over and over, and lurches from one subject to an unrelated one, as in this answer during an interview with the Associated Press last month:

"People want the border wall. My base definitely wants the border wall, my base really wants it-- you've been to many of the rallies. OK, the thing they want more than anything is the wall. My base, which is a big base; I think my base is 45 percent. You know, it's funny. The Democrats, they have a big advantage in the Electoral College. Big, big, big advantage. … The Electoral College is very difficult for a Republican to win, and I will tell you, the people want to see it. They want to see the wall."

For decades, studies have found that deterioration in the fluency, complexity, and vocabulary level of spontaneous speech can indicate slipping brain function due to normal aging or neurodegenerative disease. STAT and the experts therefore considered only unscripted utterances, not planned speeches and statements, since only the former tap the neural networks that offer a window into brain function.

The experts noted clear changes from Trump's unscripted answers 30 years ago to those in 2017, in some cases stark enough to raise questions about his brain health. They noted, however, that the same sort of linguistic decline can also reflect stress, frustration, anger, or just plain fatigue.

Ben Michaelis, a psychologist in New York City, performed cognitive assessments at the behest of the New York Supreme Court and criminal courts and taught the technique at a hospital and university. "There are clearly some changes in Trump as a speaker" since the 1980s, said Michaelis, who does not support Trump, including a "clear reduction in linguistic sophistication over time," with "simpler word choices and sentence structure. … In fairness to Trump, he's 70, so some decline in his cognitive functioning over time would be expected."



Some sentences, or partial sentences, would, if written, make a second-grade teacher despair. "We'll do some questions, unless you have enough questions," Trump told a February press conference. And last week, he told NBC's Lester Holt, "When I did this now I said, I probably, maybe will confuse people, maybe I'll expand that, you know, lengthen the time because it should be over with, in my opinion, should have been over with a long time ago."

Other sentences are missing words. Again, from the AP: "If they don't treat fairly, I am terminating NAFTA," and, "I don't support or unsupport"-- leaving out a "me" in the first and an "it" (or more specific noun) in the second. Other sentences simply don't track: "From the time I took office til now, you know, it's a very exact thing. It's not like generalities."

There are numerous contrasting examples from decades ago, including this - with sophisticated grammar and syntax, and a coherent paragraph-length chain of thought-- from a 1992 Charlie Rose interview: "Ross Perot, he made some monumental mistakes. Had he not dropped out of the election, had he not made the gaffes about the watch dogs and the guard dogs, if he didn't have three or four bad days-- and they were real bad days-- he could have conceivably won this crazy election."

The change in linguistic facility could be strategic; maybe Trump thinks his supporters like to hear him speak simply and with more passion than proper syntax. "He may be using it as a strategy to appeal to certain types of people," said Michaelis. But linguistic decline is also obvious in two interviews with David Letterman, in 1988 and 2013, presumably with much the same kind of audience. In the first, Trump threw around words such as "aesthetically" and "precarious," and used long, complex sentences. In the second, he used simpler speech patterns, few polysyllabic words, and noticeably more fillers such as "uh" and "I mean."

The reason linguistic and cognitive decline often go hand in hand, studies show, is that fluency reflects the performance of the brain's prefrontal cortex, the seat of higher-order cognitive functions such as working memory, judgment, understanding, and planning, as well as the temporal lobe, which searches for and retrieves the right words from memory. Neurologists therefore use tests of verbal fluency, and especially how it has changed over time, to assess cognitive status.

Those tests ask, for instance, how many words beginning with W a patient can list, and how many breeds of dogs he can name, rather than have patients speak spontaneously. The latter "is too hard to score," said neuropsychologist Sterling Johnson, of the University of Wisconsin, who studies brain function in Alzheimer's disease. "But everyday speech is definitely a way of measuring cognitive decline. If people are noticing [a change in Trump's language agility], that's meaningful."

Although neither Johnson nor other experts STAT consulted said the apparent loss of linguistic fluency was unambiguous evidence of mental decline, most thought something was going on.

John Montgomery, a psychologist in New York City and adjunct professor at New York University, said "it's hard to say definitively without rigorous testing" of Trump's speaking patterns, "but I think it's pretty safe to say that Trump has had significant cognitive decline over the years."

No one observing Trump from afar, though, can tell whether that's "an indication of dementia, of normal cognitive decline that many people experience as they age, or whether it's due to other factors" such as stress and emotional upheaval, said Montgomery, who is not a Trump supporter.

Even a Trump supporter saw and heard striking differences between interviews from the 1980s and 1990s and those of 2017, however. "I can see what people are responding to," said Dr. Robert Pyles, a psychiatrist in suburban Boston. He heard "a difference in tone and pace. … What I did not detect was any gaps in mentation or meaning. I don't see any clear evidence of neurological or cognitive dysfunction."

Johnson cautioned that language can deteriorate for other reasons. "His language difficulties could be due to the immense pressure he's under, or to annoyance that things aren't going right and that there are all these scandals," he said. "It could also be due to a neurodegenerative disease or the normal cognitive decline that comes with aging." Trump will be 71 next month.

Northwestern University psychology professor Dan McAdams, a critic of Trump who has inferred his psychological makeup from his public behavior, said any cognitive decline in the president might reflect normal aging and not dementia. "Research shows that virtually nobody is as sharp at age 70 as they were at age 40," he said. "A wide range of cognitive functions, including verbal fluency, begin to decline long before we hit retirement age. So, no surprise here."

Researchers have used neurolinguistics analysis of past presidents to detect, retrospectively, early Alzheimer's disease. In a famous 2015 study, scientists at Arizona State University evaluated how Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush spoke at their news conferences. Reagan's speech was riddled with indefinite nouns (something, anything), "low imageability" verbs (have, go, get), incomplete sentences, limited vocabulary, simple grammar, and fillers (well, basically, um, ah, so)-- all characteristic of cognitive problems. That suggested Reagan's brain was slipping just a few years into his 1981-1989 tenure; that decline continued. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 1994. Bush showed no linguistic deterioration; he remained mentally sharp throughout his 1989-1993 tenure and beyond.

Trump’s Psychopathology and the Government Shutdown

-by Helen Klein

What is becoming increasingly clear is that despite Dr. Ronny Jackson’s gushing superlatives about Trump’s clean bill of health that extend beyond the physical, Trump’s personality make up and his mental/cognitive functioning are dead center in this shutdown mess. All arrows point to Trump. Now that the Republicans have hit a wall with Trump during the negotiations, even they are being forced to recognize his impairments in judgment and decision making, although of course they won’t do anything about it. They cannot help but realize with increasing disgust that they cannot control him, nobody can control him and he is one sick and crazy dude. Hello!

Is Graham going to make another about turn in his view of Trump? Compare his quote from February 2016, “I think he’s a kook. I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit for office,” to his quote in November 2017, “What concerns me about the American press is this endless, endless attempt to label [Trump] some kind of kook not fit to be president.” He may soon need to eat those words.

Dr. Jackson’s findings and conclusions regarding Trump’s recent physical were discussed in a DWT post a few days ago, The Physical, by this author.

Kurtz, who worked at The Post from 1981 to 2010, writes that Trump’s aides even privately coined a term for Trump’s behavior-- “Defiance Disorder.” The phrase refers to Trump’s seeming compulsion to do whatever it is his advisers are most strongly urging against, leaving his team to handle the fallout.

Dana Milbank, in his January 17 editorial in the Washington Post, “Is Trump’s Doctor Okay?” was “alarmed, not about the President’s health but the doctor’s.”

And not just his heart! The doctor rhapsodized about Trump’s vision, his stamina (“more energy than just about anybody”) and above all his mental acuity, which, Jackson made sure to note, he examined only “because the president asked me to.” Trump is “very sharp, and he’s very articulate... Very, very sharp, very intact... Absolutely no cognitive or mental issues whatsoever... The president did exceedingly well.”

From "The Physical:"

In conclusion, while Trump’s basic general health appears satisfactory, Jackson’s presentation of the findings leaves much to be desired and is alarming to many. His use of over the top superlatives was unwarranted and uncalled for. His conclusions about Trump’s mental, cognitive and language skills are well beyond that indicated from a routine physical and appear misleading, unethical, unprofessional and even untrustworthy. Unfortunately, Jackson gives the impression of being a political lackey rather than a professional doctor of medicine. This is worrisome. One wonders if there were any findings he is hiding.

On Twitter, Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone and Matt Damon humorously questioned even the factual aspects of the findings.

Here are some excerpts from Gail Collins’ January 17 editorial in the New York Times, Donald Trump Gets His Sanity Grades:

Donald Trump has passed his mental test. This may come as either a relief or a shock.

But the big news was the mental test. Trump took something called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment and got a perfect score. Not perhaps the highest bar possible, unless you were concerned about whether he can identify pictures of animals and draw hands on a clock. But the test can be useful if there is, for some reason, concern that the subject is suffering from... um, dementia.

But about the president’s mental report. It didn’t measure judgment, and there was no score to indicate whether the test-taker would, if faced with a question of what to do about immigration policy, change his position 12 times in 24 hours. Whether he would confide to several million Twitter followers that the country “needs a good shutdown”? Whether he thinks of himself as a “very stable genius.”

Maybe Jackson could have given him a passing grade without going so far over the deep end. Something like: “Identified the camel picture, and no problems you could lock him up for.”

So here we are. Our current president is in O.K. physical condition and has “absolutely no cognitive or mental issues whatsoever.” The doctor says so. And really, he’s doing better than Woodrow Wilson, his jaw is intact and everything’s fine, unless you count a terrible attention deficit disorder and rampaging narcissism as mental issues. If so, they don’t come up on that test with the camel.

Up top you can watch Saturday Night Live's lovely skit about Dr. Jackson. Hopefully heron't be a recurring character.

Mental and cognitive issues and jokes aside, the bottom line in this shutdown mess is Trump’s psychiatric issues. These have been described in the media by a variety of professionals and were also reviewed in a previous DWT post. Concern in this realm is really nothing new, but it keeps getting buried in importance. Now it is raising its ugly head and is an unavoidable aspect of the mess we are in.

Trump has a mental disorder, Dr. Jackson. While an assessment along these lines is not part of a routine physical, you had no professional basis for any statement ruling this out.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a key player here, which Howard Dean noted last week on Lawrence O’Donnell’s The Last Word on MSNBC. Even a superficial glance at the designated features listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders- Fifth Edition, the bible for mental health professionals, reflects a slam dunk for Trump – he meets all 9 features, well beyond the required 5 for the diagnosis.

Here is a refresher to remind everyone what we are dealing with:

Symptoms of Narcissistic Personality Disorder

The definition of NPD states that it comprises of a persistent manner of grandiosity, a continuous desire for admiration, along with a lack of empathy. It starts by early adulthood and occurs in a range of situations, as signified by the existence of any 5 of the next 9 standards (American Psychiatric Association, 2013):

• A grandiose logic of self-importance
• A fixation with fantasies of infinite success, control, brilliance, beauty, or idyllic love
• A credence that he or she is extraordinary and exceptional and can only be understood by, or should connect with, other extraordinary or important people or institutions
• A desire for unwarranted admiration
• A sense of entitlement
• Interpersonally oppressive behavior
• No form of empathy
Resentment of others or a conviction that others are resentful of him or her
• A display of egotistical and conceited behaviors or attitudes

A summary of the features is helpful:

The most important characteristics of NPD are grandiosity, seeking excessive admiration, and a lack of empathy. These identifying features can result in a negative impact on an individual’s interpersonal affairs and life general. In most cases, on the exterior, these patients act with an air of right and control, dismissing others, and frequently showcasing condescending or denigrating attitudes. Nevertheless, internally, these patients battle with strong feelings of low self esteem issues and inadequacy. Even though the typical NPD patient may achieve great achievements, ultimately their functioning in society can be affected as these characteristics interfere with both personal and professional relationships. A large part of this is as result of the NPD patient being incapable of receiving disapproval or rebuff of any kind, in addition to the fact that the NPD patient typically exhibits lack of empathy and overall disrespect for others.

Malignant Narsissism, while not an official DSM-5 category, zeros in on other factors affecting Trump’s recalcitrant stance and blatant unconcern about the shutdown. Trump has no conscience. He thrives on causing disorder, mayhem and destruction. He gets a kick out of others’ misery. Now he has the power of the Office of the President to create chaos on a YUGE scale. Sad to say, he may be finding this reinforcing. The only downside for him is that he had to miss the one-year celebration party in Florida. Naturally, this was held anyway to rake in lots of bucks.

Malignant narcissism is a psychological syndrome comprising an extreme mix of narcissism, antisocial behavior, aggression, and sadism. Often grandiose, and always ready to raise hostility levels, the malignant narcissist undermines families and organizations in which they are involved, and dehumanizes the people with whom they associate.

All Aboard! by Nancy Ohanian

This description is particulary noteworthy regarding Trump. He is certainly raising hostility levels, undermining our institutions and demeaning those around him.

To distinguish between narcissist and malignant narcissist:

A narcissist will deliberately damage other people in pursuit of their own selfish desires, but may regret and will in some circumstances show remorse for doing so, while a malignant narcissist will harm others and enjoy doing so, showing little empathy or regret for the damage they have caused.

Unfortunately, Trump appears to fit the latter description.

Furthermore, Eric Fromm, the social psychologist who coined the term Malignant Narcissism in 1964, described it as a “severe mental illness” representing “the quintessence of evil” and “the most severe pathology and the root of the most vixious destructiveness and inhumanity.” The British psychoanalysist, Herbert Rosenfield, decribed this condition as “a disturbing form of narcissistic personality where grandiosity is built around aggression and the destructive aspects of the self become idealized.”

Trump has never been held accountable for his behavior so why should he be now? Frankly, HE DOES NOT GIVE A SHIT. He has demonstrated over and over that he does not care about our country, our democracy, our institutions, the American people or the planet for that matter. He only cares about himself. He seems to enjoy denigrating others and take pleasure in their suffering. He is clearly a RACIST who has no compassion whatsoever for the Dreamers-- as far as he is concerned, they could be shipped back to whereever (aka their “shithole” countries). And he has Miller and Cotton, two evil anti-immigrant racists, whispering in his ear to keep him on track lest he be influenced in another direction. He has extremist minders keeping him in their clutches. They will likely hover at any future meetings.

A brief look at his behavioral history stemming from childhood is notable. He punched his second grade teacher in the face! His father sent him to military school because of his unruly uncontrollable behavior. He appears to have had Conduct Disorder, another DSM-5 category. Trump has always has been a bully who has bulldozed his way into adulthood using threats and intimidation. He has never kept his promises-- he has cheated a long trail of contractors and workers without the slightest guilt. He has shown no morality or ethics and a complete disregard for the law. And he has always gotten away with it! To him, scoffing at rules has been highly effective and this has become his M.O. He has NEVER been held accountable for his criminal shenanigans. What are a few fines here and there (e.g., $25 million for Trump University)? (One question that arises is - how has he managed to snub the justice system and the IRS for his extensive money laundering, which has apparently been going on for decades? This does not say much for our justice system).

Trump has a low bar for whom he associates with-- he is loyal to no one. All he cares about is how he will personally benefit from relationships. “He sucks up and shits down.” He was in bed with the Italian mafia for many years-- this is covered in a documentary film by the Dutch, for one-- and later with the Russian mafia for more than a decade. As Simpson from Fusion testified to the House Intelligence Committee, the Russian mafia, the Russian security services and the Russian government are all entwined and headed by Putin. Many Russians danced at Trump’s Inaugural balls. The extensive list of the folks surrounding Trump in the White House as well as many of his appointees SCREAM of Russia. Does he care one whit about being a traitor? He has shown over and over that he does not. He carries on about The Wall but not about Russian interference in our democracy, the greatest threat to our security in history. Trump admires Putin and loves Russia!

Trump is likely running around the White House rubbing his hands with glee about the shutdown. Too bad Wolff is no longer there to supply us with some juicy quotes. Trump has stated that what our country needs is “a good shutdown.” He loves confrontations. He loves blowing things up. He never backs down. He loves sticking it to others in the face. Malignant narcissism is written all over this. Putin must be laughing his head off. Trump has brought us down. He is destroying our government one tantrum at a time.

Trump does not even care about his positions on much of anything, which shift back and forth with the wind. This weekend Schumer said that negotiating with Trump is like negotiating with “Jell-O.” Even McConnell said he has no clue what Trump wants. Trump enjoys keeping everyone guessing and on tenderhooks. He is the all powerful, the master of the universe. His ego is on steroids.

His ignorance is YUGE. He does not read, he does not listen, he does not attend, he does not process. His speech is off topic and incoherent, a “word salad.” He makes Sarah Palin look like an orator. Trump may well have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and a Language Disorder (some indications of a language disorder are reduced vocabulary (word knowledge and use), limited sentence structure (e.g., ability to put words and endings together to form sentences based on the rules of grammar) and impairments of discourse (e.g., ability to use vocabulary and connect sentences to explain or describe a topic or series of events).

Thus Trump appears to be a man with many clinical diagnoses. He thrives on chaos and consults only himself in the mirror, as he knows better than everyone. He has no idea of the costs, human or financial, of a shutdown that may continue for weeks. And as long as he does not personally have to pay for it out of his own pocket, he does not care. He continues to enrich himself on our dime. He is thrilled that there is a domestic crisis. He loves being the center of attention, and that he surely is. His delusions of grandeur are our reality.

It seems doubtful that Trump will back down or that the right wingers in the House will either.

In a January 17 piece, Trump’s Enablers Destroy Their Reputations for Nothing, Brian Buetler writes:

In this world, they (McConnell and Ryan) are too ineffectual and paralyzed by fear of Trump’s outbursts to negotiate with Democrats in good faith, even when they know they need Democratic votes to keep the government from shutting down.

After a year of abdicating their constitutional obligations on Trump’s behalf, he returns the favor by making routine governance impossible.

The precise mechanisms are different, but in one respect, they’re suffering the same fate as Graham. Like him, they put a career’s worth of political cache on the line for Trump without condition, and in both cases he flushed it unblinkingly down the shithole.

It seems we will be in shutdown mode for a long haul. I hope I am wrong.