Have We Ever Been Forced To Pick Between Two Senile Old Men Before?

Oklahoma City isn't quite as red as the rest of the state. But the state is really red. The state PVI is R+20. Only one state, Wyoming, is worse. Every statewide position is filled by a hard-right Republican and 6 of the 7 members of the state's congressional delegation are Republicans and the 7th, freshman Blue Dog Kendra Horn is as right-wing as a typical Republican on most issues and will probably lose her seat in November if she survives a primary. The state's Senate consists of 9 Democrats and 39 Republicans while the House has 76 Republicans and 25 Democrats. The last time the state elected a freshman Democrat was in 1978 and in 2016 Trump beat Hillary 65.32% to 28.93%. Only Wyoming (21.63%), West Virginia (26.43%), North Dakota (27.23%) Utah (27.46) and Idaho (27.49) gave Hillary smaller proportions of their votes. So Trump felt the state would be a safe bet for a campaign kickoff. But, as you know by now, he left Tulsa Saturday night crestfallen and furious at his staff for the tiny turnout-- just 6,100 people in the 20,000 seat stadium. Within hours the Lincoln Project had an ad out laughing at his ideas of "big."

Monday morning by dawn he was up and tweeting out his desperation-- and his defining strategic penchant for projection. According to Wikipedia "Psychological projection is a defense mechanism in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. For example, a bully may project their own feelings of vulnerability onto the target. It incorporates blame shifting and can manifest as shame dumping... [and] is more commonly found in personalities functioning at a primitive level as in narcissistic personality disorder." There is no photo of Trump next to the definition, but there certainly could be.

Two years ago Psychology Today dubbed him The Projector In Chief. "Too often," wrote Dr. Paul Siegel, "Trump sounds like he is turning things inside (of him) out, engaging in the unconscious defense mechanism that Freud called projection: the attribution of one’s own forbidden-- and typically malevolent-- motives, impulses, or emotions to others. When people project, what is true about oneself instead becomes true of others. As with other defense mechanisms, people are unaware that they are projecting aspects of themselves in the moment in which they do it."

Compulsive projections pave the road to unconscious guilt. The cut-throat businessman who believes that everyone is trying to cheat him is found guilty of illegal business practices. A religious leader becomes famous preaching about the immorality of homosexuality, only to be found cavorting with male prostitutes. A prosecutor builds a career convincing juries to send sexual abusers to jail-- until we discover that he is sexually abusive himself.

If Trump’s tweets are projections, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s guilty of colluding with the Russian government-- only that he’s guilty of acts that involve Russia in some way (e.g., financial crimes, sexual improprieties, even treason).  It also means that behind his fury about the Mueller investigation, it’s his knowledge of his own guilt that is actually keeping him up tweeting at night. Each keystroke is directed at himself as much as at his followers on Twitter.

...Psychologists regard projection as a maladaptive defense mechanism. Whereas more adaptive defense mechanisms distort only what a person believes about himself, projection distorts external reality, so people who do it run the risk of reality eventually catching up with them. The only way to prevent this from happening is to convince enough people that their projection is real. That may be what Trump is trying to do... to keep distressing truths about himself at bay.

One would be nuts to read Trump tweeting that "foreign countries and others" will print mail-in ballots and not suspect that Trump is planning to do exactly that. In fact, his top henchman/hatchetman, Bill Barr, a Fox News Sunday guest this week said "A foreign country could print up tens of thousands of counterfeit ballots. [It would) be very hard for us to detect which was the right and which was the wrong ballot. So, I think it can-- it can upset and undercut the confidence in the integrity of our elections. If anything, we should tighten them up right now."

Politico writer David Siders wrote how Trump has started his trench warfare reelection campaign. Trench warfare is a good description... but "a war of projection" would be too. "In Tulsa and in the days beforehand," wrote Siders, "Trump and his allies signaled the beginning of a scorched earth campaign. Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. has posted memes portraying Biden-- baselessly-- as a pedophile. [Trump is.] Trump’s campaign released an ad on Friday depicting Biden as aged and confused [as is Trump], calling him “clearly diminished” [as is Trump] and lacking “mental fortitude.” [as does Trump]. On Saturday, he continued to suggest without evidence that Biden has health issues [as does Trump], saying ‘There’s something wrong with Biden” [as is clearly the case with Trump]. The no-boundaries approach is in keeping with Trump’s smashmouth style. Yet it’s also a necessity for an unpopular president facing an electoral landscape that’s tilted against him. Amid a pandemic that has ravaged the economy and killed about [more than] 120,000 Americans, Trump has fallen behind Biden by nearly 9 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics national polling average, and he lags behind the presumptive Democratic nominee in most swing states. The electoral map has become so treacherous for Trump that his campaign is spending on advertising in states that once appeared safely in his camp, such as Iowa and Ohio."

Trump’s advisers have long believed he could recover if he could drag Biden’s favorability ratings down. Confronting an opponent who is viewed more favorably than Hillary Clinton was in 2016, Trump is laboring not only to depict Biden as mentally unfit-- but as an addled tool of the Democratic Party’s most extreme fringe.

The effort to yoke a centrist Democrat to an “unhinged left” was road-tested in Oklahoma, where Trump mocked Biden as “a helpless puppet of the radical left.” Among the lessons of Tulsa, which will inform countless rallies in the months ahead, was that invoking lightning rod progressives such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez draws a more fervent response than criticizing Biden in isolation-- and that linking Biden to that wing of the party is Trump’s lodestar.

“He believes that he has to push Biden to the left, and I think that's correct strategically,” Frank Luntz, the veteran Republican consultant and pollster, said in an email. “If Biden is seen as a centrist, he'll have an advantage among swing voters who don't want to support an extremist. But if he's seen as left-wing ideologically or overtly partisan, swing voters will have a problem with him.”

Luckily for the inept and ineffective Democrats, they won't need to paint Trump as an extremist. He does that himself, And most voters-- by a very large and growing margin-- see him as dishonest and untrustworthy. "[T]here is disagreement among Democrats," continued Siders, "about how frequently Biden should appear in public, given both public health officials’ concerns about crowds during a pandemic-- and Trump’s penchant for self-inflicted wounds." And Biden's senility and penchant for shitting his pants in public-- so far just figuratively-- is something his team is petrified of. He's merely a figurehead for The Democrats and a placeholder for whatever comes next. Still... not as bad as Trump.

“Every day that’s not about Joe Biden is a day that Joe Biden wins,” said Pete Giangreco, a Democratic strategist who has worked on nine presidential campaigns. “That’s my view. Because if this thing’s a referendum on Trump, he’s going to lose.”

But Republicans-- and Trump himself-- will continue to goad him to draw him out. Trump’s campaign has been taunting Biden to make more public appearances, a strategy Republicans view as a win-win. If Biden begins to appear in less controlled settings, they are hopeful the events will produce narrative-changing gaffes. If he refuses, they can portray him as fragile and afraid.

“Finally, he’s getting out of his pajamas and getting into his suits and starting talking,” said Bob Jack, chairman of the Tulsa County Republican Party. “I want Joe talking. I think that’s great. He can’t string five words together.”

In response to Trump’s taunts about Biden’s vigor, Andrew Bates, a Biden spokesman, wrote on Twitter on Sunday that “Trump just triumphantly announced on national TV that during a pandemic he's atrociously mismanaged, he ordered federal officials to slow testing to improve his personal optics at the expense of lives. So yes, let's please talk about mental acuity.”

What Campaign? by Nancy Ohanian

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

Projection back then (2011-2013). Self-serving insanity now.

But wait, more tweety-turds from President Projecto!

1. January 17, 2012- "@BarackObama will attack Iran in order to get elected."

2. October 9, 2012- "Now that Obama's poll numbers are in a tailspin- watch for him to launch a strike in Libya or Iran. He is desperate."

3. September 13, 2013- "I predict that President Obama will at some point attack Iran in order to save face."

Maybe Pelosi Needs A New Chair For House Ways And Means-- Neal Is Dragging His Feet On Trump's Taxes

Mnuchin and Richard Neal, who REALLY doesn't want to get the Adam Schiff treatment from Trumpworld

When the Biden p.r. machine stirs up shit against Bernie-- which they never stop doing (it's like a pit of vipers whispering in the ears of any journalist foolish enough pay them any attention)-- one of the first things they always bring up is that he hasn't released his taxes. Really? When he ran in 2016 he did release his taxes for 2014; they were boring and very white bread. He has since pledged to release 10 years this time, but virtually every anti-Bernie pundit who has raised this, wrongly claims he's never released any tax returns.

You know who didn't release any tax returns of course. And, according to Greg Sargent's column in the Washington Post yesterday, the Democrats-- particularly Richard Neal-- seem to be dragging their feet and screwing it up. Trump's "absurd claim" that Barr's 4-page press release purporting to be a "summary" of the report granting him "total exoneration," is laughable and only hardcore Trump 2-digit IQ worshippers believe it-- oh, and the corporate media. Trump's "efforts to bully Democrats and the media into groveling with forgiveness for supposedly having gotten this scandal wrong, are all about what lies ahead. The obvious game is to chill further scrutiny, which very much constitutes a live threat to Trump that no amount of furious tweeting about 'exoneration' can make disappear." Sargent points out that that is precisely "why Democrats should, if anything, be intensifying their effort to access Trump’s tax returns right now, not dragging their feet on it."

He sites a new memo-- from centrist Dems no less-- hoping to amp up the pressure on Neal and Pelosi, arguing that "getting the returns is a legal slam dunk, and is absolutely justifiable, or even imperative, as a matter of oversight and good governance," since as head of the House Ways and Means Committee, Neal has the law in his side, a law that says he can "request any individual’s tax returns, after which the Treasury Department 'shall' furnish them." Neal has asked multiple House committees to each furnish a rationale rooted in governing or oversight for getting the returns, the theory being that this will place the request on firmer institutional footing and make the legal case stronger. The Trump administration will challenge the request, leading to a long court battle."

Over the weekend, Arthur Delaney at HuffPo reported that the overly cautious "Neal is in no hurry and seemingly doesn’t care if Democrats don’t get the documents before the next election." Back to Sargent:

The idea is that, while it may be understandable for Democrats to want to build a strong institutional and legal case, this cannot become an excuse for further delay. Notably, the memo points out that while there is no precedent for seeking a president’s tax returns under this particular provision of the law, that’s because for decades, presidents and presidential candidates voluntarily released them.

That is, until Trump blithely shredded this most basic norm of transparency-- meaning that his own unprecedented contempt for this norm is what necessitates the House taking this aggressive step in response.

Along those lines, the memo further argues that doing this would represent a thoroughly legitimate and reasonable exercise of Congress’ oversight function. Among the reasons:

• To determine whether Trump’s foreign financial dealings create conflicts of interest, or worse, whether he’s compromised by them in some way. We still do not know whether special counsel Robert S. Mueller III defined his investigation to avoid looking at Trump’s finances. Whether he did or not, the memo argues, Congress has its own obligation to scrutinize these questions.
• To determine whether Trump is violating the Constitution’s emoluments clause by receiving payments from foreign governments without Congress’ consent. The memo argues that the fact that the clause allows for Congress to consent to certain emoluments-- or not to-- itself requires getting the returns, so it can exercise its responsibility to determine whether any particular emoluments either are, or are not, deserving of congressional consent.
• To determine whether-- or to what extent-- Trump and his family have profited off the huge tax cut he signed, which could be substantial. The memo argues that this information could help Congress determine whether to go along with whatever future tax policies Trump proposes, such as making certain provisions in the new tax law permanent.

Here’s the thing. The urgency of all these matters should not in any way be seen as diminished by the conclusion of the Mueller investigation. That’s because, even if no criminal charges were brought for conspiracy with Russia, the Mueller probe and its spinoffs added substantially to the broader case against Trump’s corruption.

This is a case that will continue to build, as the multiple other investigations resulting from Mueller’s work, as well as those launched by House Democrats, proceed. As Timothy L. O’Brien, who understands the depths of Trump financial murk like no one else does, puts it, “reality is likely to keep intruding on everybody who has been ushering Trump-Russia coverage into the grave.”

After all, because of those investigations, we have learned that Trump carried on negotiations with Russia over a Moscow project for many months while GOP voters were picking their nominee; that he has been directly implicated in a criminal campaign finance scheme; and that Trump concealed both these things from America. Getting Trump’s tax returns could help shed light on whether there are other such foreign dealings, and on his tax treatment of the hush money payments, among other things.

We have also learned from Trump’s own former lawyer that he may have gamed assets for insurance and tax fraud purposes, and that Trump’s tax returns could contain clues to those things-- not to mention clues to the extensive history of tax fraud used to inflate his inherited fortune, something we learned about from that big NY Times expose.

Rather than getting drawn into a sad-sack debate over whether Democrats should “move on” from the Mueller investigation, it’s more natural to just keep the focus on Trump’s corruption, as a matter of basic oversight. The political ground for maintaining that focus is actually more fertile right now, due to everything we’ve learned-- and continue to learn-- as a result of the Mueller investigation. And getting Trump’s tax returns is central to that basic mission.

A couple of years ago Dr. Stephanie Sarkis, author of Gaslighting: Recognize Manipulative And Emotionally Abusive People-- And Break Free, wrote a piece for Psychology Today 11 Warning Signs of Gaslighting-- Gaslighting is a manipulation tactic used to gain power. And it works too well. The only way we're going to break free of Trump's gaslighting is at the polls in a little over a year and a half, but it's important to understand one of Trump's most used coping mechanisms. Sarkis defines gaslighting as a common tactic used by abusers, dictators, narcissists and cult leaders to gain more power, while making a victim question their reality. These are her 11 warning signs. How many of them do you recognize in Trumpanzee?

• They tell blatant lies-- with a straight face.
• They deny they ever said something, even though you have proof.
• They use what is near and dear to you as ammunition.
• They wear you down over time.
• Their actions do not match their words.
• They throw in positive reinforcement to confuse you.
• They know confusion weakens people.
• They project.
• They try to align people against you.
• 10. They tell you or others that you are crazy.
• 11. They tell you everyone else is a liar.

A Disturbed Liar-- A Clinical Sociopath... And He'd Rather Destroy Us All Than Leave Us "Unprotected" By His Wall

Wikipedia has a simple explanation for projection-- one of the most obvious and clearest cornerstones of Trump's psychological makeup: "a defence mechanism in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. For example, a person who is habitually rude may constantly accuse other people of being rude. It incorporates blame shifting." Yesterday, Trump had been up and tweeting his nonsense about his vanity wall and his government shutdown for a couple of hours when he suddenly let this seemingly random one loose:

I wondered what brought that one on. And then I ran into a twitter thread by a long-time Trump foil from his days at the NY Times, Kurt Eichenwald. The thread began just before noon on Sunday and ended-- with the word "end"-- at 12:25... so half an hour's worth. Eichenwald, who's 57, began working for the Times, primarily covering Wall Street-related topics, in 1986. He's also a best-selling author of 4 books, primarily about financial and corporate fraud, such as Conspiracy of Fools about the Enron scandal investigation.

I'm just guessing, but I have a feeling that Eichenwald's Sunday noon-time thread is what triggered Trump's pre-dawn projectionist-tweet.

1. I have known Donald Trump since 1987. Like everyone else who knows him well, before he became a politician, I know he is liar, a narcissist, and eventually I knew he was mentally ill. At that time, he professed to be a Democrat. This had nothing to do with politics...

2...so, how long did it take to conclude all this about Trump? Three phone calls for everything but the mental illness. That took three years. But let's talk about those four experiences. About October 7, 1987, I began working on a tryout as a reporter at the New York Times...

3...in the business section. My first story was about Trump filing with the SEC to buy more of than 5% of the stock in Alexander's Dept Store. I am wrong on the date-- this call was October 1, 1987. I called Trump Corp to ask a question of spokesman. Trump himself picked up...

4....I identified myself and the first words out of his mouth were, "Oh, Kurt, I love your stuff." That surprised me, since I had never written anything for him to love. But I figured this was a business guy sucking up to a Times reporter. I asked him some questions, and he...

5...asked me to go on background. He began to wax on about the prospects of Alexanders, how mismanaged it was, how he could save it. He talked about how strong the stock market was, how he believed that Alexnaders was missing out on this continued strength and that he wanted...

6...to load up on Alexanders shares partly because of that. He then told me to identify him as an analyst to explain something about his intent. I made the huge error of doing so. Problem of first day at work. I was later told, no one at the NYT allowed Trump to state...

7...something in the paper anonymously because when he asked, it was his sign he was about to lie.

A week later, my phone rings. It's Trump. "Kurt, did you see that article about me in the metro section today?" I hadn't but I had the paper next to me, and began looking for it...

8...it was on the front. It was a glowing article about Trump by a reporter named Fox Butterfield. Before we were able to discuss anything else, for his second sentence, Trump said, "Fox Butterfield is the greatest reporter in America." He then went on and on about how this...

9...story really captured who he is, and bragged about himself in a way that seemed bizarre. I couldn't understand why he had called me. I was just some reporter on a try out. And it was clear, he was behaving like a kindergartner showing daddy his crayon picture. He wanted...

10...me to reiterate how great he was, he kept asking, "Don't you think that really captures who I am? I do. He really knows me." I was not sure what to say, but I figured I would take this opportunity to do some real reporting. After five minutes of his spiel about how great...

11...he is, I said, "I was wondering about the Alexander's buy..." and he said, "Ok, well, gotta go.." and hung up. It would prove to be the strangest call of my career.

A week later, the stock market crashed, losing more than 20% of its value in a single day. Work went into...

12...overload. One day about a week in, an article appeared in the New York Post. Trump proclaimed that, he was so great, he had known the crash was coming and had already sold all of his stock. I found out he had called the Wall Street Journal and another reporter at the NYT...

13...to say this. None of them would print it because...even if it was true...who cares? But no one believed it was true.

I KNEW it was false. He had been buying up Alexander's stock. There was no new SEC filing (and there never would be) showing he had been selling his shares...

What Would Freud say? by Nancy Ohanian

14...I couldn't understand it. Why would this man be calling around to brag how smart he was by claiming he did something that was provably false? I decided, this was an interesting story. I went to the deputy editor of the business section and spelled out what I knew...

15...and said it would be an interesting story that Trump was purposely calling people to pretend brilliance in a lie. The editor did not even look up from his computer and said the words I remember to this day: "Dog bits man. Donald Trump lies." In other words, everyone in...

17...so why am I saying all of this? Because lots of people-- particularly Cult45-- think these portrayals of Trump as a disturbed liar are new. No, this is stuff that people who have covered him have known for decades. Look at the people who go on TV to discuss him. Many have...

18...worked with him. Many have covered him, know him as "Donald." We knew he was a liar and unbalanced when he was a Democrat, when he was a Reform Party, when he was a Republican. Our position never changed. We did not engage in situational ethics...

19...an end point. A person who did business with Trump over the years told me in 2016, "If you asked him, Donald would tell you I'm his best friend." This struck me as odd, so I said, "And what would you say HE is?" A pause, then the man replied: "A clinical sociopath."

end

Or was it Maggie Haberman's appearance on CNN on Friday that triggered Trump. (Friday... Monday? Does Trump have that long an attention span?) Haberman, a top Trump-watcher for the NY Times, told New Day Friday host John Berman that "the number of conservatives who I have talked to in the last day, who worked on the campaign, who supported the president, who now say, 'you know, I regret doing that; this was a mistake, this administration is off the rails, all of these investigations that are coming to a head are gonna be a huge problem.' They are disgusted... with what they have seen of the details that have come out of Michael Cohen's plea deal... That's going to intensify... and it takes 20 Republican senators to vote in favor of impeachment. This could be a critical moment." That kind of talk-- let alone on television-- drives the media-obsessed Trump up the wall!

Does It Surprise You To Know That Eating At An Over-Priced Trump Restaurant Is Like Eating Off The Floor Of A Public Toilet?

You'll have to click on the image before you figure out how to react if you see any of them in a restaurant

The ugly imbecile and illegitimate "president" of the U.S.-- who had millions of votes less than Hillary Clinton, the people's choice and who was helped by a foreign power (Russia) who wanted to cripple America by installing an incompetent moron-- is, in case you forgot, a gaslighting racist. In true Goebbels fashion, he repeated his ridiculous projection that Maxine Waters is "an extraordinarily low IQ person," which she isn't... but he is.

After the heroic ostracism of Huckabee's vile daughter at the Red Hen in Virginia-- which followed public humiliations of White House Nazi Stephen Miller and of child kidnapper Kirstjen Nielsen at other restaurants-- Congresswoman Waters told her supporters at a rally in Los Angeles, "if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere." Trump immediately tried to twist that from a call to disturb his Cabinet enablers to an attack against all Trump supporters, another in a long list of lies.

Meanwhile, Trump, who owns filthy restaurants and hotels that are always being fined for health-code violations, decided to project his sickening and unsafe establishments onto the Red Hen. "The Red Hen Restaurant," he lied like a spoiled 6-year old, "should focus more on cleaning its filthy canopies, doors and windows (badly needs a paint job) rather than refusing to serve a fine person like Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside." His own restaurants may look good-- if faux glitzy-- on the outside by are virtually sewers on the inside.

In contrast to Trump's pigstyes, Virginia authorities found no violations when they visited the Red Hen in Lexington in February and gave the Red Hen their top possible health-risk rating. All of Trump's restaurants fail health inspections regularly and you actually take your health into your hands by eating anything served by his filthy kitchens. The most recent inspection at his DC hotel found 10 health-code violations, including raw meat stored above ready-to-eat foods and containers of flour stored next to a hand sink that lacked a splash guard. Inspectors also found that the hotel was operating a number of on-site kitchens without city permits. When inspectors dropped by for a follow-up inspection 3 months later, they found that Trumpanzee's hotel had failed to correct the violations and alerted the public that eating there was risky. Even with an inspector in the kitchen one Trump employee, the report states, "dropped an empty pan on the floor and then put it inside a refrigerator" without washing it or even wiping it.

Mar-a-Lago is even worse-- getting 51 health code violations in the last 5 years, not counting the 30 violations at the beach club. The notoriously filthy Doral golf club in Florida was really disgusting and unsafe, with 524 violations in the last 5 years-- some extremely serious-- for which Trump was fined. There were dozens of cockroaches all over the kitchen-- some dead and some alive-- as well as "slimy/mold-like build-up” everywhere in the kitchen.

Would you patronize a restaurant that served people like these?

Is Trump The Biggest Traitor In American History?

If you didn't learn by now that Trump's most overwhelming psychological trait is projection, you haven't been paying attention. Wikipedia: "Psychological projection is a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. For example, a person who is habitually intolerant may constantly accuse other people of being intolerant... Projection tends to come to the fore in normal people at times of personal or political crisis[ but is more commonly found in the neurotic or psychotic in personalities functioning at a primitive level as in narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder."

Newsday talked about Trump's treason remarks on Monday and pointed out that he "sounded like he was channeling his inner Kim Jong Un as he stewed -- six days afterward-- about Democrats who didn’t applaud his State of the Union speech. While Republicans were 'going totally crazy wild' as he recited his achievements on the economy, the Democrats 'were like death, And un-American. Un-American,' Trump complained while speaking at an Ohio factory. Then he added: 'Somebody said treasonous. I mean, yeah, I guess why not. Can we call that treason? Why not. They certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.'"

Equating chilliness toward him by elected representatives in Congress with disloyalty to the nation took the president into new territory. Previously, Trump reserved such accusations for “the FAKE NEWS media,” tweeting it “is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!” The NFL players who staged protests during the nation anthem were berated only for “disrespecting” the country.

If Trump ever checked in with his predecessor, he might be reminded that when Democratic presidents give their State of the Union speeches, there are usually more hands resting in laps than clapping on the Republican side of the aisle. Those with curbed enthusiasm were not labeled as traitors.

Ryan and his clones didn't applaud for Obama's SOTU addresses either. Obama handled it a little differently than Señor Trumpanzee did though:



Is Trump a traitor? Trump is a greedy, self-server who will do anything to enhance his social and financial standing. That's who he's always been. That's who he is today/ So would he sell out America? Absolutely-- without question. And yesterday, Fox News, reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned that the Trump Regime is "ill-prepared to prevent Russian interference in the upcoming midterms," as it was in the 2016 general election. Trump has opened the door to Putin and is adamantly refusing to do anything to prevent it.

“I don't know that I would say we are better prepared, because the Russians will adapt as well,” Tillerson said in an exclusive interview with Fox News in Bogota, Colombia. “The point is, if it's their intention to interfere, they are going to find ways to do that. We can take steps we can take but this is something that, once they decide they are going to do it, it's very difficult to preempt it.”

Russia is already attempting to interfere “in the U.S. in 2018” ahead of congressional midterm elections as it did in the 2016 general election, he said.

“I think it's important we just continue to say to Russia, ‘Look, you think we don't see what you're doing. We do see it and you need to stop. If you don't, you're going to just continue to invite consequences for yourself,’” said Tillerson.

All Trump does is run around claiming that the "Russia thing" was a hoax and that even if it wasn't "everyone agrees there was no collusion, no collusion, no collusion..." Translation: there was absolutely massive collusion and Trump and his wretched family personally directed it. What will he do when Mueller exposes him? That's coming.

How Would You Diagnose Monsieur Trumpanzeé?

There has been so much said about Trump's mental health-- lack of mental health-- that the American Psychiatric Association sent out a warning to its members not to diagnose the mentally ill without personally examining them and not to release the results without explicit permission. Our resident psychologist, Helen Klein, took a stab at diagnosing Señor Trumpanzee and found him to be severely afflicted with narcissistic personality disorder and probably a sociopath to boot. Others have dignosed him to be a full-on psychopath and... well, have you heard anyone who knows him-- or any Republican elected officials-- denying any of these assessments?

Watch this short TED talk video about narcissism and narcissistic personality disorder and see if it reminds you of anyone who happens to be running for president this cycle. The four basic traits you need to look out for, although in some cases, not very deeply:

• A grandiose view of oneself
• Problems with empathy
• A sense of entitlement
• A need for admiration

One little, tiny hint you might find useful: in recent years, social media provides narcissists a means to seek social status and attention.



OK, I'm persuaded. That said, Trump's single most persistent tactic in life has been projection. Anything you want know about Trump-- about what he knows or what he fears he is or even just what's on his prescription drug-addled mind-- just listen to what he says-- screams-- about his opponents. Think of every insult he's hurled towards any of them. He's describing his inner self. "Lyin' Ted?" Maybe... but I can think of someone who has a record of lying far more blatantly and consistently than Ted Cruz. "Crooked Hillary?" She's not my idea of moral rectitude... unless you compare her to her pal Donald Trump. He's Lombard Street compared to a gently curving, flat country road.

Unfortunately, the father of psychiatry, Sigmund Freud, never analyzed Herr Trumpänzee...  but one can easily imagine how that might have gone from Freud's writing. He defined "projection" as people trying to "defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others." Projection is usually present in people suffering from psychosis and in people suffering from narcissistic personality disorder. Know anyone you might consider a bully? Bullies are often known to project their own feelings of vulnerability onto the target of the bullying. That helps explain why no one knew how to handle Mr. Trumpanzee during those car wreck Republican debates. Has anyone ever behaved that way in a debate? Ever?

In Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung, wrote about guilt and conscience and suggested that projection is related to false accusations, both personal and political. Ready for a little Freud, at least some Freud via Karl Wolfe?

Psychological projection is the phenomenon whereby one projects one’s own thoughts, motivations, desires, feelings, and so on onto someone else (usually another person, but psychological projection onto animals, parents, children, neighbors, other drivers, political figures, racial groups, states and countries, also occurs).

According to the theories of Sigmund Freud, psychological projection is a psychological defense mechanism whereby one “projects” one’s own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, feelings, and so on onto someone else (usually another person, but psychological projection onto animals and inanimate objects also occurs). The principle of projection is well-established in psychology.

...Projection concerns externalizing the issues that we need to deal with ourselves. Usually we project onto others issues and problems that we need to address within ourselves, or are unable to manage properly.  Projection is irresponsible behavior as we dump our problem onto somebody else.  We justify these projections by blaming someone or something outside for the emotions  we do not want to feel.  We project our disappointments and problems onto other people, it is somehow their fault, we become a blamer.  Ultimately it is the person who projects that loses, as they never really sort out their own problems.

And, as though anticipating Trump, Wolfe added that "classic racism is an example of psychological projection; 'It’s all their fault that I feel they way that I do,' says the racist. I am a victim of another persons thoughts or actions."

I've read that one of the Trumpanzee daughters, Ivanka, is a very observant Orthodox Jew. That's probably an exaggeration but if she knows much about Judaism, she might remind Papa Trumpanzee about a Talmudic warning to the devout: "Do not taunt your neighbor with the blemish you yourself have."