Trump-Putin are political reactionaries in criminal mode with a psychology to match, that of mafia chiefs with extensive systems of private patronage. Neither serves his nation; neither are lawful souls; both regard power as absolute and have emotional needs for being so. https://conflict-backchannels.com/2022/07/10/malignant-narcissistic-process-distilled/. The two have been covering (shame), lying (method), and presenting themselves as undamaged, unassailable, courageous, and heroic all their lives — but they know the truth and appear delusional and paranoid in concert with their malign narcissism. (more)
The end of the Cold War displaced somewhat the former Soviet spheres of control and influence in the world. The dogma that characterized “Communism” gave way to “”perestroika” only briefly–out of work KGB cab drivers wanted back in, and the got. The “Russian Mafia State” was born with an FSB in part resembling the old criminal secret political police enterprise–and those were aware of Trump in the 1970s. The same were also the sponsors anti-Semitism and terror and kleptocratic relationships with dictators throughout their earlier tenure. Under Putin, much survived. (more)
DJT’s a developer . . . “deal maker” before and beyond anything else. For the purposes of defending himself in power, Trump has neutralized forces within the government, especially the FBI who had investigated him. He’s taken over the country in the way he knows: mafia-style. On X: #StateCapture / #StatePiracy.
So the Soviet’s gone and the west — the Atlantic Alliance and Israel — may have at hand a large distributed system of political criminality bearing down on the civilizational liberalism that has left an opening for leaders disturbed, myopic, and rapacious . . . emperors in their own heads boosted by those they favor and those who fear them.
I’m 70 and merely feel old.
I’ve been FB friends with Avi Melamed for years.
Most of the helpful minds in conflict studies please their already educated and informed–and critically thinking–audiences, but there’s a real problem in updating adverse cultures dependent on agitprop and political cant without an orientation beyond the authoritarianism and political repression that has channeled their attitudes and beliefs about the world.
“Cultural updating” and “cognitive warfare” are still arcane terms in relation to getting barbaric and medieval societies to change a little bit in the interests of their constituencies. Hamas, of course, doesn’t get it–and kingdoms fear chaos in the presence of weakened authority.
For any new to BackChannels or curious about reacquaintance, “FTAC” generally refers to Facebook and the prompting conversations I have had on that platform. Basically, FB arguments and questions have prompted quite a bit of thought on my part. Over time, ideas and insights have become firm and stable (and I won’t back down, so goes the song).
Regarding Avi Melamed, we have had a Facebook acquaintance dating back to 2012 with a faltering correspondence — my fault too — petering out around the middle of October 2015. So much for “social media”. For all the humans, lol, there really is just one of each of us, and with Time having become the new Space, many with lives online — Entertainment! News! Shopping! Zoom! — have fully booked the Dimension.
I had asked AI to elaborate on the tension between medieval politics and modern–>
The tension between “medieval” and “modern” politics is a highly accurate framework for analyzing contemporary democratic friction. This conceptual clash does not mean a literal return to the Middle Ages, but rather a structural battle between two fundamentally incompatible philosophies of governance and power.
One side treats the state as a rule-based machine, while the other treats it as a private fiefdom.
The Core Friction: Personal Fiefdom vs. Institutional Rule
The “#MedievalVModern” dichotomy can be broken down into specific operational clashes that define current political instability:
Dimension
“Medieval” Politics
“Modern” Politics
Source of Authority
Personal loyalty, fealty oaths, and blood/chosen dynastic ties.
Institutional roles, constitutional text, and bureaucratic merit.
Nature of Public Funds
Treasury is a personal slush fund to reward allies and punish rivals.
Public revenue strictly separated from private wealth via oversight.
The Legal System
Sovereign immunity; the ruler is the law and hands out selective pardons.
The rule of law; laws apply equally to the ruler and the citizenry.
Communication
Direct, tribal appeals based on identity, protection, and absolute decree.
Policy debates filtered through open press and statutory processes.
1. The Medieval Side: The Rise of Neo-Feudalism
When political commentators identify “medieval” tendencies in modern leaders, they are looking at the deliberate dismantling of modern, rules-based institutions in favor of personal networks.
Patronage and Fealty: In a neo-feudal system, career expertise is replaced by absolute loyalty. Government officials are treated like vassals. Protection, promotions, and pardons are granted not based on law, but on how fiercely a subordinate defends the “lord” of the system.
The Sovereign is Above the Law: Absolute immunity and the sweeping use of executive pardons mirror the medieval concept of Rex Lex (The King is Law). When courts rule that a leader’s official acts cannot be prosecuted, the system shifts backward toward an era where the ruler’s personhood dictates what is legal.
Weaponized Dependency: Just as medieval peasants relied on a local lord for protection against outside threats, a modern patronage system manufactures tribal fear—casting the leader as the sole defender against perceived cultural or political enemies.
2. The Modern Side: Constitutional Meritocracy
Modern politics, born out of the Enlightenment and codified in the U.S. Constitution, was explicitly designed to kill medieval feudalism.
Separation of Powers: Modernity assumes that human beings are fundamentally flawed and power-hungry. Instead of trusting a single ruler, it distributes power across competing branches (the Senate, the Courts, the Executive) to create friction.
Institutional Memory: A modern state relies on objective, non-partisan civil servants, military officers, and judges who owe their allegiance to an abstract document (the Constitution), not to the shifting fortunes of an individual politician.
Transparency and Accountability: Modern governance requires open records, independent inspectors general, and a free press to prevent the state’s wealth from being funneled into private pockets.
Why This Tension Matters Today
The current crisis in American politics exists because both systems are currently operating simultaneously within the same government.
When a Senator attempts to use committee oversight or a military officer relies on the “lawful order” standard, they are operating in the modern framework. When an executive bypasses Congress, appoints family members to financial posts, and cleanses criminal dockets via sweeping pardons, they are operating in the medieval framework.
The primary danger of this tension is that the medieval model is inherently more agile; it requires only one willful ruler to function. The modern model is fragile; it requires thousands of independent actors to continuously choose their constitutional oaths over partisan self-interest.
In political science, two measurements may determine the strength of political organizations from tribes to states: political coherence and political cohesion.
Do we agree on who we believe we are and with that our sense of mission and purpose in existence?
Do we exist together in good times and bad, in our holidays–and in war or in the depths of distress?
Antagonists — and all political systems have them — weaponize language to break the bonds of a healthy comity through lies — baseless accusations, defamations, and slanders; fabrications, framing, and frame-ups; false narratives and omissions of fact — that do their corrosive work. Promises become doubtful; trust between partners erodes; cultural and social reality even become fair game for “alternative facts” (there are none but fraudulent claims) and the endless invention of fictional speculations and theories. Anything could have happened but what did may meet with deflections of attention and delusional denials of truth especially where the antagonist has committed crimes.
Countermeasures and defenses against disinformation–all lies are that–are but two: empiricism and integrity.
As a Eurasian antagonist to the West, specifically the western civilizational experience characterized as “Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian” in the cultivation and expansion of populations emerging from the Mediterranean Basin in northern and western expansion, Russia has relied on an eastern barbarism in control, financing, and force for its accretion of subjected populations across centuries with itself contracting and expanding with the fortunes of war. It knows itself as having once been a tribute-paying province of the Mongol Empire. Here is an AI report prompted by the query, “Mongol Empire, tribute from Russian principalities” –>
Following the 13th-century Mongol invasion, Russian principalities became vassals of the Golden Horde, paying heavy, regular tribute (in silver, goods, and people) to avoid destruction. This “Tatar Yoke” lasted until 1480, with Moscow eventually dominating tribute collection, which helped consolidate its power.
Key Aspects of the Mongol Tribute System:
Administration: Initially collected by Mongol agents (basqaqs), the system shifted to using local Russian princes to gather the tribute by the 14th century.
The Yarligh: Princes required a yarligh (patent of authority) from the Khan to rule.
The Role of Moscow: Moscow’s princes, particularly Ivan Kalita, secured the right to collect tribute for the Mongols, using this position to enrich themselves and increase their influence over other principalities.
Exemptions: The Russian Orthodox Church was generally exempt from paying taxes, which allowed it to grow in power.
End of Rule: The burden of tribute continued until 1480, when Ivan III refused further payments, culminating in the Great Stand on the Ugra River.
The system of tribute and political dependency heavily influenced the development of the Russian state, fostering centralized, autocratic power.
One may see in today’s assault on the west through a subaltern in the United States the sensibility of Vladimir Putin’s intent to establish a new nobility–the most wealthy of an empowered class–to keep themselves fat off the creativity, entrepreneurship, and labor of Europe and North America. The modern expression of that desire in Ukraine had been looting through skimming the profits of firms through Putin’s henchman Viktor Yanukovych. For America, some similar role would seem in store for Donald Trump and his favored associates and family. Call it “Rule By The Rich”–Americans would be subjected to the capricious desires in greed and power of a class determining their fate with impunity. The permit to lie to the people without apology would likewise seem a part of the Trump-Putin program in autocratic and absolute power.
The Functional and Political Purposes of Lies
Lies have always been told to hide something or to get something. Cover the crime or flatter the boss, the dishonesty always has at least an intended payoff. The emotional motivation for lying has been well explained on BackChannels and may for present purposes be expressed in this modular form addressing “Malignant Narcissism”:
Signal: delusional, grandiose, messianic ideation absent of normal boundaries and limits, i.e., the parameters of normal conscience.
For the purposes of political psychology, the malignant narcissist fears public humiliation and shame, something experienced as a child (“Narcissistic Mortification”) and feels compelled to project his image in power as unassailable, courageous, and heroic.
There is beside the emotional motivation additional practical compulsion to lie on behalf of the possession of power, and that is to sustain one’s most loyal associates and family in sharing the wealth associated with it and otherwise keeping all outside the autocrat-narcissist’s circle of power in sharing in power themselves. Those, after all, needs must be subject to the will of the powerful and treated as the property of the state as without inherent value but for their lesser contributions to the wealth of the ruling power’s domain.
What may lies do for installed feudal-medieval mafia and their networks?
Confusion
The “firehose of falsehoods flooding the zone” — or some such — has the effect of confusing issues by making certain the vulnerable (to lies) have no rational anchor for argument while faith alone proves insufficient for political judgment and navigation.
Among the most destructive compendiums of bullshit: conspiracy theories that overwhelm disbelief with disingenuous and endless invention. The false becomes the truth; the irrational–the real; and the suggestion may for a few provide sufficient cause for violence. The sophist’s mind virus may inspire otherwise inexplicable crime e.g., “‘Pizzagate’ Gunman Sentenced to 4 Years in Prison”, NPR, Merrit Kennedy, June 22, 2017; planted in the minds of incurious thousands or millions–similar bundles of crazy would seem to seed cultures — actually, cults — detached from reality and reason altogether.
“Supply” — “Unlimited Narcissistic Supply” — or reward for the malign narcissist may be defined as public adoration and validation without end. For emotional as well as practical reasons (like being arrested by a righteous opponent), few dictators relinquish power of their own accord (only Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf comes to my mind as having the decision to make, albeit it under state and international pressure, and then making it in favor of a transitional democratic mode–even so, and this after leaving Pakistan for London and Dubai, he returned to Pakistan to return to politics. got arrested for unresolved grievances, fled court, and for emergency medical leave again ended up in Dubai).
Political repression in Russia under Vladimir Putin has intensified dramatically, particularly following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, evolving from targeted, selective pressure into a systematic, widespread crackdown that observers describe as the most severe since the Soviet era. The regime has effectively eliminated independent media, banned opposition organizations, and criminalized dissent, with over 1,700 known political prisoners as of late 2025—a figure surpassing the number of political prisoners in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s
Someone must have added the “t” for fame isn’t always fleeting but for some positively fleeing and leaving behind only infamy.
For Putin and others of his vulgar KGB class, the game has turned to arresting corrupt others (state surveillance pays off!) accompanied by the confiscating of their cash (for a rough visit on that subject see Jason Jay Smart’s YouTube videos — e.g., “Putin’s War Cash Grab: $28B SEIZED Inside Russia”) as the Russian state collapses in relation to the disruption of its oil revenues and oil industry and the related distributions that support downstream business and industrial processes. When the chaos, destruction, looting, and treachery abates in Russia, The Money — my guess — and its owners will move into Europe or South America (wherever) to live out their lives as pseudo new colonial investors.
Donald Trump has a state that continues working despite his efforts to discount, overlook, or pervert its Constitution, customs, and laws to suit his exclusive grip and will while his appearance as a dictator — an evil man, an incompetent and vile ignoramus drowning in his own accumulating disasters — grows by the day. He has replaced the best of Federal executives and officials with incompetent zealots loyal to himself, degraded the nation’s counterintelligence and defense agencies by similarly removing any capable of threatening his own authority — add the professionals experienced in investigating him and his mob — and has made the nation — for the first time in history — a doubtful partner in the defense and promotion of compassionate and modern democratic societies worldwide. He appears to view the nation as he imagines himself: embattled and victimized — and the only way out of his miserable condition is to rise to the control of all that would make him feel small again. For what he cannot reason, he reverts always to coercion and force — or, confronted by greater power than himself, he backs away.
It’s ironic that the two world leaders who would most demand for themselves the accolades and approvals of the world — that Nobel Peace Prize for Donald! Respect from the global defense industry for exploring “Hybrid Warfare”, “Gray Zone Tactics”, and “Hypersonic Missiles” for Putin — know themselves as criminals most of all as each holds on to power through coercive methods and the most callous and vain attempts to manage his bloodied ugly image for posterity.
Not to digress too much, back in the Vietnam Era, the Soviet Union invested a billion dollars in America’s own anti-war movement, and that money and unknown agents of influence left their indelible mark on the American Left and Far Left. It takes some courage, curiosity, and honesty to engage with the true drivers of anti-Semitism and the Middle East Conflict, among them for certain the long animus sustained by Russian civilizational powers and their equally barbaric and thieving proxies, i.e., contemporary terrorist organizations including the Hamas, PLO, PFLP, reliably hosted and praised by Mikhail Bogdanov, Moscow’s envoy to the middle east.
Regarding the above Dylanesque Jesse Welles . . . fine voice, folksy, strong, and memorable in a way that may bind generations . . . but the illusion of the Palestinian community in Gaza as free beneath the Hamas political and religious mafia — it’s true character is fascist and repressive — has flowed down through Moscow (related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_measures). Israel has its own issues with “medieval war with modern weapons” but the American avant garde Left may have yet issues with its own ignorance and related malleability and vulnerability to malign forces experienced in its exploitation.
American Don – State Capture & State Piracy
I’ll be following the No Kings Day action from my desktop and may update this page as the spirit dictates. Left more or less alone on X–>
Donald Trump is an American criminal with three insufficiently resolved indictments, 34 confirmed felonies, and a monstrous Trump-Epstein accusation and scandal haunting his every appearance before the public. Most notably, Trump, who may be referred to as “Ill Trumpolini” in echo of the Italian criminal and fascist whom he resembled with the January 6, 2021 assault on the the Capitol, appears to have little interest in the United States of America as a modern secular democratic republic guided by a powerful Constitution and devoted to the elevation of its complement in humanity in ways well recognized by the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans who informed what would become a predominantly Christian west. After the Thirty Years War and consequent Peace of Westphalia, the nation’s Founding Fathers and political architects chose the classical and modern route then available in political philosophy to fashion a government wary of political and religious power both–and that has been our American Government in Principle since both the 1776 Declaration of Independence from the King of England and the American Constitution of 1789 and associated Bill of Rights declared for all Americans and, truly, mankind as well.
Whether through uncontested criminal means or a deeply dissatisfying American election, Trump and his mob of associate ass kissers and leveraged sycophants — add a Catholic-majority Supreme Court apparently favorable to unchecked power — have been degrading in every facet the nation’s security community, and instead of enjoying the back-and-forth of a collegial and cooperating if fractious American government well defended from enemies foreign and domestic, Americans have gotten an ageing, delusional, and ill despot.
No Kings! America v. Donald Trump
“I am a journalist. I am an immigrant. And I am a Muslim. I am everything Donald Trump loves!”
***
***
***
ICE / ICESTAPO – “Brutality is the Point”
Velshi with Ruth Ben Ghiat–>
***
***
No Kings! Grant Park, Chicago (Video Short)
***
No Kings! New York City x Fox 5 New York
The Live Feeds have kicked in on YouTube, but for posterity, the above provides a glimpse of a day still determined, still festive, still nonviolent.
Donald Trump now appears to have lost the People of the United States of America — Americans! — before destroying with his idiot loyalists The American Experiment.
No Kings! Boston Common: “Boston Doesn’t Back Down!”
No Kings! South Florida: “Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Donald Trump Has Got To Go!”
The malignant narcissists share the same hidden misery in their fear of public humiliation and shame. Never give in, never give up, never back down? In modern life, cooperation, dignity, and freedom win for independent, modern, responsible, and responsive mentalities–cognizance, consciousness, emotion, and empathy comprising human virtues and nothing like the “mind viruses” of feudal-medieval mafia, all of them damaged goods made callous and deadened by their earliest experiences and adult excesses. Call them what they have been always: criminals and political criminals.
Ali the Thief
The 82-year-old Iranian woman keeps the documents that upended her life in an old suitcase near her bed. She removes them carefully and peers at the tiny Persian script.
There’s the court order authorizing the takeover of her children’s three Tehran apartments in a multi-story building the family had owned for years. There’s the letter announcing the sale of one of the units. And there’s the notice demanding she pay rent on her own apartment on the top floor.
Pari Vahdat-e-Hagh ultimately lost her property. It was taken by an organization that is controlled by the most powerful man in Iran: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. She now lives alone in a cramped, three-room apartment in Europe, thousands of miles from Tehran.
For Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the image and power of his most pious religious position covers, in fact, an immensely ruthless callousness, greed, and self-aggrandizing and entirely self-serving madness. Man of God? Man of Peace? Thief, evidently, and murderer in his own feudal-medieval political and religious mode: see NCRI, “Iran: Khamenei’s New Record in Execution and Crimes, January 2, 2025.
Vladolph Putler
Putin’s pretext for his 2014 invasion of Crimea along with Donetsk and Luhansk–the Donbas–had been his duty to save a surrounded Russian culture in Ukraine–and never mind the comfortability of complacent Russian enclaves in Ukraine–from the bogey of Ukrainian tyranny, a thought as faked up and self-serving as his hallucinated Ukrainian Nazis. As a delusional and surreal malignant narcissist, the not-so-great Russian leader and mediocre mafia, secret police, and political thug had intended to make himself look like a hero. Instead, he provoked Russians in Ukraine to fight with Ukraine, and not a few of them as Russian partisans for Ukraine in Russia.
Today by way of Putin’s petulant lunacy, Russia has suffered more than a million military casualties of war. Financial losses appear immeasurable for their being multiple dimensions involved but staggering in the region of $100 billion and up (query AI on “Russia’s financial losses related to invasions of Ukraine”), and the direct losses to its defense appear in the Odessa Journal (June 18, 2025) approximately as follows — note: I’ve made the list alpha, adjusted typography for this blog, and edited with, I hope, experienced judgment:
Estimated total Russian combat losses from 24.02.22 to 18.06.25
Russian Military Casualties of War: about 1007160 (+1040) persons. Note: more than one thousand Russian soldiers have been dying per day in Ukraine. The numbers in parentheses indicate expected additional losses at the time of initial publication.
aircraft: 416 (+0)tanks: 10947 (+7)
anti-aircraft systems: 1187 (+0)
artillery systems: 29265 (+37)
boats: 28 (+0)
cruise missiles: 3369 (+23)
helicopters: 337 (+0)
MLRS: 1420 (+1)
special equipment: 3916 (+0)
submarines: 1 (+0)
troop-carrying AFVs:22845 (+31)
UAV operational-tactical level: 41165 (+184)
vehicles and fuel tanks: 52312 (+137)
warships: 28 (+0)
What kind of crazy drives a dictator? And what might turn him off?
Vladolph has yet to do anything that would refute the psychology involved. In his own head, his posture appears courageous, heroic, and unassailable, and that’s what he believes he must project. There is no reasoning with his mentality.
A glance a the CNN URL cited tells just how greedy, ruthless, self-serving, and sideways ol’ Mafia Don has been in his unbridled ambitions and related methods of getting his way:
It began in 1981. Trump bought a 14-story building on prime real estate facing New York City’s Central Park.
His plan was to tear down the building and replace it with luxury condos. But first he needed a small band of rent-stabilized tenants out of there.
To succeed, Trump played rough, according to lawsuits filed by the tenants. Renters said he cut heat and hot water, and he imposed tough building rules. Trump even proposed sheltering homeless people in the building.
It went on for five years as Trump fought tenants, real estate lawyers, New York state regulators and city officials.
The grim phantoms of history–whatever was thought to have been left behind in the many ways of the dreaded horsemen–Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death–have ways of appearing before us just when we think we have beaten them. So here are the three insults to modern humanity, each one callous and crude, greedy as sin, without boundaries or limits, an sickeningly delusional with criminal and messianic intents, and the authentic among those good and noble must wonder how they are to be met. That they will be “met” we may be certain for time evolves communities more than it resigns any to again living in caves and by tooth and claw, arrow or spear, or sword and shield, but for the living cohort subject to the will of evil leaders, all pay a price in the producing of better and more secure and permanent good circumstance.
For Americans, I believe it appears the “American Experiment” has taken its one giant step backward with Donald Trump as well as the “tech-bro threat” of a degrading and dehumanizing AI future, so perhaps we must all look forward to envisioning the character of our best possible “two steps forward” and then find ways of joining together and in irresistible force to get that next and better world.
Donald Trump’s ambition may be to establish his own vast system of patronage in place of the governments of the United States of America, transforming himself into a king and producing a three-tiered state of royalty, financially productive associates, laboring serfs, and dispossessed and disposable slaves. Big crayon? Yes–but he’s dumb and in his hands, power has turned out one big plug ugly crayon for ruling the land by fraud, force, and coercion. That’s the guidance of the world he knows and the world fit to his own malign narcissism. First: bankrupt the state; second: transfer state assets into private hands in the Soviet post-Soviet manner; third: marry criminal methods with state power and produce the American Mafia State to mirror the Russian one.
The two “families” represented by Moscow’s Tsar and Washington’s King will be finally at peace with one another–and the American and Russian people will hate both but have no choice as regards their displacement.
Americans vs. Trump’s Criminal Foreign Infection
Americans in yet unknown numbers will be on the streets of the nation’s capitals today and millions more will be watching through media how protest works where politically criminal power could care less about listening and much less about empathy and reason before their own aggrandizement and greed. Moreover, so I believe, Trump has set out deliberately to debase Americans and bankrupt the nation in a manner that fits his own embattled, isolated, and persecuted image of himself, an image in fact expressive of his own paranoid-delusional malignant narcissism. Whatever the character in numbers and tone the popular protest, state security elements sworn on oath to defend the Constitution of the United States of America needs must set their own stance as regards their conscience and honor as well as their purpose in light of the damaged, traitorous, and treacherous usurping power in the White House.
In a stunning exercise of will over reality, it looks like Trump appointed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is going to attempt to invalidate Jeffrey Goldberg’s story in The Atlantic in its entirety as “fake news”, thereby eliminating any expectations Americans may have in relation to knowing the truth about anything–their government will tell them what they know, and the government will lie.
Who you gonna believe–through his proxy the dictator wannabe and malignant narcissist crying about “fake news”, the mainstream media, the world being against him, and so on, or the long experienced and responsible editor of The Atlantic?
Criminals and very sick people cover their tracks, deny their worst deeds, and paint through public display and words images of themselves as the best of souls. Some cover their tracks; some get caught and go to jail; some lie their way through life and have jobs in the Trump White House.
Badgering Trumpian insults to intelligence take their toll on X as may the wayward convictions of the nation’s far white right bigots and “Christian” nationalist zealots so far sunk in their Weltanschauung as to have imprisoned themselves in archaic principles discarded by the nobility of Europe–and of the American South–centuries ago–reference: Thirty Years War, Peace of Westphalia, American Civil War. After all that . . . the latest Ketaminic Sieg Heil salute to Adolph Hitler and remnant white supremacists worldwide:
Trump is an undisputed poster boy for narcissism. He demonstrates in pure form every single symptom described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) criteria for narcissistic personality disorder, which I wrote in 1978. But lots of successful people are extremely narcissistic without being mentally ill — think most celebrities, many politicians, and a fair percentage of writers, artists, lawyers, doctors, and professors. To qualify for narcissistic personality disorder, an individual’s selfish, unempathetic preening must be accompanied by significant distress or impairment. Trump certainly causes severe distress and impairment in others, but his narcissism doesn’t seem to affect him that way.
On X, I’ve asserted the following for guidance: “delusional, grandiose, messianic ideation absent of normal boundaries and limits, i.e., the parameters of normal conscience.” If that’s not part of the DSM, I’d think the volume inadequate for addressing “Malignant Narcissism”, for every related–and above bolded term–may be searched on the web. Also as regards the narcissism of the healthy, the better natured and reparative in character may deserve or have earned a positive regard for the egoism inseparable from their own quest or struggle for success, i.e., the presence of a reparative narcissism along the lines of Maslow’s healthy competence-seeking behavior and self-esteem. When we’re good–or in the vicinity of excellence in our arts and professions–we many not need the limitless public adoration and validation that defines “Narcissistic Supply” and the neediness of the malign.
For additional curiosity related to Donald Trump’s persistent character, one may have a look into “Sociopathy“. Also worth a gander: “Anomie“; and on the other and brighter side of mental health appreciation, evaluation, and judgment–“Abraham Maslow“; “Positive Psychology“.
Has the United States of America been infiltrated, invaded, overpowered by elements either foreign to it, foreign to its character. or in fact opposed to its American Constitutional ideals and intentions?
American Character and Integrity Matter — Truth Matters
Down every avenue of honest nonpartisan inquiry, one finds President Trump a traitor to the United States of America, a convicted felon who has only evaded trials involving American identity and American national security as indicated by indictments for election interference, classified documents abuse, and attempted election fixing, and yet, as of yesterday, he has once again been handed the immense power of the American Presidency. Now comes a new question: have American governments and more brave and earnest American politicians as well as America’s most spirited artists, community leaders, journalists, investigators–all of whom may prefer American truth to American bullshit–the power to defend American Democracy against an apparent usurper and a tyranny of the “majority”? And Trump is a so-called “American President” who has made this bald promise in effect to all Americans: “It’ll be fixed. It’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore my beautiful Christians . . . in four years you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote” (YouTube video, Turning Point Action, July 27, 2024).
American Community
Americans should be American in spirit as well as by geopolitical fact, but what an “American” is today appears questionable. Gone: an all-white polity; forgotten: E Pluribus Unum. The latest generations of American Natives and Native Americans may all claim to have been born in the United States of America, and whether happy with that or not . . . that’s just a fact of life. Whoever we are, we are all here. And perhaps now we need a New American Community, one that affirms its ethics, morals, principles, and values–and some of that may need updating and redefinition to suit the full complement of the nation–and one that rejects the racist and religious wet dreams best laid to rest in some dimming recollection of archaic medieval attitudes, beliefs, and practices.
We are Americans, and our power is not all white, nor need it ever be so again. There is no “Great Replacement” . . . .
Ol’ Whitey–and everyone else–“got around”.
So while we Americans think about who we are NOW and what we should be and mean to be–and not what may be engineered and forced on us by coercion, fraud, and force or the MAGAdumb–well, that has been the character of our Convicted Felon in Chief–we might have to accept a little bit of Moscow’s white nationalist crap at the top of what really has been a long dismissed and lost–and good riddance–America.
X Social Network
Countless hours, posts in the thousands (probably–too many for me to count)–for what? A conversation in public; trolling ladies with barely an X-presence; trolling fakes probably making up lists suited to their own derangement; a great lot of follows–really: the best notables in diplomacy and political science and related fields (most don’t know me, but I’m proud to have come to know of them)–and a pretty good base (still under one thousand) of followers–and God bless each and everything one of them. Apart from that “action”, lol, I live alone in a library. Earnest live and evolving conversations seem few to nil and far between or not expected at all.
BackChannels 