This much must be understood about Donald Trump: he may actually believe his own bullshit.
Within the framework of the Malignant Narcissistic Process, the necessity of lying and the related greater manipulation of others becomes clear: the malignant narcissist lies to cover over emotional damage and put in its place an undamaged and unassailable heroic self. The suspect felon in the courtroom may well believe in concert with his own invention that the proceedings are fake, politically motivated, and fixed–and he, so brave and glorious, should be out campaigning for the next Presidency of the United States of America. Now bent, delusional, and twisted, Donald John Trump, four-time indicted felony suspect, may know where he is physically and resent the power detaining him, holding him in trial, but he has no apprehension as to what he has done before the law, to others, and to his own life.
America has no king and doesn’t want one.
The foremost notable argument against having a king has come to us from Thomas Paine in his pamphlet Common Sense (1775-6). Says Wikipedia, “Writing in clear and persuasive prose, Paine collected various moral and political arguments to encourage common people in the Colonies to fight for egalitarian government. It was published anonymously on January 10, 1776,[2] at the beginning of the American Revolution and became an immediate sensation.”
It helps to understand him, of course, and then with reason–and perhaps even prayer–help him along to where he belongs, i.e., an asylum or prison or both.
AI art found on X and fit to BackChannels conclusions about the delusional Donald John Trump.
Put yourself in Trump’s mind-https://conflict-backchannels.com/2022/07/10/malignant-narcissistic-process-distilled/. Most of your life has been spent in the shadow of a traumatic “narcissistic mortification” that you do not wish to experience ever again–and you determine you never will. First, you forget about it, pack it away, didn’t happen; then, you come out swinging, a good guy, unassailable, courageous, heroic–and to prove it, you will roll the dice! 🙂 (awful cliche). Your realpolitik is pretty tough–nasty environment–but your image is gold and you are in with all of the in-crowds! You brag up a storm; snow the bankers; charm and screw the subcontractors. The better part of human nature and prudence takes its course and you need cash, a lot of it, and it turns out you have been noticed all along, boychik.
You have a “roof” and a dragon (unlimited “resources” long before “Game of Thrones”) and plenty of “narcissistic supply”. Whether or not you can pay the freight or stay out of trouble, the high is like no other–Y-O-U! own the world!
The Dragon wants to get you to take the both of you a little higher and, well, you are an executive and the very image of American gold-leafed success–just one more step.
How hard could it be?
We should know more about the lives–and demons–associated with healthy leaders, but the evil get our attention and we have powerful concept, methods, and tools for getting “behind the curtains” and finding what the malignant narcissist has tried to cover as well as avoid all of his life, i.e., his humiliation before authority.
So Trump sits in court, a “stable genius”–a horse’s ass for countless others–found out and subject to the control of power more powerful–also more possessed of integrity–than himself.
I think he knows he has been played for criminal political power–call it the #MoscowSystem for #PiratesMurderersAndThieves–and not only will millions of others not look at him as they once had but he may not look at himself as he once had. So he yawns in court. He’ll make noises about a “rigged game”, but he’s delusional, and it’s not–and the #AmericanPublic in vast majority knows that that, finally, is the truth.
For disappointed Trump Republicans, consider a reset on your own methods of discerning truth or your own motivations for accepting baseless and outrageous accusations and claims–and come to some understanding about Malignant Narcissism and related criminal and politically criminal psychology.
For United States Military and Police: be true to your oath as well as quintessential American ethics, principles, traditions, and values: America’s Founding Fathers produce by 1789 a remarkable guidance for a secular democratic republic, truly one nation with justice and liberty for all. Never forget for one minute that you are the defense and security for the most advanced and greatest complex integrated and essentially classically humanist political system on the planet (well, France might be healthier at the moment–but we’ll show them how it’s done). 🙂
Good American citizens fight for the same things but play each to their own abilities and strengths.
#AINOS – Americans In Name Only. #TAKs – Trump’s Ass Kissers.
Latent Political Impact
Adult responsible Democrats and Republicans, critically thinking, reasoning, and reasonable in the constructing and fine tuning of good public policy, appear slow to comprehend how deep the attack on America’s way of life, domestic tranquility, and defense and moral strength among nations has gone. In fact, a portion of today’s GOP has traded its conservative Constitutional moorings for a reactionary feudal-medieval position in time and is fast floating away from the desires, hopes, and ideals of ordinary Americans who would not allow themselves to be dumb.
For Republicans, where are “the adults in the room”?
Where is the push-back from conservatives who should be mad as hell as regards the selfish and piratical theft of their democracy?
#FeloniousTrump #4FelonyCases91Counts well may be called #AmericanTraitorTrump–and no conservative Republican dares call him out to his face.
We have seen the brazen and greedy–where are the brave and free among the much less visible virtuous?
A Note on Nobility and Virtue
In Putin’s world, the fire sale of state assets into the pockets of former Communist Party nomenklatura had been set up by the mid-1980s as insurance and precaution against the possibility of bankrupting the state (hunt around in Karen Dawisha’s work for the scholarship). “A New Nobility” appears intended for the KGB/FSB and associated oligarchy that would become wealthy enough to live as it pleased without concerns for the development of Russia and its people. Private estates built on private wealth and power would become as unassailable as those who owned them. Putin would return Russia to feudal-medieval barbarism and the patrimonial authoritarianism in which the test of sovereignty and dominion would be the ability to destroy persons and property as alike and at will and with impunity.
For the west, that world awaits only inaction or passive and tacit popular American approval at the polls.
Anyone who is not constrained may wield power with a hammer and the fear of it, but in the better liberal democracies of the world, all hew to the ideals, laws, and principles of democratic order by constitution and by legal code, centuries of it and fine tuned by conflict, reason, and struggle for the greater good.
Whatever “the nobility”–who would themselves represent law in each their respective domains–may think of themselves, there are those around them–or placed beneath them–who judge quietly, perhaps sullenly, but with determination to set right the wrongs of merely vulgar power. The dimensions that matter: awareness and comprehension; compassion and empathy; good conscience and intents; courage and fortitude; goodness in spirit; good grooming and manners; inherent grace, justice, and magnanimity.
After years of blogging defined by “collect, select, and opine”, I have found with the national and global obsessions with “#FeloniousTrump” (“#4FelonyCases91Counts”)–so I frequently refer to him on Elon Musk’s X post-Twitter platform–a certain saturation. I have tired of Donald John Trump’s image and voice, his skewed anti-democratic American political stances, his now infamously malign and surreal (delusional, grandiose, messianic) narcissistic psychology, his paranoia and related lies and lying, and the uncritical and other than Christian self-righteous viciousness of his fan base.
Instead of writing (much), I’ve chosen to produce a page of reference with two of Liz Cheney’s YouTube videos at the base. Before one reaches them: excerpts form suggested reference.
Motivation
Donald Trump has failed perhaps more than his share of bank loans and debts, and he has had to deal with a rough world, one often lawless beyond his own reach. The pressures must get “up there” with always incessant needs for cash. Well, he found his cash, and much of it in concentration.
As a bipartisan effort, the report does not delve into the root causes of the attack, including Trump’s role as he called for his supporters to “fight like hell” to overturn his election defeat that day. It does not call the attack an insurrection, even though it was. And it comes two weeks after Republicans blocked a bipartisan, independent commission that would investigate the insurrection more broadly.
“This report is important in the fact that it allows us to make some immediate improvements to the security situation here in the Capitol,” said Michigan Sen. Gary Peters, the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which conducted the probe along with the Senate Rules Committee. “But it does not answer some of the bigger questions that we need to face, quite frankly, as a country and as a democracy.”
But the DHS and the FBI do not create an intelligence report focused specifically on the upcoming pro-Trump rally. That’s important because these reports go beyond raw intelligence — they validate information and put it into context that would help local law enforcement develop a plan. These threat assessments or intelligence bulletins are typically written as a matter of course ahead of high-profile events. It’s not clear why this didn’t happen.
“There were significant, widespread and unacceptable breakdowns in the intelligence gathering. .?.?. The failure to adequately assess the threat of violence on that day contributed significantly to the breach of the Capitol,” Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.), chairman of the homeland security panel, told reporters. “The attack was, quite frankly, planned in plain sight.”
Sources said Scavino told Smith’s investigators that as the violence began to escalate that day, Trump “was just not interested” in doing more to stop it.
Sources also said former Trump aide Nick Luna told federal investigators that when Trump was informed that then-Vice President Mike Pence had to be rushed to a secure location, Trump responded, “So what?” — which sources said Luna saw as an unexpected willingness by Trump to let potential harm come to a longtime loyalist.
As he pushed to overturn the election, Trump relied on a band of outside allies who undertook what federal prosecutors have called a “criminal scheme” to fraudulently overturn the 2020 results instead of relying on the advice of attorneys in the White House who urged him to accept his loss to Biden./Trump was asked in the interview why he didn’t listen to those lawyers.
In public, he made more than 800 inaccurate claims about the election from the time the polls began closing on Nov. 3, 2020, to the end of his presidency, according to a database compiled by The Washington Post. Dozens of times, he simply characterized the election as “rigged,” “stolen” or “a hoax,” and flatly and falsely declared he had won — even as a mountain of evidence proved otherwise. Other falsehoods were more specific about the voting and ballot-counting process, contained unproven allegations and promoted conspiracy theories.
Fourteenth Amendment Equal Protection and Other Rights
Section 3 Disqualification from Holding Office
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Donald John Trump may not think of himself as a cowardly and smarmy con man, felon, mafia chief, or traitor to his nation in light of his own delusional, grandiose, and messianic character and apparent absence of conscience. However, all indicators point back toward cooperation with Vladimir Putin in relation to seeing himself installed in power–with immunity from felony-level wrongdoing, no less–by an overwhelmingly White Christian American Nationalist Front that itself appears to have America’s Republican Party leveraged away from its traditional adult, civil, Constitutional, lawful, and responsible navigation.
When Trump covered for Putin in the now infamous “Helsinki Moment”, mainstream media and moderate cognizant and good Americans were shocked but then gave that moment two minutes of squawking before some other drama displaced it.
Here, copied verbatim, is what Trump said in that now hideous and signal moment:
***
all I can do is ask the question my people came to me dan coates came to me and some others they said they think it’s Russia I have president putin he just said it’s not russia i will say this i don’t see any reason why it would be I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today and what he did is an incredible offer he offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators with respect to the people I think that’s an incredible offer
And there Trump is, no different back then than he is today: inveigling, lying, infantilizing, pandering and far gone in the sordid business of trading country–and American law–for the lowest in the way of criminal, corrupt, and ruthless power.
And where has been the GOP in relation to Trump?
***
…Trump and company don’t simply want to “deconstruct the administrative state,” as Trump whisperer Steve Bannon famously said. They want to remake the state to concentrate political and economic power in the hands of themselves and their wealthy friends. That requires removing the checks on executive power that are embedded in the federal bureaucracy.
Basically, Trump wants to transform a system that already tilts dangerously in the direction of oligopoly into a full-blown patronage state along the lines of what Viktor Orbán has done in Hungary and Vladimir Putin has accomplished in Russia.
In X-speak, has #America tired of #FeloniousTrump #4FelonyCases91Counts?
Today, Americans know that Trump knew he had lost the 2020 election and with premeditation chose to lie to his base, which may now be considered either gullible or just plain traitorous and vicious, and then he drove a violent portion to insurrection in an attempted coup. Those whom Trump betrayed and inveigled in his madness should be especially angry with him.
Call him “Trumpolini” and hope America–the vast majority of Americans–will find the courage to defend their nation, its revolutionary Constitution and spirit, and be finished with him as well.
The order of events in the Trump business saga and the near thematic coverage of Trump-related dark money and Russian money support the case for “#CollusionNoDelusion.
When it comes to Trump properties in America, Donald Trump has never had an issue with Russian immigrants. Wealthy ones, of course. How did he find them? How did they find him? We might suppose that part of the business “proprietary” in the extreme.
The search string, “Soviet Era Heroic Realism” yielded the second image–it helps to knowingly guess what one is after–which has the caption, “Post World War Two Russian Post–Young builders of Communism, go forth toward the new heights.”
We know how that worked out, and Stalin, at least in atrocious facsimile, appears to be with us yet.
Regarding Trump’s depiction, I have commented via Twitter (on Brigitte Gabriel’s feed) already this morning on Moscow’s Trojan Horse–he’s about that large too–in the Grand Old Party (of Greed), and here will relay the cannon fire in plain text and in a manner more easily accessed–>
“Trump is doing what he has always done. He walks to the line of openly calling for violence and stops just before making overt directives,” Kurt Braddock, an American University professor who studies far-right extremism and the ways in which communication and propaganda contribute to political violence, told Insider.
“In many ways, the implications are the same. His supporters who are looking for an excuse to turn to violence will see this as his implicit approval,” Braddock added.
Practically an Afterthought on Donal Trump’s Anti-Democratic Authoritarian Narcissistic Mentality
"“I get along well with Putin,” Trump said, adding that the Russian president discussed Ukraine regularly. “He wanted to get a piece,” Trump said. “Now it looks like he’ll probably end up getting the whole thing.” #DonaldTrump on #UkraineRussiaWarhttps://t.co/AHf5vVolJI#DTPutin
Janus, the god of the gate looking in and looking out, might suit the passage made by former President Donald John Trump in relation to his appointing as his first campaign manager the world’s most notorious flack for dictators–and then or now–as his legal troubles mount beyond his managing–a lead lawyer for his team (for a short term) with a clientele in Venezuela.