A unanimous Texas Supreme Court, all seven of the justices Republicans, upheld the state’s draconian abortion law. Why should anyone there complain? The judges are all elected to their positions in a state that is less than 40 percent non-Hispanic white, yet it doesn’t vote in the expected stereotypical way. Gerrymandering and voter suppression certainly has a hand in it, but with eighty percent of eligible voters in the state actually registered, and typically only 50 percent of those are motivated to vote—we see the state “electing” corrupt, racist white guys who don’t even care if you know it.
That doesn’t mean that power-mad and corrupt Republicans (did you know that the top-five most corrupt presidential administrations since U.S. Grant are Republican, according to historians?) aren’t still “fearful”; a district judge threw out Ken Paxton’s lawsuit that largely targeted Hispanic voters in Bexar County because, well, what’s the point if those voter registration cards were already mailed out?
But Travis County is still in Paxton’s crosshairs; amazing how desperate Republicans are to keep people in Democratic strongholds from voting, voters who are perhaps waking up to the reality that it isn’t really in their interest to keep voting for corrupt, racist white guys who don’t even care if you know it.
And
don't be fooled; the intent of the so-called Save Act pushed by Donald Trump and House Republicans is not to "assuage" crazed conspiracy theorists (sure it will), but is based on the
same motivation: not to insure legal voting, but to curtail it. As I mentioned before, in Texas hundreds of thousands of registered legal voters are put on "suspense lists" until they can "prove" they actually live where they say they do; where there is a "will," there is a way for Republicans to keep the "wrong" people from exercising their right to vote.
In that spirit, Republicans are busy pulling any trick out of their fundaments to cheat their way to “victory.” No doubt they are going to find something “positive” out of the recent assumed attempt on Trump while he was busy playing golf at his Florida resort, instead of this—what did Mark Levin call him, a “god-fearing man”—being in church on Sunday?
I thought I said all I needed to say concerning this election, but as they say, it ain’t over until over, and while Kamala Harris has according to most polls a slim lead over Trump, the last debate seems to have done little more than to assuage the fears of some voters about her “fitness,” as it clearly did not move the needle as much as hoped, and it may come down to how motivated voters are to go to the polling booths or mail in their ballots.
Admittedly, it is difficult to understand why some “thinking” voters who lean right or even just “center” would be motivated to vote for someone like Trump. Nobody in their “right mind” should feel any kind of “vicarious connection” with him or the way he “thinks.” This is a man with severe psychological issues (the current diagnosis is dementia), who does not speak or think in what most people should regard as “normal.” He once told us that if he shot someone on Fifth Ave. in New York City his supporters would still vote for him; that was not supposed to be a “joke,” because this elevated case of narcissism and sociopathy truly believes this. Trump is telling us he is a “target” because he is “consequential”—but not for the reasons he and his supporters believe.
JD Vance’s claim that it is Democrats who need to “tone down” the “rhetoric” is of course hypocritical on its face; what he and others on the far-right want is for Democrats to simply stop calling out Trump’s lies and unfitness, so as to keep his unhinged mind tethered to some semblance of sanity, given the fact that Trump has a tendency to act like a cornered raccoon when threatened by the truth about himself. That Trump is incapable of self-awareness or how power corrupts, it is “natural” for him to have learned no lessons from the first assassination attempt; he seems to have gone full crazy, especially in regard to immigrants, where he is doubling and tripling down on his pet-eating claims while schools in Springfield with Haitian children are being shut down because of bomb threats.
This guy is so deluded that violence and violent rhetoric that demonizes and dehumanizes not just immigrants but anyone who opposes him is shockingly revealing of how his mind works when it is not (as we learned from Michael Cohen) scheming to cheat any system that dares to keep him in check. If Trump wasn’t born into wealth, he’d just be another bigoted nobody looking for someone to blame, because no one would trust him any further than pick your slang term.
Trump clearly enjoys describing a world of violence and mayhem, using as “evidence” deluded conspiracy theories in which he applies "anecdotes" and “statistics” that are simply made up as he goes, the more outrageous the “better”; even his “harmless” lies are not without malicious import. Trump’s claim that during the Biden administration 110 percent of all new jobs were taken by illegal immigrants is not only absurd on its face, but mathematically impossible—yet there are the less mathematically-attuned who think if it “looks” that bad, then it must be “that bad,” even if people with half a brain know it’s an impossible lie whose only purpose is to demonize hard-working immigrants.
Even Dwight Eisenhower knew that political stunts like “Operation Wetback” had to be balanced by common sense measures, which is why at the same time he increased the number of legal work permits for migrant labor. In fact Eisenhower, a moderate Republican, is perhaps the last president to have had a “sensible” immigration policy, unlike that which has been defined by hypocrisy and racism since 1965 in which the “fixes” have only made the “problem” worse.
Yet Trump supporters don’t care how much he lies—they want to believe that things were the “best” the country had ever been when he was in office (obviously forgetting the pandemic ever happened), and now they are the “worst” they have ever been, totally devoid of context or reality. Things are “bad” because they need to be bad, or else Trump’s credibility (such as it is) is exposed as the dangerous farce that it is.
Trump claims to be the “greatest” president in history, and Joe Biden is the “worst” president in history. Who believes that? Jordan Klepper from the Daily Show finds those people every time he visits a Trump rally, and it makes you feel dumber for just listening to them. This CBS News video a few months ago tells us that Trump supporters are mainly “aggrieved” low-class white people who don’t seem to realize that Trump only cares about himself and his riches, and by believing his lies and accepting them as their own, are being used for his own benefit, not theirs:
These people don’t feel so “bad” as long as the “others” are being beaten on worse; mass deportations of migrant workers doing work most of them wouldn’t touch won’t make their lives “better,” but it makes them feel “good” even when the economy and their own lives eventually suffers from such, as we are told here https://itep.org/trump-mass-deportation-would-vaporize-the-economy/. Such is the national delusion we live in today, and the evidence suggests that Trump not only lives in a hellscape of his own creation, but has convinced people who live in their own dark world, but being in one without a unifying concept, accept his conceptualization as their own.
In this video…
…Dr. Bandy Lee, a psychiatrist who edited a book of essays by mental health experts entitled The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, makes it plain that whatever is ailing Trump, he has spread it to a large segment of the population like a cancer or virus. And this hasn’t just infected those most susceptible to his version of reality, but it is also infecting people who feel the harm to the body politic and its potentially fatal nature, but feel “helpless” to stop him, at least by “legal” means; Trump has no doubt overtaken the “sense” of a few such people; but then again, who really is to blame for that? Trump, and those who have enabled him.
One wonders if enough people are truly concerned about will happen in another Trump administration; even undecided “swing voters” seem willing to give Trump the “benefit of the doubt” no matter how unhinged he sounds. And if what the Associated Press is reporting, sounding the alarm that the USPS headed by Trump-appointee Louis DeJoy and his reduction and consolidating of distribution centers that is still underway less than two months till the election, and is concerning to both parties in regard to the timely tabulation of mail-in ballots—and could be the cause of chaos that makes January 6 look like a flag football game.
Dr. Lee points out in the video that an unhinged Trump has been allowed to be so by occupying a world that has been afforded to him by being born into wealth, insulating him from the reality of most people. She asserts that Trump “suffers from malignant narcissism,” and that his supporters can’t see through this domineering, authoritarian self, because in a way his supporters want to be so themselves against the “others.”
Trump’s “dark psychology,” which Carl Yung called “The Shadow,” is “highly emotionally driven so not only does he conjure up the most horrific images and dark displays of what he sees to be reality,” Dr. Lee says, but while “the chaos and carnage in society doesn't really exist, he takes others with him to that place.” Trump says “the unspoken out loud” but while it may appear that “he says what others only think,” in fact
he's actually leading people into those domains and that's part of the Trump contagion that I've been warning against. The psychology of Trump is a contagion that he's spreading—not just ideas but a whole mindset and a whole psychology that once people assume it they come to think like he does. They'd rather follow whatever he says and then reality goes by the wayside because he subverts reality into delusion and his own delusions into reality. That is what severe symptoms cause one to do, and the level of detachment from reality indicates how severe his symptoms are.
Dr. Lee notes that using terms like “vermin” and “bloodbath” indicates Trump is untethered from reality, and thus making claims like “killing babies after birth” and eating cats and dogs help frame a world that is a “hellscape” which is in fact is not real but exists within Trump’s own imagination, made worse by feelings of “distress” that things may not be going according to his plan, exacerbating the worst aspects of his mental state.
And make no mistake: his mental delusions have made him what he is: a self-crafted “celebrity” made for the unreality of the television market, a man who accepts minority “friends” as long as they help disguise the fact that he is a racist who only chose the Republican Party because he could not abide a black (actually biracial) man being a president of his country, and thus the “birther” nonsense that he made himself ridiculous espousing that only Fox News took seriously, and thus the easily manipulated Trump found a home where his own unhinged views were shaped into acceptable sound bites for the Fox News masses.
We have to ask ourselves—or more specifically, Trump supporters—just how much “crazy” are we willing to accept before we say enough is enough. In the film Mr. Klein that I talked about last week, the socially and economically privileged Klein’s easily avoidable folly led him right into that cattle car to Auschwitz, and we need to avoid making the same kind of mistake here.
No one should be fooled by the idea that things seemed “normal” during the previous Trump administration; he was somewhat kept under “control,” at least initially, by “professionals” who knew their business, forced on Trump because he was completely clueless save for his personal beliefs based on personal fantasies.
But then we saw
that once Trump untethered himself from the professionals and surrounded himself with fascist fanatics like Stephen Miller, Vivek Ramaswamy, Peter Navarro, Steven
Bannon, Roger Stone and his various “advisers” on Fox News; that is when we saw
the real Trump, someone who could not accept any reality save that shaped his
own warped worldview in which he was “the boss” who, like in his “reality” television
show, he decided who lived or died and took giddy pleasure in saying “you’re
fired.” Imagine if he is re-elected and conspiracy crank Laura Loomer will be a "player" in formulating public policy, Corey Lewandowski will be his "enforcer," and Aileen Cannon will find a spot on the Supreme Court as a "reward" for her "loyalty."
Yet while there were “limits” to this behavior as president, they were not the kind that made things “better”; remember how Miller so easily manipulated him against doing right by DACA recipients when hours previously he seemed to have accepted a bi-partisan Senate deal—“reminding” Trump who elected him and why. Being human simply isn’t in the playbook. The fact is that Trump has nothing but contempt for the viewpoints of others that imply he is wrong or ill-educated about a subject matter, which excites the worst impulses in him, and if the offender continues to insist that he see reality, he or she is either “fired,” or if outside his control, subject to the most contemptibly and rhetorically violent terms, and it is a measure of Trump mental delusion that he cannot see what others are seeing. He clearly lost the debate with Harris, but he cannot admit this because it would mean that there is something “wrong” with him, and that simply cannot do with a man who claims to be a “very stable genius.”
There is no “joy” to be had in talking about Trump’s mental state and complete unfitness for the highest office in the land, and danger he can do there with his increasingly unhinged dictatorial impulses; perhaps even worse than his immigration “priorities” is how he can transform the court system for many decades to come into bastions of far-right extremism that instead of protecting individual rights, removes them in the name of culture war and partisan politics.
Worse yet is when there are those few people who seem to believe that there is no other way to stop him save by a bullet; but that is Trump’s doing, not Democrats calling him out on his violent rhetoric and unhinged conspiracies based on lies and manipulation of a gullible ignorant mass of people—and as noted, Trump has only moved the dial off the charts with this rhetoric rather than learn any “lessons.” Trump doesn’t deserve that; that would be too easy for him.
Trump needs and deserves to be publicly humiliated once and for all by voters “firing” him at the ballot box, by people who tell him he is not who he thinks he is, but just a sick man who has been insulated from reality since he was child, a man “molded” by his Hitler-supporting father, corrupt lawyers like Roy Cohn, neo-Nazis like Miller, and dictators like Putin and Orban, a man who has never been able to come to grips with who he is and the damage he has done to this country that may take decades to repair, if ever.
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