As the protests around the country get more violent, I’m worried that the Trump strategy of stoking hate and rage and blaming Democratic mayors, governors and Biden might take hold with some voters in Midwestern swing states.
What Trump and his right-wing, Republican strategists are doing is taking venomous pages from Hitler and Goebbels’ Nazi playbook of sowing chaos and inciting violence on a minority community (the Nazis on Jews, Trump on Blacks) in order to gain power. This fascist, authoritarian playbook of using violence to grab power is as old as history. Just read the Old Testament or the Koran.
Trump is desperate. He knows he’s losing. Why else would he lie about voting by mail being dangerous? Why else would he try to deflect attention away from his incompetent, stupid response to the pandemic and his and the Republican’s embracing of big business and heartless ignoring of small businesses and blue-collar workers to focus on the bogus — law and order?
To claim he is the law-and-order president when he has broken practically every law and certainly every norm of honesty and decency is as outrageous as his falsely claiming that no president, except for perhaps Lincoln, has done more for Black people.
Trump’s gargantuan and constant lies and norm-breaking behavior make the title of Matt Taibbi’s book, Insane Clown President, seem understatedly naive and quaint. It’s like calling the murderous Joker a clown. A clown makes you laugh, the Joker was fueled by rage and kills people.
In The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 25 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, the consensus of these experts was that Donald Trump is a malicious narcissist, the same personality disorder that Hitler and Stalin had, and is a sociopath to boot. A sociopath is someone who is incapable of empathy, which Trump has demonstrated over and over.
Trump’s sociopathy is reinforced by another expert, Donald Trump’s cousin, Mary Trump, in her New York Times best-selling, scary book, Too Much and Never Enough. In the book Mary Trump, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, details how Donald became such a narcissistic, greedy mob-like criminal. In the book she gives the name of the man Donald paid to take his GRE exams that allowed him to transfer from Fordham to the prestigious Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He cheated. And cheating is habitual. He cheated to get into Wharton, he cheats at golf, he cheats on his wife, he cheats on his taxes (why else would he insist on hiding them), he cheats on norms and laws. He even cheats on following the rules of Twitter.
I’m worried that somehow this insane, lying, criminal, authoritarian populist cheater will be reelected. As Barack Obama said in his speech at the Democratic convention, goodbye democracy.
A very dear friend of mine told me several months ago that I was too hard on Trump in a blog I wrote. I now fear I wasn’t hard enough. So, I say to Donald Trump: “Fuck you! Strong letter follows.”
