Psychological health matters when you elect a president who will wield massive power.
Over 200 mental health professionals signed a full-page open letter in The New York Times in October 2024, warning that Trump has symptoms of “severe, untreatable personality disorder—malignant narcissism” and is “grossly unfit for leadership”.
In 1984, Kernberg first proposed malignant narcissism as a psychiatric diagnosis.[16] He described malignant narcissism as a syndrome characterized by a narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), antisocial features, paranoid traits, and egosyntonic aggression.[17] Other symptoms may include an absence of conscience, a psychological need for power, and grandiosity.
Hmm. Sound familiar?
When you elect a president who is a malignant narcissist you should expect to get endless shell games, lies, dissembling, callous disregard for the rules and laws, arrogance, aggressiveness, self-aggrandizement, a lack of empathy for the American people and enjoyment of inflicting pain on others.
Donald Trump’s administration is in lock step with Trump, so his lackeys have taken on the same traits: lying, dissembling, callous disregard for rules and laws, arrogance, performative aggression and more. This approach to governance is not sitting well with the American people.
EPSTEIN FILES SHELL GAME
The most recent example of bad governance is the Epstein File release. They claimed they would release the Epstein files in compliance with the Transparency Act passed by Congress and signed by Trump but the DOJ failed to comply with the law.
The AP reports:
Some of the most consequential records expected about Epstein are nowhere to be found in the Justice Department’s initial disclosures, which span tens of thousands of pages.
Missing are FBI interviews with survivors and internal Justice Department memos examining charging decisions — records that could have helped explain how investigators viewed the case and why Epstein was allowed in 2008 to plead guilty to a relatively minor state-level prostitution charge.
The gaps go further.
The records, required to be released under a recent law passed by Congress, hardly reference several powerful figures long associated with Epstein, including Britain’s former Prince Andrew, renewing questions about who was scrutinized, who was not, and how much the disclosures truly advance public accountability
Among the fresh nuggets: insight into the Justice Department’s decision to abandon an investigation into Epstein in the 2000s, which enabled him to plead guilty to that state-level charge, and a previously unseen 1996 complaint accusing Epstein of stealing photographs of children.
The releases so far have been heavy on images of Epstein’s homes in New York City and the U.S. Virgin Islands, with some photos of celebrities and politicians.
TRUMP PHONY CHECKS TO THE MILITARY
“Trump’s $1,776 checks for more than a million troops come from Congressionally-allocated reconciliation funds intended to subsidize housing allowances for service members, a senior admin official confirmed. Pete Hegseth directed the Pentagon to ‘disburse $2.6 billion as a one-time basic allowance for housing supplement’ to all eligible service members.”
… Trump admin official: “Congress appropriated $2.9 billion to the Dept of War to supplement the Basic Allowance for Housing entitlement within The One Big Beautiful Bill. Approximately 1.28 million active component military members and 174,000 Reserve component military members will receive this supplement.”
… The $2.9 billion was appropriated by Congress to subsidize the basic allowance for housing, the monthly payment to cover troops’ off-base expenses such as rent, mortgage, and utilities known as BAH. This was done due to the rising cost of housing for troops. So Trump just took money that Congress appropriated for that and moved it over into a “bonus” so he could take credit for it.
… A shell game by the ultimate con man.
TRUMP’S THROWS SHADE AT AMERICANS WHO COMPLAIN ABOUT THE COST OF LIVING
On Wednesday, December 17th Trump delivered an 18-minute rant on prime time TV, interrupting the finale of Survivor to berate the American people for failing to get it that almost one year into his second term as president they should still be blaming Joe Biden for anything that’s wrong with our economy and thanking him, Donald Trump, for whatever is right with the economy. And everything is right! by-the-way. In fact, everything is rosy and terrific and there’s no inflation and prices are down.
Trump thinks he can manipulate public opinion with his magical thinking to benefit himself. This kind of magical thinking has worked for him before. He won the presidency when no one thought he could. And he won it a second time when it was pretty darn iffy as well. Trump does particularly well when he is the opposition party, and he rants about what the party in power is doing wrong. The problem of foisting an unreal world on people who know better comes back to bite you when you are the governing party.
Trump has dismantled government, medical research, children’s health, taken an axe to free and fair elections, and free speech, and imposed his heavy hand on universities, law firms. USAID, education, trade, the UN, various war zones and the Kennedy Center as well as much much more. No one but Trump thinks that this is Biden’s economy anymore. But that’s because Americans live on Earth 1 and on Earth 1 prices for food, gifts, electricity and other expenses are going up and no amount of ranting at the American people to believe otherwise will make that go away.
Here is the real-world, on-the-ground situation in our country as Fortune reports:
Federal jobs data lend support to Sperling’s argument, with anemic growth setting in from April onward, exactly when Trump rattled markets by announcing a worldwide “reciprocal tariff” regime, which he called “Liberation Day.” The longest federal government shutdown in history deprived Wall Street of jobs data for several months, but it belatedly revealed yet more anemic employment growth—and the highest unemployment rate in four years. Bank of America Institute added more context to the picture by showing that small business profitability fell in November for the first time in a year-and-a-half, attributing the price hikes and hiring struggles they’re enduring to one likely cause: tariffs.
Trump might be saved by the Supreme Court, which is going to rule one of these days on the lawfulness of his tariffs. Trump could take the loss as a win, giving him the chance to roll back those tariffs instead of re-imposing them using other statutes or laws that could evade judicial scrutiny. But I think Trump will be unable to admit he was wrong about tariffs. Because he is never wrong, in case you haven’t figured that out yet.
If the Supremes rule that these tariffs are not legal, Trump will find other laws he can use to re-impose these tariffs. (He has already said he would do that.) He will continue the pain and keep claiming everything is rosy. It’s called gaslighting. Or maybe it’s called propaganda. Either way, it is a violation of reality that can only survive on Fox News and in rightwing media eco chambers. This is also what we should expect because we hired a flaming sociopath as our president.
TRUMP RAILS AT A DEAD MAN
Trump as president is debasing and damaging our culture and our morals by being what conservative columnist Bret Stephens calls America’s “Ogre in Chief”. Younger Americans have been raised in a Trumpian infected country that has been influenced by Trump’s invective, nastiness and pettiness. Trump is the presidential role model. How is his nastiness and corruption, his self-centered whining and his need for retribution affecting young boys? young men? How has a president who is a sociopath affecting the next generation of Americans?
Conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens is a frequent critic of President Donald Trump, though he took his criticism a step further after the president insulted the late actor-director Rob Reiner.
In a Tuesday column, Stephens castigated the commander-in-chief and lamented having to write about Trump, who he called a “petty, hollow, squalid, overstuffed man.” He argued that dedicating a column to him was necessary as Trump was, in his words, “the most loathsome human being ever to occupy the White House.”
“Right now, in every grotesque social media post; in every cabinet meeting devoted, North Korea-like, to adulating him; in every executive-order-signing ceremony intended to make him appear like a Chinese emperor; in every fawning reference to all the peace he’s supposedly brought the world; in every Neronic enlargement of the White House’s East Wing … in all this and more, our standards as a nation are being debased, our manners barbarized,” he added.
AMERICANS TURN AGAINST TRUMP
THIRTY YEARS AGO, THE POLITICAL SCIENTIST Christopher Wlezien proposed the “thermostatic” theory of politics. In short: If policy goes too far in one direction, voters will send signals to push it in the opposite direction, over time maintaining a rough equilibrium. This effect shows up in public opinion polls on a variety of topics, from immigration to economics to foreign policy. Although Donald Trump has demonstrated that he’s uniquely capable of breaking democratic norms, he may finally have swung the pendulum too far on all of these issues. There are indications that, in thermostatic fashion, Americans are responding to Trump’s attacks on every value, institution, and tradition of American politics by regaining their appreciation for why and how our system works.
Trump’s dismal approval rating suggests that Americans were expecting more from his second term. Voters returned him to the Oval Office because he promised to make their lives more affordable, but he did the opposite by erecting the highest trade barriers the United States has had in a century. An April survey found that 89 percent of Americans expected this policy to raise prices. The latest AP-NORC poll found that just 31 percent of Americans approve of how Trump is handling the economy—the lowest approval of any point in his first or second term. [The Bulwark]
EVEN HIS MAGA BASE IS PULLING AWAY
The president also has a 38% overall approval rating, with 54% of respondents disapproving and 8% saying they were unsure.
“This is a major problem for him,” said Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, via PBS News. “When affordability is so front and center in people’s minds, that’s going to be laid at the doorstep of a chief executive.”
Trump’s approval rating is also reported to have lost some ground among his ‘Make America Great Again’ base, according to the latest NBC News Decision Desk Poll powered by SurveyMonkey. Two groups, those who identify as Republican and, particularly, those who claim to be part of the MAGA movement, have seen a significant drop in support since a previous poll conducted in April.
The number of voters who identify more as Republicans than part of the MAGA movement who “strongly approve” of Trump have dropped from 38% in April to 35% in the latest poll, while MAGA Republicans who “strongly approve” of the president have decreased from 78% in April to 70% currently. Additionally, fewer Republicans are identifying with the MAGA movement overall, with the party evenly split at 50% on whether they identify with the movement compared to the traditional Republican Party.
HAPPY NEW YEAR
After less than one year as president, Trump has unleashed so much chaos, corruption and ineptitude and embraced so much extremism that he has intensified the backlash that is typical and normal in politics. That’s what you get when you elect a malignant narcissist as president. He has gone too far in too many ways.
A blue wave was coming. But Trump has done more than any other political figure could have done to turn that wave into a blue tsunami.
Happy New Year.