April 11, 2020: The Man with the Narcissistic Personality Disorder Stays the Course

 

4/11/20: The facts are brutal. Thursday, we learned that another 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment.

 

That brings the three-week total to 16.8 million.

 

The number will rise once unemployment offices, swamped by applications, catch up with paperwork.

 

Closing down the country to stop a killer virus has wiped out all the jobs added to the U.S. economy since 2013.

 

____________________

 

If it’s not clear to you that Trump is afflicted with the Narcissistic Personality Disorder you need to look up the symptoms yourself.

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Still, if you had any doubts about what kind of person the president is, you should have learned a cold, hard truth this week. The man who previously loved to boast about creating “jobs, jobs, jobs,” will be lucky (and we, as a nation, will be lucky) if he doesn’t go down in history known as “Depression Don.” Yet, in the bitter end, the only job Donald J. Trump cares about is his own.

 

That’s why you could find him tweeting angrily Thursday, the same day the nation learned that all those millions of men and women were out of work, about the great ratings he was piling up with his daily press conferences. After the Wall Street Journal criticized him for appearing on TV too often, rambling on too long, doubling back and repeating himself, getting facts wrong, and contradicting health experts, Trump fired off this narcissistic gem:

 

 

Only Trump.

 

Only such a man would be talking about “Monday Night Football” and “Bachelor Finale” numbers at a time like this, when the only numbers that should matter are 16.8 million men and women suddenly out of work.

 

Only someone like Trump could be bragging about “ratings” at such a moment in history.

In large part due to Trump’s failure to take the threat of a pandemic seriously, the U.S. “rates” #1 in total confirmed cases of COVID-19 (532,879), and #1 in deaths (20,577), as of Saturday evening.

 

But this is who Trump is. If it’s not clear to you that the man is afflicted with the Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) you need to look up the symptoms yourself. Why be surprised that he’s capable of talking about great ratings at a time of national despair? He cheated on his first wife. He didn’t learn a lesson, even when his children were hurt. He cheated on his second wife. He still didn’t learn a lesson, save for the lesson a person with NPD might be expected to learn. That he was rich and if he hurt others his wealth would protect him from pain.

 

He moved on and remarried. Then he cheated on his third wife, too, and not just once.

This is who Donald J. Trump really is.

 

One of the symptoms of a Narcissistic Personality Disorder is “a lack of empathy,” and when you ignore the pain of 16.8 million newly unemployed, and the loss of more than 20,000 lives, that’s lack of empathy writ large.

 

 

LACK OF EMPATHY

 

 

Nor could Trump let the Wall Street Journal criticism go. He couldn’t because he is who he is and that’s a warped man.

 

So, he repeated his tone-deaf boast Friday, in another disgusting tweet:

 

Because the T.V. Ratings for the White House News Conference’s are the highest, the Opposition Party (Lamestream Media), the Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrats &, of course, the few remaining RINO’S, are doing everything in their power to disparage & end them. The People’s Voice!

 

*

 

TO FOCUS our point, let’s consider a handful of jobs lost and gained this past week. One who found himself out of work was Captain Brett Crozier, commander of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt. Crozier had made the mistake of making Trump look bad.

 

With the coronavirus spreading, he fired off a letter to top leaders of the U.S. Navy (and by implication to the president himself) demanding action to protect the 5,000 men and women aboard. By the time the letter leaked to the press, dozens had taken sick. Given the cramped living conditions on the warship, Crozier warned the situation could only get worse. 

There were press reports immediately, that Trump wanted the captain fired. He let Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly do the dirty deed and then backed Modly up when he canned Crozier. 

“I thought it was terrible, what he did, to write a letter,” the president said of the captain just last week. 

“I mean, this isn’t a class on literature. This is a captain of a massive ship that’s nuclear powered. And he shouldn’t be talking that way in a letter.” Trump said he agreed with the decision to fire him, “100 percent.”

 

Modly claimed he fired Crozier because he broke chain of command. Then Modly visited Guam, where the Theodore Roosevelt was anchored, and tried to explain his decision in a talk over the ship intercom. All he really did was anger most of the men and women who heard him speak.

 

Meanwhile, Crozier’s warning proved true. First, he fell ill with COVID-19. Then the virus spread, even as the Navy began evacuating the ship. By Thursday, there were 416 confirmed cases among the officers, sailors and Marines.

 

 

“His motives were pure. He was looking out for his crew.” 

By Friday, the commander of the 7th Fleet, Vice Admiral Bill Merz, was talking to CNN  and admitting that the crew was in a bad place. “There was lots of anxiety about the virus,” Merz told Barbara Starr, the respected Pentagon reporter. “As you can imagine the morale covers the spectrum, considering what they have been through.” Starr noted that Merz repeatedly described the crew as “capable and performing well,” which could be read as validation of Crozier’s leadership before he was axed. The men and women of the Theodore Roosevelt were justifiably concerned.

 

The carrier crew was “struggling in the wake of losing their CO [commanding officer] and their perception of the lack of activity regarding fighting the virus,” Merz said.

 

Merz suggested that the crew did not appear to have been given a comprehensive and clear sense of the various steps the Navy was taking to help the Roosevelt deal with the virus outbreak onboard. That lack of information may have caused some stress, he suggested, feeding the very visible anger many crew members displayed when [Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas] Modly visited the ship and addressed them about Crozier’s dismissal.

 

“I think we could have told them earlier what we knew” about the virus Merz said. “The degree of accuracy against the virus at any level is a little sketchy, but I think we could have at least bought them in earlier and started having this dialog up front.”

 

“The specific questions [Merz fielded] clearly indicated we needed to give them more information about the true dangers of the virus” and how the Navy was handling [sic] aboard the ship, he said.

 

Of Captain Crozier, Merz added, “I certainly don’t question his motives. I think his motives were pure. He was looking out for his crew.”

 

Starr also reported that a sailor who had tested positive had been found unconscious by “his buddies.” He had been rushed to an intensive care unit on Guam. 

Suddenly, the Narcissist-in-Chief woke up to the threat. He wasn’t worried about Captain Crozier. He wasn’t worried about the sailor in intensive care or the hundreds who had been infected. He was worried about himself, as any narcissist must be. If the firing made him look bad, if sailors died for no good reason, and that angered active duty military and their families – he might not keep his job come November.

 

That meant he had to act. Trump sent out Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to tell reporters that he, the president, was “open” to reinstating Crozier to command. “We’ve taken nothing off the table,” Esper told CBS News. “My inclination is always to support the chain of command, and to take the recommendations seriously.”

 

So: Crozier was out because he made Trump look bad.

 

Then Crozier might be in again, because bringing him back might make Trump look good.

 

And now Modly was out – having resigned – because he had to take the fall to ease the criticism aimed at his boss.

 

So, add another American to the unemployment line.

 

*

 

AS THIS BLOGGER readily admits, he does not care for this president at all. But this blogger is a fan of the facts. So here are a few facts about one lucky individual who landed a plum job last week.

 

In case you missed it, the White House has a new press secretary, the fourth to hold that post under Mr. Trump. Her name is Kayleigh McEnany. (Fact.) She’s blonde. (Fact.) McEnany must be smart. (Supposition.) She has a law degree from Harvard. (Fact.) She has insisted that Trump “doesn’t lie.” (Fact – that she said that. Absurd that she did.) McEnany said in February that the coronavirus wasn’t coming to America, and said as late as March 11, that it posed no threat. (Fact and fact – that she said that – not that she was correct.)

 

Just for fun, imagine you had the choice of hiring anyone in this country to fill this post. The job of the White House Press Secretary is (in theory) to stand before reporters and the American people and tell the truth, or the best version of the truth you can present. Would you, if you were making this hire, dig deep in a pile of manure and pluck out a woman who made her name as a “birther,” denying that Barack Obama had a right to serve as our nation’s top executive?

 

You would if you were Donald J. Trump. Because you would suffer from a Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

 

Citizen Trump made the same false claim for years, until finally, he realized late in the 2016 campaign that his racist-tinged lies were hurting him in the eyes of moderate, undecided voters. Then, and only then, did he do what a narcissist does. He did what was best for himself.

 

He admitted Obama was born in America, after all.

 

He did it in the least words possible and never apologized or admitted he had been wrong. He didn’t recant because he cared about truth. He recanted in service to the only “greater good” a narcissist ever sees.

 

He did it for himself.

 

McEnany, then, is the perfect person to shield the Narcissist-in-Chief from any harsh truths.

 

  

The blogger was curious. Who exactly was this new White House Press Secretary, and what made her tick? 

It turned out to be fun to revisit some of her comments from 2015 and 2016, before she sold her soul for a chance to get paid to sneer at reporters. Commenting on then-Candidate Trump, she was spot on when condemning his comments, after coming down the escalator to announce he was running for president. After he called almost all Mexicans “rapists” and “killers,” she was clear. “To me,” she said, “a racist statement is a racist statement. I don’t like what Donald Trump said.” 

She said it was “inauthentic” to call him a Republican. In fact, she laid the “RINO” tag on her future boss, describing him as a “Republican in name only.” 

“Donald Trump has shown himself to be a showman,” she said during the campaign. “I don’t think he’s a serious candidate. I think it’s a sideshow. It’s not within the mainstream of the candidates.” 

Asked recently how she squared her comments then with her work as White House Press Liar now, she said she had been led astray after “listening to CNN.” 

Anyway, that’s our humor for today.

May 16, 2020: Team Trump Blames Team Obama for Coronavirus Outbreak and Binder Shortage

 

5/16/20: The country is staggering towards a reopening and an uncertain recovery. But, by God, we’ve got binders! The best binders. Not one binder. We have two binders! Binders that prove Donald J. Trump is the best president ever.

 

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“The American public will look to the U.S. government for action when multi-state or other significant events occur.” 

Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents

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President Obama? He left the nation binder-less when he exited the White House 1,213 days ago. 

And because Obama left us in a bind, completely without binders, 88,000 Americans have died. 

During a press conference Friday, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany wanted to make this clear. Standing at the podium, she proudly displayed the fruits of three years of labor by Team Trump. “Binder 1” in her left hand! “Binder 2” in her right! Both filled with real ideas about how to handle the coronavirus crisis! I think she expected reporters and people listening at home to gasp. 

Team Trump wasn’t slacking off. Not like Team Obama. These fantastic binders – and here she sneered at the work of the previous administration – could be compared to “this thin packet of paper [emphasis added]” left behind by the Obama folks, having to do with combating pandemics.   

She held up the packet gingerly, by one corner, like a dead mouse in a trap, and handed it over to her “assistant, Wendy.” 

Only, I didn’t gasp. My first thought: Taxpayers are paying this fool’s salary? And she has an assistant? 

For what?

Watch the first minute of the clip, above. 

 

My second thought was: This is so stupid, it’s hard to know where to begin. We supposedly learned on Monday, thanks to Sen. Mitch “Zero Charisma” McConnell, that the Obama administration was to blame for the spread of the coronavirus because they failed to leave behind “a game plan” to address pandemics. And – what? You thought Team Trump could have come up with a plan of their own in three years! Shows what you know. In a chat with Lara Trump, who probably knows less about pandemics than a panda, “Zero Charisma” grumbled, “They claim pandemics only happen once every hundred years but what if that’s no longer true? We want to be early, ready for the next one, because clearly the Obama administration did not leave to this administration any kind of game plan for something like this.”   

“That’s exactly right,” Lara Trump responded. 

Sound of this blogger slapping his forehead, followed by primal scream…. 

“HOOOOOOOOOLY F***ING S**T!”

  

Mitch wasn’t “exactly right.” He wasn’t even partly right. By Thursday, even Sen. Zero C. had been forced to acknowledge that he was wrong about what he claimed. 

His attempt to pin the blame on a previous administration for the blunders (and binders) of Team Trump wouldn’t have made sense even had he been correct. The most obtuse person in the U.S. government should be able to recall the SARS outbreak of 2002. That virus spread to 26 countries. 

A decade later, the MERS virus erupted in Saudi Arabia and struck across the Middle East. Pandemics don’t happen every hundred years. These threats are no longer rare. MERS struck again in 2015, this time in South Korea. 

 

Trump called Obama a “psycho” during the Ebola outbreak. 

If Team Trump didn’t understand that they might have to deal with a pandemic during their watch, then Team Trump would be entirely to blame. President Obama had to deal with the H1N1 virus in 2009. Then, in 2014, the Ebola virus began to ravage West Africa. We know Trump knew about that pandemic threat because he went berserk and said Obama was a “psycho” for the way he handled the crisis. 

You could even say that Citizen Trump lost his nerve. He predicted that there would be “bedlam” in the streets after Obama allowed seven infected Americans, who had been working in West Africa, to return home for care. 

As we have noted several times before, Trump – ever the hater – did say at one point, as Ebola spread:

What's worse? Trump's hate. Or the fact more than 8,000 Americans liked this idea?

 

As Politico reported in March, the previous administration did leave behind a 69-page plan titled: Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents. 

ABC News did a bit of digging, as good news organizations must, and noted that Mr. Trump had not once uttered the words “pandemic” or “preparedness” in any public way. ABC also noted the existence of the 69-page plan, as well as a similar plan prepared by the Bush 43 administration in 2006. As CNN pointed out, the Obama administration version “explicitly lists novel coronaviruses as one of the kinds of pathogens that could require a major response.” 

The plan is also clear about where ultimate responsibility in a time of pandemic lies: 

The U.S. government will use all powers at its disposal to prevent, slow or mitigate the spread of an emerging infectious disease threat. The American public will look to the U.S. government for action when multi-state or other significant events occur.

 

There’s even more you could say about how the Obama administration tried to prepare the Trump administration. If you’re interested, feel free to click the link above and read the document for yourself. 

Something, you can bet, Trump never did.

 

* 

IN RELATED NEWS, the COVID-19 toll rises inexorably. As of Friday evening, Johns Hopkins reported the U.S. had 1,442,924 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 87,493 deaths. 

Those numbers looked so bad I decided I had better doublecheck the math. The Centers for Disease Control posts new numbers every day. CDC also has numbers that look grim. The figure for May 15 is now up; and on that one day we piled up another 22,977 cases. And on May 14 the U.S. recorded 27,191 new confirmed cases of COVID-19, the worst daily total in the last week. 

I’m hoping that figure won’t jump again; but if you remember Trump saying the virus would go away in April, that brought the total for May to 372,652 new cases. That’s more in just 16 days than any other nation on earth has totaled since the crisis began. 

A kingdom lost for the loss of a binder, Ben Franklin might have said. 

 

“If we didn’t do any testing we would have very few cases.” 

Let’s end today with this nugget from the man we have to pray will lead the nation out of this mess, much of which he made himself. Asked by reporters about the alarming numbers of cases the United States has seen, President Trump said this: “When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing we would have very few cases.”

Words of wisdom, from Donald J. Trump. 

As we said at the top of this post, the stupidity we get from Team Trump is so profound, so all-encompassing, it’s hard to know where to begin or to end. 

But, hey! 

We have Binder 1 and Binder 2!!! 

 

POSTSCRIPT: Here in Glendale, Ohio, where I live, people were out in force Friday and Saturday evening, eating and drinking at outdoor tables in the village square. I’m going to be diplomatic and say that, generally speaking, revelers seemed not to believe: 

a.     Masks were a good idea.

b.    Six feet = seventy-two inches.

c.     People serving them food and drink might be nervous about getting coughed on by patrons.

 

In any case, the country is opening up, for good or ill. It’s easy to understand why people want to get back to work, why business owners want to reopen. It’s also easy to understand why waiters and waitresses, and others going back to work might want customers to work a little harder to help them remain safe. Since I have three daughters in the medical field, I understand why frontline medical personnel are worried we might be opening up too soon. 

The math will help determine whether we are making a mistake. Saturday, the CDC recorded 31,967 new cases of coronavirus. That would make it the worst single day since April 25. Could be an aberration. 

Could be the start of a Trump Bump.

June 2, 2020: President Trump - A Twisted Talent for Stirring Anger and Fear

 

6/2/20: The deaths of 106,000 Americans from the coronavirus are bad enough. The toll on jobs, as our economy grinds to a halt, with more than 40 million Americans suddenly out of work, is bad enough.  

Now, on top of that we see scores of American cities riven by angry protests and even rioting.

 

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This president has no more moral authority than the cop who knelt on George Floyd’s neck until he was dead.

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And who do we look to in vain for a calming voice in a time of growing fury? Donald Trump? This president has no more moral authority than the cop who knelt on George Floyd’s neck until he was dead. 

Trump is what Trump is. He’s an adept hater. That makes him the wrong man, in the wrong job, at the wrong time. We all remember how he got a start in politics. His rise in the right-wing pantheon came on the strength of his birtherism. Racism with a new name. Trump claimed that Barack Obama wasn’t an American. He said he could prove it. 

He never did.

 

More recently, he gave a birther radio personality, Rush Limbaugh, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

He employs a birther press secretary. Birthers stick together, like Klansmen and Klanswomen without sheets. 

Trump is who he is, a profoundly warped human being. He can’t help to heal a nation because his superpower is creating division. During his run for the White House, Trump appealed to fans like the West Virginia woman who called Michelle Obama “an ape in heels.” He employed a campaign co-chair in New York who joked that Mrs. Obama should go back to Africa, “live in a cave,” and have sex with gorillas. Since entering politics Trump has managed to pluck the heartstrings of neo-Nazi luminaries like Richard Spencer, David Duke and Rocky Suhayda. It was Suhayda who pointed out that Trump’s 2016 victory represented “a real opportunity for people like white nationalists.”

Spencer and his audience cheered Trump's victory in 2016.

 

As a candidate, Trump said he might pay the legal fees for a white fan who sucker-punched a black protester, who was being led out of one of his rallies. Matthew Heimbach, an avowed white supremacist, assaulted an African American woman at another rally in March 2016. His lawyer later claimed that Heimbach could not be held to account, because his client had “acted pursuant to the directives and requests of Donald J. Trump and Donald J. Trump for President.” If his client was found liable, the attorney said, “any liability must be shifted to one or both of them.” 

The man who sits in the White House gives haters cover to spew whatever they want. Trump gave the Holocaust denier, Arthur Jones, hope enough to run for Congress. He hired Carl Higbie, who joked about having people bring guns to the border and perform target practice on illegals. Higbie had previously suggested that black women think “breeding is a form of government employment.” Later, while visiting Great Britain, the president retweeted posts from Katie Hopkins. Hopkins, a racist with a British accent, once famously compared dark-skinned immigrants coming into Europe to “cockroaches.” 

 

A twisted talent for stirring anger and fear, and fueling hatred. 

Twisted individuals often band together. It’s no surprise to find that one of Trump’s top aides is Stephen Miller. Miller is a soulless chap who subscribes to the “Great Replacement” myth. That is: Dark people are plotting to replace the white race in Europe and America. 

Miller was the warped genius behind the decision to lock up children in cages after they and their families tried to sneak across our border. Trump was in sympathy, all the way. 

Trump’s skill set includes a twisted talent for stirring anger and fear, and fueling hatred. In the fall of 2016, the man who wished to be president fired up his base by attacking NFL players who knelt in peaceful protest against police brutality. After he was elected, he claimed that protesting players, predominantly African American, were disrespecting our military, and our flag, and should lose their jobs. He said that if they didn’t like it, they should leave this country. When Jemele Hill, an African American sportscaster, labeled him a racist, Trump said she should be fired. He called kneeling players like Colin Kaepernick, sons-of-bitches. And police kept kneeling on the necks of others.

 

Trump has had almost a full term to learn to unite rather than divide. He has regressed. Last summer he suggested that four female members of Congress, all individuals of color who had criticized his policies, should go back to countries where they came from if they didn’t like it here. One of the four, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, was born in the Bronx. Ayanna Pressley was born in Cincinnati. Pressley’s ancestors arrived in America, via slave ship, long before the first Trump set foot on free soil in 1885. 

Now, with the nation torn by protest, we need a leader with empathy. The Great Divider is incapable. When he gazes in the mirror, he is looking at all the people he cares about most. 

Trump has never governed with all of us in mind. His default setting is to appeal to the base instincts of his base. It’s them against the rest of us, and if he can stir anger against “treasonous” Democrats, “flag-hating” liberals, “Enemies of the People” in the press, and his dark-skinned predecessor, he’s not only ready to do so, he’s in his element.

 

If you care to look, the word “hate” litters the president’s Twitter feed, like bodies in the wake of a pogrom. The Democrats “hate” our military, he says. His critics “hate” our country. His political opponents “hate” the Second Amendment. Trump hates anyone who criticizes or doubts him and works hard to get his base to hate them, too. 

Trump might claim to care about George Floyd. He doesn’t. He won’t care no matter how many African Americans are killed by police, because most would never vote for him. The police, in general, will. Trump might tweet a hundred times a day. He won’t tweet sympathy for Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old ER-tech, shot eight times by police. And shot by mistake. Or Botham Jean, shot and killed by mistake, while in his apartment. Or Greg Gunn, shot in the back by a police officer, while Gunn was walking home after a card game. Or Sean Reed, a 21-year-old veteran, shot while live-streaming the incident on Facebook, so that you could hear the cops laughing over his corpse. He’s going to need a “closed casket” funeral, one joked. You won’t hear the Great Divider speak with feeling about Ahmaud Arbery, the black jogger, gunned down by neighbors (watch the video), at any of his rallies. Because many who attend those rallies love their AR-15’s more than they love their darker neighbors.

 

If you were to ask President Trump, after three-and-a-half years in office, who these people are – Frederick Douglass, Trayvon Martin, or Eric Garner (who died because he was selling cigarettes illegally; more video) – he wouldn’t know. He wouldn’t know about Philando Castile (watch even more video if you’d like to see another senseless killing), Jordan Davis, William Green, Tamir Rice (killed at age 12, while wielding a toy pistol), Atatiana Jefferson (shot and killed by police in her own home) or Heather Heyer, a young white woman (run down and killed in 2017, by a white supremacist at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va.). 

Trump has continued to stoke the anger as cities he is supposed to care about have exploded. When protesters gathered outside the White House on a night in May, Trump boasted that if they had breached the main fence, they would have been met with “vicious dogs” and the “most ominous weapons” he had ever seen. 

He intimated that his critics – in this case protesters – were fake. Their anger was a hoax. Trump was one of many right-wing nuts who gave credence to the idea that survivors of the Parkland High School massacre were “crisis actors,” not kids justly shocked by the carnage they had endured. Now the president said the crowd at the White House gate was “professionally organized,” not comprised of Americans expressing outrage and dismay. He commended the Secret Service in a series of tweets, saying agents “let the ‘protesters’ scream & rant as much as they wanted, but whenever someone....got too frisky or out of line, they would quickly come down on them, hard – didn’t know what hit them.”  

George Floyd never knew what hit him either. But for Trump, the simpler the message, the better it is when it comes to riling up his base.

 

* 

REPORTERS have a chance to ask Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada what he thinks of Trump’s threat to use the military to stamp out protests. For 21 long seconds he pauses, a pause freighted with meaning. 

“We all watch in horror and consternation what’s going on in the United States,” he finally says. 

 

“There couldn’t be a scarier person inhabiting the White House.” 

Even Canada’s leading conservative newspapers are concerned with what’s happening to the south. “There couldn’t be a scarier person inhabiting the White House at this very moment,” Gary Mason, a writer for The Globe and Mail says. 

“My view is one of profound sadness – sadness at watching communities we respect being so torn apart, and sadness at watching the loss of life in the pandemic,” Frank McKenna, former Canadian ambassador to the United States, adds. “The United States is so polarized, the question of wearing a mask or not is fraught with political overtones. It’s excruciating to watch.”