The Malignant Cruelty of Donald Trump

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The president is defaming the memory of a woman who died nearly 20 years ago—and inflicting pain upon her family today.

May 26, 2020
Peter Wehner

“I’m asking you to intervene in this instance because the President of the United States has taken something that does not belong to him—the memory of my dead wife—and perverted it for perceived political gain.”

There may be a more damning thing that’s been said about an American president, but none immediately comes to mind.

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That Donald Trump would resort to conspiracy theories to attack his perceived enemies is hardly a revelation. After all, Trump employed a racist conspiracy theory against Barack Obama, which helped him gain political prominence in the Republican Party, and later claimed that President Obama had wiretapped his phones. During the 2016 primary, Trump linked Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael, to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and retweeted a supporter who claimed that Marco Rubio was ineligible to run because his parents were not natural-born U.S. citizens. Trump suggested that the suicide of Vince Foster, a former aide to President Bill Clinton, and the death of former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia were murders; that childhood vaccines cause autism; and that windmills cause cancer. He’s claimed that climate change is “a total and very expensive hoax” by China’s government, that a cybersecurity company framed Russia for election interference, that Ukraine was hiding Hillary Clinton’s missing emails, and that voter fraud cost him the popular vote in 2016. (Business Insider provided a useful summary of more than two dozen of Trump’s conspiracy theories in October.)

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A lot of human casualties result from the cruelty of malignant narcissists like Donald Trump—casualties, it should be said, that his supporters in the Republican Party, on various pro-Trump websites and news outlets, and on talk radio are willing to tolerate or even defend. Their philosophy seems to be that you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet. If putting up with Trump’s indecency is the price of maintaining power, so be it. Will Trump’s white evangelical supporters—Franklin Graham Jr., Robert Jeffress, Eric Metaxas, Mike Huckabee, Ralph Reed—defend his behavior as the perfect embodiment of the New Testament ethic, the credo of Jesus, the message from the Sermon on the Mount? “Blessed are the brutal, for they shall inherit the Earth.”

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Remember, Trump’s approval rating was often well under 50 percent even when the economy was doing well and America was at relative peace abroad. There’s plenty of evidence, including the 2018 midterm elections, that Trump’s dehumanizing tactics erode his support, especially among white suburban women. And I rather doubt that people will have forgotten Trump’s reckless handling of the pandemic by November; defaming the memory of a woman who died nearly two decades ago and causing renewed grief for her family isn’t likely to help him with most voters, either.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/malignant-cruelty-donald-trump/612097/

[oswaldactedalone]

1. Trump is the leader

of the #DeepSlate of criminal actors selling out America.

[Eyeball_Kid]

2. Trump uses Klausutis to go after Scarborough. He's a sociopath.

What else can be expected? Trump will brazenly cheat to win re-election.

We all know it's coming, just like Christmas. Trump is awake all night planning his next big heist. The election is just a hurdle to clear. He has no limitations on dishonesty and criminal intent.

Fascists love him.

He's planning on going in for the kill. The victim? The Constitution. He's going to kill the Constitution. And he'll do it in front of 320 million people. Hell, he has no qualms about killing 100k people. Killing the Constitution ought to be easy.

Yeah, we can vote. But Trumpy-boy doesn't give a shit about voting. It's an annoyance to him. He's a tyrant. And tyrants don't flinch when destroying a democracy. They go right to the heart and drive a stake through it. His base will cheer him on. So will the Republican Party.