How Americans Became Part of the Trump Family

[Celerity]

The president’s dark emotional inheritance has become the nation’s.

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/mary-trump-donald-trump-and-american-psyche/614251/



Here is part of an email alert that The New York Times sent to its readers over the weekend: “Breaking News: President Trump wore a mask publicly for the first time.” The announcement would not seem, at first glance, to merit the urgency. Breaking news is typically the stuff of shock, its revelations suggesting a rupture in the assumed order of things—and this was, after all, an update about face fabric. But the sad truth was that the bit of news, for all its absurdity, also deserved the designation. After months of resistance—the seeming result of vanity and spite and stubbornness—Donald Trump, on Saturday, had finally deigned to model the simple public-health protocol proven to halt the spread of a virus that has killed more than 129,000 Americans. Changing Trump’s mind—the result, reportedly, of negotiation and “pleading” on the part of his aides—wasn’t just an exercise in optics; it would save lives. The belated development could not qualify as good news. But it was news.

And it was a type of news that is, more than three years into the Trump era, all too familiar. Americans’ awareness of their president exists, now, at almost the cellular level: Never has the public been so intimately acquainted with the body of the executive, its impulses and its fickle humors. The 5 a.m. tweets tell us when he has awakened. Their tone tells us when he is angry, or indignant. Their ellipses invite us to fill in the blanks: What did he mean? What will he do next? Presidents, traditionally, have operated at a public remove; Trump, by contrast, is inescapable. News stories regularly report on his funks and his furies, turning what was once merely the subtext of national news events—the president’s feelings—into the text. The reporting is rational: Trump’s wayward whims are matters of national security. His rage can threaten. His pride can harm. That grim knowledge has turned Americans, over time, into a nation of armchair psychologists, struggling to understand the workings of one particular psyche. The efforts are fruitless, but they continue all the same. The public—both in spite of Donald Trump’s ubiquity, and because of it—remains ever tuned to his frequency.

Around the time that trump’s aides were finding ways to cajole their charge into putting on his mask, a book began to make its way around American media outlets. Too Much and Never Enough, by Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, is both a memoir and a manifesto. One of its theses is that the mind of the president, the subject of so much fixation, is beyond fixing. Donald Trump, she suggests, is not a riddle to be answered or a mystery to be solved; he is what he is, full stop. He is a tautology wrapped in a spray tan. And he has been what he is now, really, all along. Mary Trump, chastened by her own, earlier silence about her uncle’s unfitness for office, is sounding a belated alarm. People have suffered, she writes, because her uncle is incapable of understanding other people’s suffering. People have died because her uncle cares more about the illusion of competence than its realization. “His ability to control unfavorable situations by lying, spinning, and obfuscating,” she writes—a power he has relied on throughout his life—“has diminished to the point of impotence in the midst of the tragedies we are currently facing.”

With this psychographic reading of the president, Mary Trump is doing the work many other Americans have been: analyzing, decoding, explaining. She is, however, uniquely qualified for that effort. In addition to her membership in the Trump family, Mary Trump holds a doctoral degree in clinical psychology. (She also has a master’s degree in comparative literature: As political tell-alls go, her book is remarkably well written.) The author’s assessment of her uncle is both hedged and blunt. “I have no problem,” she writes, “calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label gets us only so far.” She adds that Trump likely has dependent personality disorder, an undiagnosed learning disability (making it difficult for him to process and retain new information about the world), and sleep disorders (likely related to his habit of ingesting some 12 Diet Cokes a day), and that he is also, very possibly, a sociopath. That helps to explain why the Trump family tried, and failed, to halt the book’s publication. And why the White House responded to the book’s claims using the familiar rhetoric of “fake news.” (The president’s press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, said of the book last week, “It’s ridiculous, absurd allegations that have absolutely no bearing in truth.” She added: “I have yet to see the book, but it is a book of falsehoods.”)

snip

[onecaliberal]

1. I am shook wafted watching Rachel's interview with Mary.

[Maru Kitteh]

2. Terrible illustration.

WAY too much brain. Should be more like:

[BigmanPigman]

3. Mary tRump also said he is a sadist, which we already knew.

All the enablers are sadists too.
Kids in cages, taking affordable/any health insur away from those who are dying, encouraging the harm of minorities, sexually assaulting women, instructing police to harm protesters and journalists, and allowing Putin to kill our troops Did I forget anything? Oh yeah, COVID!!!!!!!