Trump and the Apocalypse

From the beginning, the biggest problem with Donald Trump has been his deranged psychological state.

As numerous psychologists will tell you, Trump is a textbook malignant narcissist.

As noted repeatedly, but not enough, Trump’s existence is devoted to Trump, period.

Trump suffers (and he clearly DOES suffer) from “narcissistic personality disorder” or NPD.

Here are the manifestations of NPD. Judge for yourself whether they apply to Donald Trump:

• a grandiose sense of self-importance
• a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty or ideal love
• a belief in one’s specialness or uniqueness such that one can only be understood by associating with others of unique high status
• excessive self-admiration – arrogance and utter lack of humility.
• a sense of entitlement
• an exploitative personality
• a lack of empathy and unwillingness to  recognize or identify with the feelings
 and needs of others.

Since he arrived in the White House,  Trump as become even more obsessed with self. As he becomes threatened by his own frantic undoing and hubris, he grows ever more defensive, deceptive, unstable and angry. Growing paranoia is likely in the mix.

 His response is to lash out at not only his perceived “enemies," but those around him, those who don’t bow and scrape before him.

And so we anticipate more firings to come.

If it weren’t for his fragile mental health, we might survive the demise of a merely incompetent Donald Trump.  But with a deranged president faced with defeat and public humiliation, we are threatened with his power to take us all down in a fit of madness.

And by “us” I mean humanity.

Think no further than a mad man (in both senses of the word) who has a doomsday nuclear arsenal at his disposal.

We can only hope that sane minds in the nation’s capital are thinking along these same lines. 

How could they NOT be?

Trump, in a lesser, but still dangerous, scenario of madness and anger, could brandish presidential threats to protect his all-consuming ego by holding hostage the rule of law.

We have yet to learn whether last year his arrogance played a direct role in undermining our elections.

Some weeks back I wrote eight Republican senators who have been identified as possibly willing to put the nation (and humanity) before their partisan interests. I asked that they initiate the removal of Trump from office on the grounds of his mental instability.

Only John McCain responded. His short letter was largely political boiler-plate that, predictably, avoided the question of Trump’s mental health.

Since then, the president’s behavior has become all the more ominous.

It is not alarmist to say that a mentally unstable Donald Trump is a threat to humankind. It’s time for Republicans and Democrats, for those closest to the president, for his family, for all of us, to insist on and force his resignation or impeachment.

Trump's delusions are non-partisan grounds for impeaching him.

Today I concluded that the only way we can avoid catastrophe here and abroad is to impeach Donald Trump on the grounds that he is unfit for the office of the presidency.

This is not a partisan issue. Forget Trump's conflicts of interests etc.

And forget your own worthy causes, even the ones Trump supports.

Trump's unfitness is caused by mental illness, plain and simple. He is, in a word, delusional (to say nothing of being a pathological narcissist, sexual predator and liar).

His delusions have spread to his enabling closest advisers, whose moral immune systems have been suppressed by their own lust for power.

I wish I could say this were a metaphor, but it is literally true, Alas, there are no Trumpian “alternative” truths. Ask any mental health professional.

Regardless of where we stand on the issues, we have a patriotic duty to be laser focused on impeaching a President dangerously unfit for office by virtue of his mental illness.

Trump's 'Gifts' to America could spell impeachment

One great “gift” that Donald Trump has given "We the People" forces us to break the mold on how we think about political divisions in this country.

In the weeks ahead we will forget Republicans and Democrats and the seemingly rigid divide between the two, particularly in Congress.

We will forget Liberals and Conservatives.

And yes, with time, we will even be able to put aside “Red” and “Blue” states.

The last to fall will be our growing class, racial and educational divisions although our history tells us that those will be a long, long time coming.

(Note in passing: we have already forgotten Hillary Clinton. That clears the air and leaves Trump to be judged free of Clinton baggage and fake news “distractions.” )

So what will end these divisions?

Two words: Donald Trump — but not in the dictatorial way he would imagine.

The answer to the question brings us to Trump’s greatest gift. The realignment is going to be over the values of Trump (if they can be called that) versus the bed-rock values of the large majority of Americans.

Trump and initially his Russian friends are forcing us to rediscover and defend our values.

Welcome to a world divided into pro-Trump versus pro-democracy. Pro-dictatorship versus Pro-Freedom.

And finally: Pro-Lies and pro-Truth.

The first place the divide will become obvious will be in the confirmation hearings in the Senate. The Senate is packed with people with very large egos who have been deeply and personally offended by the President-elect. One does not forget insults to one’s military service, to one’s wife or father or the size of one’s privates.

Those senators, all of them Republicans, have not forgotten.

And so we have Lindsay Graham and John McCain stepping up.  Can Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio be far behind? If they and a few of others join in, initially on concerns about national security and Russian subterfuge, we suddenly have an anti-Trump majority in the Senate.

Knowing Trump, he will proceed with further ad hominem attacks. Expect the anti-Trump Senate majority to grow and solidify, possibly killing the whole Trump agenda and rejecting virtually all of his cabinet nominees.

That will only infuriate the self-obsessed Trump more. He will dig his hole deeper and deeper.

Did anyone say “Impeachment”?

Impeachment slogan baffles hundreds

If I was going to get the attention of a few hundred motorists at our Friday evening Hillsdale peace vigils, I decided I needed to freshen my message.

“Get out Now!” and “On to Plan B: Impeach” were getting stale.

So with very little thought and too much whimsy, I scrawled out:

“Impeachment: Sur La Table! Nancy”

Because I arrived at the busy corner of Capitol Highway and Sunset Boulevard early, before my fellow protesters, my new sign had no context.

There I was alone, waving a really weird sign.

Drivers who cared enough to notice seemed mildly perplexed.

What’s that? Some kind of shill for Sur La Table, the up-scale cooking utensil store in the Pearl District?

James Beard meets Robert’s Rules of Order?

Nancy?

Nancy who?

Thankfully, my fellow demonstrators soon arrived with their same-old, same-old, but lucid signs. "Support our troops. Bring them home!" and such.

Motorists began honking encouragement again.

I was about to give up on my sign when a woman behind the wheel gave me an expansive thumbs up along with a bumper-to-bumper smile.

Astonished, I pointed at the sign and looked at her quizzically — just to make sure she got it.

Yes, she nodded demonstratively. Two thumbs up. YES!

I continued to hoist the sign. Eventually two other drivers broadly shared their approval.

It was a stretch, but they got the reference to (just in case you didn’t) Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. They knew that she had declared impeachment was “off the table,” and they understood the translation from the French to be “on the table.”

Yes, yes, and YES!

So it was fun while it lasted, but, let’s face it, it’s all too clever by half.

So what next?

I'm thinking, I'm thinking ....

The President as Quagmire

We think of quagmires as places, ensnaring traps such as Vietnam and, of course, Iraq — and perhaps the entire Middle East.

The fact is that this country's quagmire is not a place, but a man, George W. Bush.

We are torso-deep in the devastating muck and ooze of Bush and his venal. power-mad administration — and we are going down fast.

As the original quagmire metaphor suggests, the answer is to drain the swamp.

In a word, impeach.

Right story; Wrong page

It's time to play "You be the editor" again.

Where would you put a story bearing the headline "'05 Incomes, on Average, Still Below 2000 peak"?

If you were the editors of the New York Times, you put it on the front page of today's business page, on the left, in a single column one-third of the way down the page.

Hardly prime journalism real estate.

But isn't this story of general interest? Isn't it worthy of the front page? Isn't it, at the very least, a political story? Note the politically pivotal year 2000, the year the Supreme Court elected George Bush.

Delve into the story and it becomes all the more newsworthy.

Remember the Bush tax cuts for the rich, which are still in effect?

Their unfairness is all right here. "People with incomes of more than a million dollars also received 62 percent of the savings from the reduced tax rates on long-term capital gains and dividends that President Bush signed into law in 2003.... 28 percent of the investment tax cut savings went to just 11,433 (My note: That's roughly the population of Hillsdale and Bridlemile neighborhoods) of the 134 million taxpayers, those who made $10 million or more, saving them almost $1.9 million each. Over all this small number of wealthy Americans saved $21.7 billion in taxes on their investment incomes as a result of the tax-cut law.... the nearly 90 percent of Americans who made less than $100,000 a year saved on average $318 each on their investments."

As you ponder these numbers, guess who is going to be paying for the war in Iraq for years to come.

The article, by the way, is written by David Cay Johnston, author of "Perfectly Legal: The Covert Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich - and Cheat Everybody Else," a book guaranteed to make your blood boil.

In short, we've been ripped off in every which way by this plutocratic, power-mad administration.

Folks, it's time to get serious about impeachment, if only to air out the White House closets before the next resident arrives.

P.S. The good news is that the story was in the Times. Let's see whether The Oregonian considers it worthy of publication.