Trump

He was supposed to be a great maker of things, but he was mostly a breaker.

This is a brutal piece by Rebecca Solnit on the privilege and cravenness of Donald Trump. Should be read by all Americans.

With Trump the usual advice of “Follow the money.” doesn’t work because Congress refuses to force him to disclose his conflicts of interest. As enormous and material as those conflicts must be, I’m just going to focus on what I can see with my own eyes, the man’s apparent intent.

In his public life, Donald Trump has never done anything that did not personally and directly benefit him. Most of us, as we go through life, assemble a collection of acts that are variously self-serving and other-serving. This is the way of life. Normal life. With Trump, not so. Even his meager philanthropic acts are tainted with controversy. The man simply cannot act in sacrificial way. He is incurable.^[In a campaign event in Fort Dodge, Iowa on November 12, 2015, Trump claimed that rival Ben Carson was “pathological” and that “…if you’re pathological, there’s no cure for that, folks, okay? There’s no cure for that.” Since Trump’s own psychopathology is widely questioned, one wonders if he, too, is incurable. Given that narcissistic personality disorder is almost certainly among the potential diagnoses, he probably is incurable.]

Someday, when I have time to burn, I’m going to write a Twitter bot that takes all of Trump’s vacuous tweets and translate them into Russian. It’ll look like this:

There’s something ludicrous about the idea of the Trump, who is distractible, impatient, and incurious being able to learn Russian, an incredibly difficult language.

I’ve long suspected that Trump regards the arts as an unnecessary nuisance for losers and suckers. High art for this hollow man is the vacuous reality television that made him famous. Now in his Federal budget, Trump offers proof. He proposes the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This is a man with no soul.

But in the closing lines of her lyric poem “Renascence”, Edna St. Vincent Millay has a warning:

An interesting perspective on resisting Trump by focusing on policy and not personality:

“The Italian experience provides a blueprint for how to defeat Mr. Trump. Only two men in Italy have won an electoral competition against Mr. Berlusconi: Romano Prodi and the current prime minister, Matteo Renzi (albeit only in a 2014 European election). Both of them treated Mr. Berlusconi as an ordinary opponent. They focused on the issues, not on his character. In different ways, both of them are seen as outsiders, not as members of what in Italy is defined as the political caste.”

Since the election in the U.S., my wife and I have supported the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and the Southern Poverty Law Center. So should you.

In internet speak, “to feed the troll” means to try to engage people online who are just trying to stir up discord for no other reason than to provoke people. Trolls are almost always insecure, psychologically-damaged people, if not full-blown psychopaths who lack the usual social barriers that most of us possess. Thus, a common piece of advice tossed about on the Internet is: “don’t feed the troll.” This is sound advice.

“The Trump Administration will be a law and order administration.”

- whitehouse.gov January 25, 2017

Some insight into women who voted for Trump.

“I think he’s a really good man, deep down. This guy has such potential, and I truly believe he cares about our country and wants to help everyone.”

Well, by everyone, you mean “those exactly like me.” Actually, how about “just me”.

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“But I had an 8-year-old who was totally on the Trump train. He talked me into taking him to a Trump rally.”

vicious neurotic,
blue blood coursing in black heart.
eyes piercing with lust.