Maybe Donald Trump Really Is Just A Moron

Lying and tantrums aside, evidence shows Trump's most important, and dangerous, feature is his ignorance.

By S.V. Date for HuffPost

Exactly 10 days after taking the presidential oath of office early this year, Donald Trump nearly drowned dozens, potentially hundreds, of his own citizens in California’s Central Valley.

Trump, unilaterally, decided he would solve Los Angeles’ wildfire problem by “opening up” taps to let billions of gallons of water being stored in two reservoirs in the Sierra Nevada foothills flow into Southern California.

“Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California. Today, 1.6 billion gallons and, in 3 days, it will be 5.2 billion gallons,” he bragged on social media, along with a photo of water flowing in a stream. “Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory! I only wish they listened to me six years ago – There would have been no fire!”

Except not a single drop of those billions of gallons could possibly have made it to Los Angeles or anywhere even close. They would have, however, overflowed the banks of rivers leading out of Lake Kaweah and Success Lake, threatening residents in communities on their shores.

“It was clearly nothing but a poor publicity stunt. And it was a dangerous one,” California Democratic Sen. Alex Padilla said at the time. “An unexpected, non-noticed release threatens lives, threatens the safety of communities if you flood somewhere without the proper coordination.”

Disaster, quite possibly including drowned residents, was averted thanks to quick action by local water management officials who talked the Army Corps of Engineers down from carrying out Trump’s order to open the floodgates on the two dams to maximum capacity and persuaded them to release a lesser amount instead.

That, however, did not stop Trump from continuing to boast about his decision, adding in the hydrologically impossible claim that the water in question had originated in Canada. “The water comes down from the northwest parts of Canada, I guess, and ― but the Pacific Northwest and it comes down by millions and millions of barrels a day. And I opened it up,” he said at the National Prayer Breakfast on Feb. 6.

“Thank you very much, Canada, we appreciate it,” he said at an Oval Office photo opportunity two months later. “They had all that water pouring out right into the Pacific. They had a big valve, like a giant valve as big as this room and they turned the valve. Takes one day to turn it.”

University of Michigan psychology professor David Dunning, one of the co-discoverers of the “Dunning-Kruger effect” that describes how some people with little competence in any specific field nevertheless overestimate their level of expertise, said he was hard-pressed to explain Trump’s belief that water from Canada somehow flows to California, except for their relative placement on a standard map of North America.

“People take things they know and misapply them,” Dunning said. “In his case, north is up and south is down, and I’m guessing here, because water flows down, if he opens up the tap, water will flow down from Canada to irrigate the crops in California.”

White House aides did not respond to queries about Trump’s decision that wasted billions of gallons of water or, for that matter, any other issues for this story.

Whatever Trump’s actual thought process, the episode offers just one example of Trump’s failure to understand a problem but a willingness to nevertheless make a decision based on a conspiracy theory he has heard about, the uninformed speculation of one of his country club members or even just a whim grounded in nothing more than supreme confidence in his own “gut instinct.”

These decisions are distinct from policies his administration has pursued in his second term that are long-standing aspirations of the Republican Party and its dominant wing that Trump seized control of a decade ago. Striking Iranian nuclear sites, deploying ICE en masse across the country, cutting Medicaid, extending and deepening tax cuts, defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — all of these things might have happened under any GOP president, particularly one who rode to power on anti-establishment, anti-elite populism.

A host of other Trump decisions, though, do not spring from well-developed or even hastily dashed-off ideologies. There is no conservative think tank, for example, churning out white papers proposing to end wildfires by dumping water into the ground 200 miles away. They result from the nation’s 47th president believing something comically incorrect and clinging to it in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

They happen because the president is astonishingly ignorant — in the words of one of his top advisers in the first term, “a moron.”

Some of these beliefs, such as the insistence that sea-level rise will somehow create more oceanfront property, have little real-world impact. 

Others have had major consequences. Trump’s certainty that other countries pay tariff revenue to the United States has created a drag on the U.S. and global economies, spiking prices for consumers and battering domestic farmers and manufacturers.

That he is willing to go to the mat for patently incorrect ideas in this second term, of course, should come as little surprise. In his first term, he embellished a hurricane tracking map with his magic marker, making it appear that cities in Alabama were in the storm’s path. It led to alarmed calls and forced the local National Weather Service office to issue a statement that there was no threat.

Most famously, he once extrapolated from a scientist’s finding that ordinary disinfectants killed the COVID-19 pathogen on hard surfaces to suggest that people could inject it into their bodies to eliminate the virus. Makers of Clorox and other products rushed out statements warning against ingesting them.

“I’ve never met anyone else remotely like him,” said Charles Leerhsen, who co-wrote Trump’s book, “Surviving at the Top” in 1990. “He is and was profoundly stupid, completely lacking in intellectual curiosity.”

‘A fucking moron’

Getting to the root cause of Trump’s ignorance, which appears to be as broad as it is deep, is complicated by his tireless mendacity.

Does Trump actually believe an obviously false idea is true? Or is he simply lying — that is, he knows what he is saying is false but is saying it nevertheless? Those who have worked with him say it’s sometimes hard to distinguish.

“He can’t tell the difference between truth and falsehood,” said John Bolton, who served as one of Trump’s national security advisers in his first term and who was recently raided by the FBI following his repeated criticisms of Trump on television. “A lie is knowing something is not true and saying it anyway. For Trump, it’s sort of what he wants it to be, and he kind of makes up things.”

Others have been more blunt about Trump’s relationship with knowledge and facts.

Annie Leibovitz, the iconic photographer who has done multiple sessions with Trump, said in 2018: “You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don’t.”

Former top aides from his first term in office famously made their views known to one another to describe their boss. Defense Secretary James Mattis reportedly said Trump had the understanding of a “fifth- or sixth-grader,” while chief of staff John Kelly once called him an “idiot.”

Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is said to have called him a “moron,” which was clarified later as a “fucking moron.”

Tillerson at the time did not deny having called Trump that and could not be reached for comment.

However, in a 2018 appearance at a cancer center benefit, he publicly described details that were actually far more damning: “A man who is pretty undisciplined, doesn’t, doesn’t like to read, doesn’t read briefing reports, doesn’t, doesn’t like to get into the details of a lot of things, but rather, just kind of says, ‘Look, this is what I believe, and you can try to convince me otherwise.’ But most of the time, you’re not going to do that.”

Trump’s own statements through the years provide plenty of evidence for those assessments and, beyond that, suggest a lack of understanding of physics, geometry and even simple arithmetic.

In the first months upon re-taking office, for instance, Trump repeatedly told audiences that the war in Ukraine was especially deadly because of the lack of hills.

“You know, the bullet ― very flat land, as I said, and the bullet goes, there’s no, there’s no hiding, and a bullet, the only thing going to stop the bullet is a human body,” he told the World Economic Forum on Jan. 23 via a video feed.

In reality, bullets, like everything else, are affected by gravity and fall to the ground at an accelerating rate. What’s more, any number of things can stop a bullet, including cars, walls, trees and so on.

To push his false claim that climate change is a “Chinese hoax,” Trump says that even if it were true, what would be the harm, as it would create more valuable land. “You’ll have more oceanfront property,” he said several times during his 2024 campaign.

His belief defies common sense. While rising sea levels may temporarily create more shoreline in localized areas with inland valleys, the total amount of oceanfront land decreases as water height increases.

More recently, Trump has taken to claiming that he will reduce the price of prescription drugs by mathematically impossible amounts.

“We’re going to get the drug prices down — not 30 or 40%, which would be great, not 50 or 60. No, we’re going to get them down 1,000%, 600%, 500%, 1,500%,” he said at a July reception for Republican members of Congress.

For Trump’s claim to be correct, pharmacies would have to refund many times the value of a prescription each time they filled one. A medication costing $100, for instance, would have to be handed to the patient at no charge along with $1,400 in cash.

Info from randos

Among the biggest challenges faced by his aides during his first term was countering Trump’s predilection for believing outlandish claims, regardless of their source, even though he had at his fingertips a vast network of agencies created specifically to obtain and catalogue information.

Instead, Trump solicits the opinions of his old friends in New York real estate and the members of his various country clubs in Florida and New Jersey, those close to him say. And when no one in the White House or his agencies is willing to correct him, the predictable happens.

“He talks to people who are members of the Mar-a-Lago club, or he talks to people at receptions, and they tell him things, and he takes them as true, even if his intelligence people are telling him to the contrary,” Bolton said.

He recalled an instance where Trump falsely insisted, based on information from one of his friends, that the United States had extensive land holdings in Japan that could be sold off. “We spent weeks chasing it down,” Bolton said. “But in Trump’s mind, if he knows something that the intelligence people don’t know or his advisers don’t know, it just verifies to him that he’s the only one who really knows everything.”

“If you don’t have people close to him willing to stand up to him and tell him ‘no,’ then his crazy thoughts become crazy policy,” said one current top Trump adviser on condition of anonymity.

A different friend, a fellow golfer who plays Trump’s courses, according to another top Trump adviser, was behind two separate conspiracy theories that Trump accepted as gospel.

The first claimed that illegal immigrants had voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in droves in 2016 by casting a ballot, then going out to their cars to don different shirts and different hats, then going back in to vote again — and repeating this process for hours.

Trump actually created a task force to investigate illegal voting based on this tip in May 2017. It disbanded quietly in early 2018 after finding nothing.

The golfer friend’s second important tip was that the U.S. Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Gerald Ford, was having F-18 fighter planes falling overboard and sinking because its high-tech electromagnetic launch system was not providing enough thrust for the planes to get airborne.

Trump’s response to this information — which was completely false — was to repeatedly order Pentagon officials to tear apart the already completed carrier and replace the new system, which was specifically developed to reduce stress on the planes at takeoff, with decades-old steam catapults.

The military’s strategy for dealing with the nonsensical order was to ignore it, correctly assuming that Trump would eventually forget and move on to something else. In the case of the Gerald Ford, it appears to have worked. The carrier is now in service using the electromagnetic launch system that Trump, when he is reminded of it, continues to deride.

‘I’m, like, a smart person’

Notwithstanding proof of his profound ignorance, though, Trump has, through the years, insisted that he possesses a genius-level intellect.

Among his favorite phrases is “I know more about,” followed by the subject in question.

“I understand the polls a lot better than many of the pollsters understood the polls,” he said in early 2017.

“Technology — nobody knows more about technology than me,” he boasted in a 2018 Fox News interview.

“I know better than anybody about sanctions, and tariffs and everything else,” he said in July at a White House photo opportunity.

“’I know more about grass than any human being, I think, anywhere in the world,” he said two weeks ago.

In March of 2020, in one of his early coronavirus news conferences he staged in the Rose Garden, Trump was asked why the United States had a worse testing rate for the virus than South Korea. Trump responded: “I know South Korea better than anybody.” And then, to prove it, he added: “Do you know how many people are in Seoul? Do you know how big the city of Seoul is? Thirty-eight million people.”

In fact, Seoul’s 9.6 million population is a mere fraction of that number. (It does, however, have an elevation of 38 meters — abbreviated “38 m” on its Wikipedia page).

Just five weeks later, Trump told reporters during a visit to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta that he fully understood the science behind vaccine research and suggested it might have been because his uncle had taught at MIT.

“I like this stuff. I really get it,” he said. “People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.”

And as much as Trump has bragged about his own intellect through the years, he has simultaneously denigrated that of others.

He has repeatedly called all his predecessors in the job “stupid” for having forged trade agreements that — in Trump’s inaccurate view — allowed other nations to “cheat” the United States. He calls critics “dumb” and “not smart” and, frequently, “low IQ.”

“He’s an average mentally person, I’d say low in terms of what he does. Low, low IQ for what he does,” Trump said of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who is widely credited with guiding the U.S. economy out of the pandemic without bringing on a recession. “I think he’s a very stupid person, actually.”

Marc Short, who worked in Trump’s White House as Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, said Trump’s certainty about his own views was the norm. “He just generally believes that we are all wrong and he is right,” Short said.

According to Dunning, that particular trait of believing you know more than experts in pretty much every field goes far beyond the typical case of Dunning-Kruger.

“That’s an added layer,” Dunning said. “That’s self-deception.”

Trump does occasionally show flashes of intelligence. On the matter of daylight saving time, Trump earlier this year succinctly explained the pros and cons of keeping it year-round and concluded it was best left alone. On a more visceral level, he is adept at lashing out when put on the defensive, often with a low-brow insult that delights his devoted followers.

George Conway, who first met Trump during a Manhattan condo board dispute two decades ago, supported him during his 2016 campaign, but quickly became a vocal critic after Trump took office, said Trump clearly possesses at least one form of intelligence: the ability to sense weakness in others.

“It’s a psychopath’s emotional intelligence,” Conway said. “He can smell fear, and he can smell whether people are complying. He’s not intelligent in the sense that he absorbs information.”

A danger to the country

Ordinarily when the Army Corps of Engineers is planning to release water from its reservoirs, it coordinates with state and local officials days and weeks ahead of time to ensure it is done safely and productively.

During the winter months, when water is typically not released because it is not needed by farmers downstream, local maintenance crews use the opportunity to clear the channel of debris and perform other maintenance. Homeless people often set up camps near the waterways, which also draw anglers and other recreational users.

On Jan. 30, this extensive coordination never happened. To honor Trump’s order, Army Corps officials notified local authorities at around noon that it would be fully opening the floodgates that same evening.

“There was very, very little notice,” said Peter Gleick, a hydrology expert at the Pacific Institute in Oakland.

It was only because state and local water managers were able to persuade the Army Corps not to release the maximum flow of water that the channels did not flood. In the end, water flowed out of the reservoirs at 2,500 cubic feet per second, rather than the 5,000 the Army Corps had originally planned. They ended the dump after three days, with 2.5 billion gallons released, well short of the 5.2 billion Trump had bragged about.

Every bit of that was wasted after having flowed into a lake bed with no outlet. Much evaporated, while some percolated down into the ground — long before the summer months when farmers would actually need it.

Trump, apparently unaware that the Army Corps did not carry out his instructions as he had ordered — and thereby potentially saving lives and billions in property damage — continues to brag about his decision to this day.

“We actually sent in our military to have the water come down into L.A.,” he said, falsely, at the Aug. 11 news conference he staged to announce his takeover of Washington’s police department.

The idea that rain falling in Canada manages to flow to Southern California, despite multiple mountain ranges separating them, remains lodged in Trump’s mind.

“There’s absolutely no way, short of putting it in tanker trucks, to get that water to Los Angeles,” Gleick said. “There is zero Canadian water coming to California. There is no way. That water transfer is happening in Donald Trump’s head.”

Because of the refusal of the Army Corps staff to carry out Trump’s demand — which may technically have been insubordination under military rules — the water release episode appears to have passed without permanent harm.

Nevertheless, Trump’s decision-making is highly impulsive, based on his “gut instincts” rather than actual research, so it is impossible to predict whether or when his ignorance might next endanger people’s lives as it did in California’s Central Valley.

His inability or unwillingness to discern and use accurate information, however, is already hurting Americans in the one area where many of them believed he would help: his stewardship of the economy. Trump picked up his trade war where he had left off at the end of his first term, only this time, instead of focusing on China, he has broadened it to the entire world based on his failure to understand how tariffs work.

Trump, again calling his predecessors in the Oval Office “stupid” for not sharing in his confusion about international trade, started imposing high import taxes — paid entirely by Americans — immediately upon taking office. While those new levies were delayed several times, they are now finally taking hold, with consumer prices expected to increase even more in the coming months and job creation expected to slow.

Trump, falsely, continues to claim that the tariffs are somehow paid by exporters, even though his own economic advisers have tried to set him straight.

“It’s been explained many times, but he continues to repeat it,” Short said.

The willingness of at least some advisers to tell Trump he was wrong is likely the starkest contrast between his first four years and now, when his aides seem more keen to prove their loyalty by telling him what he wants to hear.

Likely exacerbating that is Trump’s embrace of autocracy and his eagerness to impose major policies without the approval of Congress or the states — meaning that Trump may well be even more willing to plow ahead with his ideas, facts be damned.

“You don’t have to be that smart to be an authoritarian,” Conway said. “All you need is a complete lack of conscience and restraint, an insatiable desire for control, worship and revenge, and a simple understanding of what makes people afraid. Trump’s reptilian intelligence meets that inglorious standard.”

Let's apply the Biden rule to talking about Trump's health

Alert the media: The White House is lying about Trump's health

From The Onion

Their explanations are absurd and it's time to start asking questions.

Donald Trump held a bonkers press conference on August 22 during which he lied about his authoritarian occupation of Washington DC and fantasized about sending troops to occupy other cities with Black leaders.

Given the stakes, it might seem inappropriate to focus on attire. Trump, however, was noticeably casual for an Oval Office event. Unless he’s on the golf course, he typically wears a suit with an obligatory red tie. But he didn’t bother with a tie, and he wore a baseball cap that boasted “Trump Was Right About Everything.”

Trump’s boundless egomania is not unusual, but the head covering did raise larger questions. He also made a determined effort to hide the back of his right hand from cameras.

Trump wanted to hide his right hand for a reason. Pictures show it slathered with what seems like several coats of Sherwin-Williams.

Trump’s hand still looked rough during a later press event where his hand was no longer coated with makeup, but visibly bruised.

Something clearly is up with the 79-year-old president, and the official explanations don’t make sense. That’s not surprising given that Trump is a world-class liar surrounded by toadies who surrendered their shame long ago. But it’s past time for reporters to ask some questions.

The mainstream media are still in self-flagellation mode over how they purportedly “ignored” former President Joe Biden’s decline. (In reality, they never stopped talking about.) But this soul-searching is apparently only backward looking and exclusive to Democratic presidents.

Trump has never behaved in a manner you could reasonably define as “rational,” but since returning to power, he’s been more unhinged than ever — launching destructive trade wars, persecuting his political enemies, and sending troops into US cities. Biden’s age was an ongoing story even while he otherwise governed like a normal person, but so far the media has not even considered a connection between Trump’s disordered actions and his health.

How sick is Trump?

In response to images of his obviously ailing hands and swollen ankles, the White House revealed in July that Trump has chronic venous insufficiency (CVI), a condition that occurs when the leg veins become damaged and struggle to send blood back up to the heart.

Trump’s physician, Navy Capt. Sean Barbabella, acknowledged the hand issues in a July memo that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt read to the press pool.

“This is consistent with minor soft tissue irritation from frequent handshaking and the use of aspirin, which is taken as part of a standard cardiovascular prevention regimen,” she claimed.

Yes, Leavitt — who has a skill for stating total bullshit with conviction — really leaned into the handshaking excuse. She told the Daily Beast that “President Trump is a man of the people, and he meets more Americans and shakes their hands on a daily basis than any other president in history.”

In case you find that explanation unpersuasive, Leavitt offered another one. She claimed bruising is a “well known and benign side effect of aspirin therapy.” This should’ve set off alarms or at least mild curiosity from the White House press corps.

Aspirin therapy is traditionally prescribed in people with heart disease or who are at a high risk of it. Low-dose aspirin is a blood-thinning medication, and popping them like a daily multivitamin carries significant risks, such as gastrointestinal bleeding and a stroke caused by a burst blood vessel. In fact, most medical guidelines generally reject daily aspirin use for people who have low risk of a heart attack or stroke, particularly those over the age of 60 who are more prone to bleeding side effects.

Against that backdrop, it’s shocking that since July, no major news outlets have done serious investigations about Trump’s health and what the White House is trying to cover up about it.

Trump received a coronary calcium CT scan as part of a routine physical exam in 2018. His previous White House physician, Ronny Jackson — who also demonstrated an absurd willingness to lie about Trump’s health — revealed that Trump’s coronary calcium score was 133 (anything over 100 indicates heart disease in the patient).

And yet the media seems to have accepted Leavitt’s “frequent handshaking” diagnosis. Photos from last Saturday showed Trump with bruising on his left hand too. Are we to believe that he’s double-fisting his handshakes now?

Red, blistered, and peeling skin, as well as swollen hands and feet, are considered serious side effects from aspirin therapy. Trump is incredibly vain. It’s hard to imagine that he would accept a treatment whose side effects are even slightly disfiguring unless absolutely necessary. It doesn’t require going down the rabbit hole of tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories to simply ask some basic questions about the president’s health.

It’s reasonable to question the Trump administration’s candor about his actual condition. In April, Barbabella released a glowing physical exam that declared, “President Trump remains in excellent health, exhibiting robust cardiac, pulmonary, neurological, and general physical function.” Has Trump’s health declined since then, or was Barbabella misleading people?

Don’t believe your lying eyes

Rich Lowry at the National Review dismisses the very idea that Trump is in decline. He wrote last week that “of all the criticisms to make of him, that he’s frail and easily fatigued is preposterous.”

But it’s far less preposterous if you remove your MAGA hat and actually look at Trump in public. He fell asleep several times in court during his criminal case in New York (yes, that was just last year). During a meeting in Saudi Arabia this May, Trump looked like he was about to doze off like a tired grandpa right after dinner.

Last month, Trump could barely keep his eyes open during a televised White House event on “Making Health Technology Great Again,” and he struggled to stay awake during an event in Pennsylvania. Moreover, visible bruising from “excessive” handshaking would suggest a Montgomery Burns-level of frailty. 

Barbabella described CVI as “a benign and common condition,” which it arguably is for a 79 year old who is not the sitting president. But Biden was never graded on so generous a curve. 

Consider a 2022 hit job in The Hill that claimed his “recent memory lapses, losses of temper and outbursts (such as calling one Fox News reporter’s question ‘stupid,’ or referring to another reporter as a ‘stupid son of a bitch’ while talking into a microphone) could be considered clues to possible cognitive problems.”

Biden’s temper was hardly a new development, and linking these “outbursts” to cognitive impairment requires audacity after Trump spent his first term posting unhinged screeds on social media. 

And finally, this

His childish cyberbullying has since advanced to straight-up mobster shakedowns in broad daylight of politicians, universities, and private companies.

Whenever Biden confused the names of world leaders, it was front page news. But Trump also frequently flubbed names on the campaign trail. On Monday, a confused Trump called Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer "Kristi — uh, Kristi Whitman. Whitmer.”

If the media unquestionably accepts Trump’s CVI diagnosis, they should at least badger Leavitt with questions about how Trump is managing his condition. CVI tends to develop in people who spend a lot of time on their feet and midterm campaign season is arriving soon. Will Trump still have his regular hate rallies?

The relentless coverage of Biden’s age reinforced a public perception about his fitness. So Trump and Republicans in general benefit when the media shrugs off his obvious health issues as Trump just being Trump.

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Trump’s Rollback of Rules for Mental Health Coverage Could Lead More Americans to Go Without Care

Trump often blames mental illness for social problems but is now monkey-wrenching coverage for treatment

By Maya Miller and Jeremy Kohler for ProPublica

Speaking of mental illness, this is one of four new portraits
Trump has had the White House display. Priorities.

During his first term, President Donald Trump frequently turned to the issue of mental health, framing it as a national crisis that demanded action. He linked it to opioid addiction, mass shootings and a surge in veteran suicides — and he later used it to argue against COVID-19 lockdowns and school closures.

At times, he backed up his rhetoric with action. His administration issued tens of millions of dollars in grants to expand community mental health services and continued funding contracts to help federal regulators enforce the parity law, which requires insurers to treat mental and physical health care equally.

But just months after Trump returned to the presidency this year, his administration paused new rules issued in President Joe Biden’s final months that were designed to strengthen mental health protections and hold insurance companies accountable when they unlawfully denied coverage. That pause came after an industry group that advocates for large employers on issues related to employee benefits filed a lawsuit seeking to block the new rules.

What’s more, Congress has curtailed funding for the Employee Benefits Security Administration, or EBSA, a small agency in the Department of Labor that enforces mental health parity in most employer-sponsored health insurance plans. The squeeze is largely due to the expiration of temporary supplemental funding Congress approved just weeks after Biden was elected president but before he took office.

While the impact of these changes is hard to measure, federal employees, policy experts and front-line workers warn that suspending the rules and cutting enforcement funding could have serious consequences. They say it could mean longer waits for help when patients challenge insurance decisions, fewer investigations of insurers and employer health plans over possible violations of federal mental health protections, and more people going without care they’re legally entitled to.

Their long-term predictions include more untreated mental illness and growing anger at insurers.

How we trick ourselves into believing things that aren't true

 

It's all right there in front of us

The Violence Trump responds to is actually the violence in His mind

Darkness Visible

Dr. Bandy X. Lee

Trump at his big, beautiful June 14 birthday
military parade in DC

The nation is now watching it unfold.

We mental health experts have long warned that internal states determine external manifestations, and that the dangerousness evident to us in Donald Trump would result in dire consequences if we did not intervene. His deployment of the National Guard in Washington, DC, and seizing control of its police force is just the kind of manifestation we warned against.

His claim that the nation’s capital is “lawless” and is “one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the world” of course has no validity in reality. 

Many had hoped that reality would curb him, be it the Covid-19 pandemic or the January 6 insurrection—but when an overwhelming internal reality blinds one to external reality, he will not see what the rest of us see.

It does not matter that violent crime in DC is at a 30-year low, just as there has been no rhyme or reason to his sending out more than 4000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Southern California to quell imaginary “lawlessness” in June.

Here is the real reason: he said Los Angeles would be “the first, perhaps, of many,” as immigration raids erupt all over the country under his authorization. “You know, we didn’t attack this one very strongly. You’ll have them all over the country.” Now, he is fulfilling his promise, and it will only grow worse over time.

Indeed, his psychopathology almost guarantees that violence will be unleashed, primarily against those who represent what he never had—which is why caregiver-child bonds were among the first he targeted at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Trump interview on CNBC shows he's 'Living in a Fantasy World'

Weird claims about statistics, inflation, the price of gas and groceries, jobs, farmworkers, trade deals continue to raise questions about his sanity 

Brad Reed for Common Dreams

Donald Trump gave a lengthy interview to CNBC  and critics quickly pounced on the president for telling a large number of false claims on topics ranging from monthly jobs numbers to the price of gas to international trade agreements.

Toward the start of the interview, CNBC host Joe Kernen pushed back on Trump's claims that the Bureau of Labor Statistics had "rigged" job creation numbers against him and debunked a Trump statement that the BLS had covered up negative jobs data revisions under the Biden administration until after the November 2024 presidential election.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Trump, however, insisted that his statements about hiding downward revisions until after the election were correct even though the biggest downward revisions actually occurred in August 2024, well before the election took place. 

Trump's bungled Epstein coverup demonstrates that he's past his prime.

The cult leader's hold weakens

David R. Lurie

Donald Trump’s clumsy attempt to distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein has driven a wedge through his base. But his flailing is a symptom of a deeper problem: the cult leader has begun to lose control of the flock.

America’s would-be dictator won’t fall because he’s acting like the mastermind of the “deep state” conspiracy he’s coached his fervid followers to believe. But the cracks in the Trump regime — which have been growing since he reentered the White House six months ago — are all but certain to widen into dangerous crevasses.

Trump has never been a broadly popular politician, and is by far the least popular person to be inaugurated as president twice. His political resilience derives from his power within the Republican Party — strength grounded in his singular grip on MAGA, which finds its only parallel in charismatic dictatorships like those of Putin and Mussolini.

A decade out from Trump’s hostile takeover of the GOP, today’s Republican “leaders” know nothing other than surrender. But his bungled, increasingly desperate Epstein coverup indicates that his skills as a cult leader are declining.

The Cold Heart of Power: Trump's War on Life Itself

A Man Who Hates Dogs: What Trump's Sterile World Reveals About His Soul

by Lobachevsky in Daily Kos

There's something deeply unsettling about a man who systematically removes every trace of life from his surroundings. Donald Trump's latest assault on the White House Rose Garden—paving over JFK's historic lawn with concrete—isn't just vandalism. It's a window into a soul that finds comfort only in sterile, lifeless environments.

From Gardens to Graveyards

The Rose Garden transformation tells the whole story. What was once a living symbol of American history, designed by Bunny Mellon for JFK and Jackie Kennedy, is now a concrete patio. Trump's justification? "Women, with the high heels, it just didn't work."

Because apparently, accommodating footwear is more important than preserving a century of presidential history.

Critics have called the result "devoid of life" and resembling "a parking lot." One observer noted it looks like "the tombstone he has put on the US economy."

The Golden Mausoleum

This isn't new behavior. Trump's Trump Tower penthouse reads like a pharaoh's tomb—all gold leaf, marble, and mirrors. Architectural Digest described it as resembling "a hotel lobby in the sky." Every surface shimmers with 24-karat gold, from the banquette covered in gold-painted fabric to the gold-leaf ceilings.

No plants. No flowers. No warmth. Just cold, hard surfaces that reflect his image back at him endlessly.

His Mar-a-Lago estate follows the same template—opulent but sterile, impressive but lifeless. It's the aesthetic of someone who mistakes expense for beauty, glitter for gold.

And he’s transforming the White House to match. Gold knick-knacks in the Oval Office. Gold decals on its ceiling.  Removing the grand lawn outside the White House to put in a concrete patio. Ruining an historic landmark that belongs to the people of America—not to him.

The Dog Whisperer (of Hate)

Then there's his relationship with living creatures. Trump is the first president in over a century not to have a pet. But it's worse than simple absence—he actively despises dogs.

His "like a dog" insults are legendary:

• Marco Rubio "sweating like a dog"
• Mitt Romney "choked like a dog"
• Omarosa "compared to a dog"
• Countless others "fired like a dog"

As Vanity Fair noted, Trump never uses dog comparisons positively. It's never "loyal like a dog"—always about failure, betrayal, or humiliation.

His ex-wife Ivana wrote that Trump hated her poodle Chappy, and the feeling was mutual. The dog would "bark at him territorially"—apparently recognizing something the rest of us missed.

The Psychology of Sterility

What does this pattern reveal? A man who's fundamentally uncomfortable with anything he can't control. Living things are unpredictable. They grow, change, die. They require care, patience, empathy—qualities Trump seems to lack entirely.

Gardens need tending. Pets need love. Both represent vulnerability, the acknowledgment that some things matter more than power or profit.

Trump's world is transactional to its core. Everything must serve a purpose, preferably his. A dog's unconditional love? Useless—it can't be leveraged. A garden's beauty? Irrelevant—it doesn't generate revenue.

Policy Through the Lens of Coldness

This coldness isn't just aesthetic—it's political. A man who paves over rose gardens and despises dogs approaches human suffering with the same sterile calculation.

• Environmental protections? Obstacles to profit.
• Healthcare for the vulnerable? Wasteful spending.
• Refugee children? Statistical problems to be solved with cages.

The same impulse that turns living gardens into concrete patios turns complex human needs into simple cost-benefit analyses.

The Emptiness at the Center

There's something profoundly sad about a 79-year-old man who's never experienced the simple joy of a dog's greeting or the quiet satisfaction of tending a garden. His world is all surfaces—gold-plated, mirror-polished, but ultimately hollow.

As one critic observed, looking at Trump's concrete Rose Garden: "I'm beginning to figure out how [Trump] bankrupted several casinos."

When you can't distinguish between what's valuable and what's merely expensive, when you mistake sterility for sophistication, failure becomes inevitable.

The man who promised to make America great again can't even keep a garden alive.

Is ChatGPT making us stupid?

Duh

Aaron French, Kennesaw State University

Back in 2008, The Atlantic sparked controversy with a provocative cover story: Is Google Making Us Stupid?

In that 4,000-word essay, later expanded into a book, author Nicholas Carr suggested the answer was yes, arguing that technology such as search engines were worsening Americans’ ability to think deeply and retain knowledge.

At the core of Carr’s concern was the idea that people no longer needed to remember or learn facts when they could instantly look them up online. While there might be some truth to this, search engines still require users to use critical thinking to interpret and contextualize the results.

Fast-forward to today, and an even more profound technological shift is taking place. With the rise of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, internet users aren’t just outsourcing memory – they may be outsourcing thinking itself.

Generative AI tools don’t just retrieve information; they can create, analyze and summarize it. This represents a fundamental shift: Arguably, generative AI is the first technology that could replace human thinking and creativity.

That raises a critical question: Is ChatGPT making us stupid?

Trump washes his hands of responsibility for deaths he caused

From Texas to Covid, Trump has a long history of refusing to take responsibility and shifting blame on to political rivals.

Dean Baker, Center for Economic and Policy Research

Donald Trump may not be very good at running things, but when it comes to shifting blame, he is truly world class. As the magnitude of the disaster in Texas becomes clearer, the one thing we can be certain of is that Trump will accept none of the responsibility.

He will insist that his decision to have mass layoffs at the Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) and National Weather Service (NWS) had nothing to do with the state’s lack of preparedness for the storm and the inadequate response. 

At this point it is not clear whether the layoffs at the agencies played a role in the warnings given or the speed of the response to the floods.

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

The Texas offices were clearly understaffed. However, we don’t know whether that impeded their operations in important ways.

He routinely makes absurd and ridiculous statements which would be treated as a major scandal if they came from the mouth of any other politician, but instead are dismissed with an “Oh, that’s Trump” from the media.

We do know that global warming makes events like the Texas floods both more common and more extreme. For that reason, we certainly can blame Trump’s efforts to promote global warming with increased subsidies for fossil fuels and ending support for electric vehicles and clean energy. We can anticipate many more weather disasters in the years head thanks to Trump’s policies.

Weather and natural disasters are far from the only area where Trump refuses to take responsibility for his actions. The economy shrank at a 0.5% annual rate in the first quarter. This was after it grew 2.4% in the fourth quarter of 2024 and 2.8% for the full year.

Nearly every forecaster expected the economy to keep growing at a healthy pace through 2025. However, Trump’s tariff threats, budget cuts, and layoffs at the federal level managed to quickly end the economy’s growth streak and push it into negative territory in the first quarter he was in office.

Naturally Trump responded to the bad news on growth by blaming former President Joe Biden for giving him an “economic disaster.” In reality land, Trump was handed the best economy of any president in more than half a century, with low unemployment falling inflation, rising real wages, and a unprecedented boom in factory construction.

Probably the all time classic for Trump denying responsibility was his response to the pandemic. He made it clear that he wasn’t especially concerned about how many people got sick or died from Covid-19, he was only concerned that he not be given the blame.