How scary is Donald Trump?

[Admin]

Understanding Donald Trump..

“Emotional incontinence is what sets Trump apart as a uniquely tyrannical figure. To watch him on stage is to witness a frenzied parade of inner consciousness. He’s simply incapable of restraining himself.” That’s how I described Donald Trump in a rather feverish piece the day before the election. My concern then — and now — was Trump’s psychic volatility. No matter the stage or the subject, he always appears in the thrall of his emotions.

But Trump’s whimsical nature is compounded by an even worse instinct: domination. He has to win, he has to punish and humiliate. This is evident in Richard Branson’s account of his first encounter with Trump, which he described to Politico last year. Branson, still in disbelief, recalled a lunch with Trump at Trump’s Manhattan apartment: “Even before the starters arrived he began telling me about how he had asked a number of people for help after his latest bankruptcy and how five of them were unwilling to help. He told me he was going to spend the rest of his life destroying these five people.”

Trump’s impetuousness flashed earlier this week when he attacked “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski via an unhinged Tweet storm. The president called Mika “crazy” and “low IQ” and said she was “bleeding badly from a face-lift” when he saw her at New Year’s Eve party.
And why, you ask? Evidently Trump was irked by a joke Brzezinski made on air about Trump hanging a fake Time magazine cover on the wall of one of his golf club offices.

This isn’t surprising. This is who Trump has been for a long time. This impulse to attack was equally apparent during the campaign. You could see it in Trump’s vow to jail his political opponent; in his mocking of a disabled reporter who criticized him; and in his calls to “knock the crap” out of protesters. You see it today in his “running war” with the media. Now that Trump has assumed power, the question of what drives him and why will become increasingly important.

Recently, I spoke with Michael D’Antonio, one of Trump’s biographers. I asked him for insights into Trump’s life and psyche: What drives him? Who influenced him? Where do his insecurities come from? According to D’Antonio, Trump’s norm-defying belligerence aligns with his heroes and the people he’s modeled his life around:

I think he's trying to be someone like he imagines Gen. Patton was. When he talks about these World War II generals portrayed in the movies, he's explaining something about himself and what he admires. He really does identify with that kind of aggression, that kind of authority. His role models were his father, the officer in charge of his group of students when he was student at a military academy, and Roy Cohn. All of these people were aggressive bullies who used strength as a tool and a measure of their own worth, and who believed anything is justified in pursuit of your ambitions.

If you want to understand Trump, look at who he admires - Vox

[stpioc]

This is really scary:

Here’s what Trump said while sitting across the table from Moon, who was elected in May after a scandal led to the arrest of his predecessor:

The United States has trade deficits with many, many countries, and we cannot allow that to continue ... with South Korea right now, but we cannot allow that to continue. This is really a statement that I make about all trade: For many, many years the United States has suffered through massive trade deficits; that’s why we have $20 trillion in debt.

The president’s distaste for trade deficits with any country is not news, but that last sentence is striking — Trump is claiming that trade deficits are at the root of the national debt..

Trump just made a humiliating economic error in front of South Korea’s president - Vox

The idea that this guy can start a trade war because he doesn't understand basic economics101 is terrifying.

For those without economics101: the trade deficit has nothing to do with the public debt.

[Admin]

This is the President of the US, from the official POTUS tweet account..

President Donald Trump took his attacks on the free press a step further on Sunday morning, when he tweeted out an edited version of a 2007 video of him body slamming and punching WWE CEO Vince McMahon. In the edited video Trump tweeted, an image of the CNN logo was superimposed on McMahon's face to make it appear as though Trump was pummeling the news network. "#FraudNewsCNN #FNN," Trump wrote, presumably shortening his moniker, "Fraud News Network."

Trump tweets video of him body slamming and punching 'CNN' - Business Insider

Simple fact is, if CNN gets a story wrong they fire the reporters. Trump can sprout endless nonsense, seemingly without consequences..

[Admin]

Conservative commentator and journalist Bill Kristol is speaking out against a video posted by President Trump on Sunday showing him beating up a person with a CNN logo on their face, saying the U.S. is “recapitulating the decline and fall of Rome.” “The speed with which we're recapitulating the decline and fall of Rome is impressive. What took Rome centuries we're achieving in months,” Kristol tweeted.

Bill Kristol: US reliving decline and fall of Rome under Trump | TheHill

A little over the top even for us, but as we argued in this forum (in the institutional decay thread), the undermining of venerable US (and international) institutions which has served us for decades, all for short-term political gain (or simply the result of road rage), is really worrisome.

[Admin]

Even Republicans start to worry..

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) was caught on a hot mic on Tuesday expressing concern over President Trump's mental health and questioning his understanding of the budget process. In a conversation with Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), the Maine Republican said of the president's budget proposal that “whenever there was a grant, they just X-ed it out, with no metric, no thinking about it, no nothing. I mean it’s just incredibly irresponsible.”

President Trump's budget proposal eliminated a slew of grants that provided welfare and social service support, such as the Community Development Block Grant. Reed responded to Collins by saying, of Trump: “He’s crazy.” Collins can be heard quietly saying, “I'm worried.” Reed, who is also the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, expressed concern about how failure to strike a spending deal would ultimately harm the defense budget.

Senators mock Trump on hot mic | TheHill

[Admin]

Good luck to that..

Donald Trump’s religious adviser has claimed God has given the president the authority to take on North Korea. Robert Jeffress, who is one of Trump’s top religious aides, said in comments carried by The Hill that Trump was given “full power” to fight evil, including North Korea. “When it comes to how we should deal with evildoers, the Bible, in the book of Romans, is very clear: God has endowed rulers full power to use whatever means necessary, including war, to stop evil,” Jeffress, the pastor of an evangelical megachurch, said in a statement carried by the political website.

Trump Has Authority from God to Wage War with North Korea, His Religious Adviser Claims

[Admin]

Scary enough to some, even in his own party..

Former GOP Sen. Gordon Humphrey (N.H.), a longtime critic of President Trump, said on Wednesday the commander in chief is "sick of mind" and urged New Hampshire's lawmakers to support calls to remove him from office. In a letter sent to Rep. Ann McLane Kuster (D-N.H.) first reported by local news station WMUR, Humphrey accuses Trump of making a bad situation worse with his recent promise that North Korea would face "fire and fury" if it continued to threaten the U.S. "President Trump's threat to rain down 'fire and fury' on North Korea is like pouring gasoline on a fire," Humphrey wrote. "It's crazy." Humphrey asks Kuster to support a bill in the House that would establish a test to determine if the president is mentally fit for office. "Donald Trump is seriously sick. He is dangerous," Humphrey said in the letter. "As a citizen, former U.S. Senator, and twelve-year member of the Armed Services Committee, I urge you to act [at] once.

Ex-GOP senator: Trump is 'sick of mind,' should be removed from office | TheHill

[stpioc]

Not the President for these times, according to Thomas Friedman:

Folks, We’re Home Alone

Thomas L. Friedman SEPT. 27, 2017

Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson wrote a famous memoir, “Present at the Creation,” about the birth of the post-World War II order — an order whose institutions produced six decades of security and growth for a lot of people. We’re now at a similar moment of rapid change — abroad and at home. Many institutions have to be rethought. But any book about Washington today would have to be called “Absent at the Creation.”

Surely one of the most cynical, reckless acts of governing in my lifetime has been President Trump and the G.O.P.’s attempt to ram through a transformation of America’s health care system — without holding hearings with experts, conducting an independent cost-benefit analysis or preparing the public — all to erase Barack Obama’s legacy to satisfy a few billionaire ideologue donors and a “base” so drunk on Fox News that its members don’t understand they’ll be the ones most hurt by it all.

Democrats aren’t exactly a fire hose of fresh ideas, but they do respect science and have a sense of responsibility to not play around with big systems without an ounce of study. Not so Trump. He scrapped the Paris climate treaty without consulting one climate scientist — and no G.O.P. leader protested. Think about that.

That failure is particularly relevant because, as this column has been arguing, “climate change” is the right analytical framework for thinking about how we shape policy today. Why? Because we’re going through three climate changes at once:

We’re going through a change in the actual climate — disruptive, destructive weather events are steadily on the rise.

We’re going through a change in the “climate” of globalization — going from an interconnected world to an interdependent one, from a world of walls where you build your wealth by hoarding the most resources to a world of webs where you build your wealth by having the most connections to the flow of ideas, networks, innovators and entrepreneurs. In this interdependent world, connectivity leads to prosperity and isolation leads to poverty. We got rich by being “America Connected” not “America First.”

Finally, we’re going through a change in the “climate” of technology and work. We’re moving into a world where computers and algorithms can analyze (reveal previously hidden patterns); optimize (tell a plane which altitude to fly each mile to get the best fuel efficiency); prophesize (tell you when your elevator will break or what your customer is likely to buy); customize (tailor any product or service for you alone); and digitize and automatize more and more products and services. Any company that doesn’t deploy all six elements will struggle, and this is changing every job and industry.

What do you need when the climate changes? Adaptation — so your citizens can get the most out of these climate changes and cushion the worst. Adaptation has to happen at the individual, community and national levels.

At the individual level, the single most important adaptation is to become a lifelong learner, so you can constantly add value beyond what machines and algorithms can do.

“When work was predictable and the change rate was relatively constant, preparation for work merely required the codification and transfer of existing knowledge and predetermined skills to create a stable and deployable work force,” explains education consultant Heather McGowan. “Now that the velocity of change has accelerated, due to a combination of exponential growth in technology and globalization, learning can no longer be a set dose of education consumed in the first third of one’s life.” In this age of accelerations, “the new killer skill set is an agile mind-set that values learning over knowing.”

At the community level, the U.S. communities that are thriving are the ones building what I call complex adaptive coalitions. These comprise local businesses that get deeply involved in shaping the skills being taught in the public schools and community colleges, buttressed by civic and philanthropic groups providing supplemental learning opportunities and internships. Then local government catalyzes these coalitions and hires recruiters to go into the world to find investors for their local communal assets.

These individual and communal adaptation strategies dictate the national programs you want: health care that is as portable as possible so people can easily move from job to job; as much free or tax-deductible education as possible, so people can afford to be lifelong learners; reducing taxes on corporations and labor to stimulate job creation and relying instead on a carbon tax that raises revenues and mitigates costly climate change; and immigration and trade policies that are as open as possible, because in an age of acceleration the most open country will get the change signals first and attract the most high-I.Q. risk takers who start new companies.

There was no good time for Donald Trump to be president. But this is a uniquely bad time for us to have a race-baiting, science-denying divider in chief. He is impossible to ignore, and yet reacting to his daily antics only makes us stupid — only makes our society less focused on the huge adaptation challenges at hand.

[Admin]

Pretty scary, by the looks of this interview.

It’s not exactly a news flash at this point that Donald Trump isn’t very fluent on questions of public policy, but his interview over the weekend with Fox Business Channel’s Maria Bartiromo is really a sobering reminder of the levels of ignorance and dishonesty that the country is dealing with.

Bartiromo is an extraordinarily soft interviewer who doesn’t ask Trump any difficult questions or press him on any subject. That makes the extent to which he manages to flub the interview all the more striking. He’s simply incapable of discussing any topic at any length in anything remotely resembling an informed or coherent way. He says the Federal Reserve is “important psychotically” and it’s part of one of his better answers, since one can at least tell that he meant to say “psychologically.”

By contrast, it’s often hard to make any sense at all of Trump’s words. Asked whether he plans to tie an infrastructure plan to his tax plan, Trump says, “I was thinking about tying it, but there’s too many honestly.” Too many what? He then continues: “You lose a few votes, you gain a few votes. I don’t want to take any chances ’cause I feel we have the votes right now the way it is.” There is, of course, no tax bill at the moment, so there’s no way Trump has the votes for it. It’s a funny interview in many ways. Along with being comically ignorant, Trump for some reason keeps referring to Chief of Staff John Kelly as “elegant.” But the prospect of a president of the United States who’s incapable of talking about any of the many issues he oversees in a reasonable way is also pretty scary.

Trump’s latest big interview is both funny and terrifying - Vox

You should read the whole article

[Admin]

Another really downright scary interview, you should read it in full:

The last time President Donald Trump sat down with a nonpartisan journalist, he revealed to NBC News’s Lester Holt that his administration had been lying about why he fired FBI Director James Comey. The real reason, Trump revealed, was an effort to stymie the investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 election. That compelled the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller whose team has caused all sorts of trouble for Trump ever since. Consequently, Trump has spent the past few months sequestered with friendly journalists conducting softball interviews. 

Yet precisely because the softball format leads to such easy questions, Trump’s frequent inability to answer them reveals the depths of his ignorance better than any tough grilling possibly could. Perhaps as a result, during Wednesday night’s interview on Fox Business, Lou Dobbs took a different approach. His questions weren’t softballs, they were downright sycophantic and often featured the interviewer attempting to supply Trump with the answers.

Lou Dobbs’s Trump interview is a masterpiece of sycophancy and nonsense - Vox

The start already..

Dobbs’s very first question, if you can call it a question, is this: “In nine months in office, you’ve already accomplished more in the way of job creation. The move in the equities markets has been extraordinary and record setting. All of the indexes, at or near record levels. You have accomplished so much in that nine months.

Lou Dobbs’s Trump interview is a masterpiece of sycophancy and nonsense - Vox

Apart from the fact that there are few Trump policies that have been implemented that could have anywhere near that impact, the stock rally and job creation is simply a continuation of what happened under the previous President. And of course, then both Trump and Archie Bunker, uhh Dobbs denounced that President as a socialist, a foreigner, and an economy destroyer (with Trump claiming unemployment was 42% and the stock market a bubble).