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How I See Trump - A Thinkpost
Jul. 6th, 2018 02:45 pmI have had a front row seat for Donald Trump for a longer while than most people here, simply because I am a New Yorker. So I'm going to share with you the observations I have about him. Admittedly, I have stated a lot of this separately, but here, I have collected all of it into one Dorian Gray style portrait for you to examine.
Trump is a lech. Trump is a noted womanizer, an abuser, a man who might have been brought up on charges if our entire society wasn't sexist. This is not breaking news. It was true from the day he appeared on the New York Stage.
The only thing about it is that what ended the careers of many politicians over many eras of US History seemed to do nothing against his chances of winning both the Republican nomination or the Presidency. If you think that a person's morality has something to do with what sort of leader they would be, this could have been an indicator, an insight into who they really are, before he took office.
Trump is a textbook narcissist. Admittedly, a lot of people in NYC have a pretty high opinion of themselves, after all, if you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere. But Trump thrives on people worshiping him, honoring him, making any fuss over him. That has become his normal. And now, all he has to do is set up some rally in in some state where people went wild for his rhetoric. Instant adulation.
The problem is that if applause and acceptance is your motivator, you're going to do the stuff that gives you the ego stroke rather than the stuff that is the proper decision. I hope I don't have to explain how that can be a major issue for the country.
Trump is just as racist as any white guy of his age. I don't want to dwell on this very long. Here's the point I have to say about racism: we are all compelled to act and react to racism, based on who we are, white or black. We have been handed this system, and it really is a system and we "act out" our "parts" which produces the same results, generation after generation.
Racism, like sexism, is a lot more complicated than it first appears, so I'm tabling this unless you have a question. And this is my only mention of the Central Park Five, just to give a nod to the most glaring example of his politics when it comes to it. Just know that, at best, Trump has no interest in being specifically beneficial to persons of color.
Trump has a "Code of Honor." At some point, probably very early in his life, Trump was taught that you should always help and support people who help and support you. And, perhaps more importantly, you should shun and/or attack anyone who is either getting in your way or is trying to stop you from accomplishing what you want. Any casual observer could see this in action throughout his life.
Think about this concept. Trump was a supporter of Barack Obama's candidacy and success during the 2008 election. But then, the United States had an economic collapse, practically on the verge of a depression, just at the time of the election itself.
When President Obama took office and examined the circumstance, he wanted to make sure that the American people would be safe from another, similar disaster, so he put sanctions on banks, lending houses and on real estate brokers to prevent them from doing the risky stuff that got the country into that mess.
It seems apparent that Donald Trump was making money from those sorts of practices because as soon as those new rules went into the system, that's about the same time that Trump started with his "Birther" accusations. By attempting to claim that President Obama was born outside of the US, it seems he was trying to have him removed from office and having those sanctions, likewise, removed so he could go back to making money that way.
Trump's greed created a wedge in the country, specifically because it allowed people who had hate for Obama a "reason" to despise him that wasn't the more obvious one. And when Trump couldn't oust Obama, he decided to run for office himself. Sure enough, when he won, one of the very first things he did was to overturn President Obama's safeguards for our economy, allowing all of these money institutions to go back to their pre-collapse ways. Coincidence? I think not.
It's also why Trump has continually attacked the press from the very start of his candidacy, right through to the moment you're reading this. Knowing that the press can and will expose anything and everything they find on Trump meant he needed to discredit their findings. By continually claiming the press are issuing "fake news" about him, he can dismiss any negative reporting that happens as untrue and keep on moving forward, knowing that his base will believe him and not the report.
But looking at the other side of this coin, during the 2016 US Presidential Campaign, when Joe Arpaio was one of the first to loudly and proudly support Trump, he returned the favor when he had the chance and pardoned Arpaio for the racial profiling cases of suspected illegal aliens.
This is what the code of honor is all about. Help the people who helped you. This is why Trump couldn't issue an unequivocal statement against the so-called "white nationalists" who staged that protest in Charlottesville, nearly a year ago (really, doesn't that seem like it was SEVERAL years ago? The date was August 12, 2017). Those people helped him get elected.
This is why Trump supported James Comey who came out with a report that maybe there was a new load of emails from Hillary Clinton's server, less than two weeks before the election. That was potentially instrumental in the last push before the vote.
Later, Trump asked Comey for "loyalty," a sign that he was using this "Code of Honor." And when Comey refused to kowtow, Trump fired him, a sign of the reverse of that code.There are other examples of this code at work. You don't have to look very carefully to find many more.
But let's keep in mind, this "Code of Honor" is Trump's personal code. In other words, his code could be counterproductive to what the nation needs specifically because the Code is about how people treat him, not how they treat the office of POTUS.
Trump is highly likely dyslexic and/or has ADD. There has to be a reason why Trump doesn't like reading and is the first president who didn't have anything more than a bachelor's degree and hadn't served in the Armed Services, dating back to Herbert Hoover. It's most probably that he has a learning disorder like dyslexia or Attention Deficit Disorder. That would make perfect sense as to why he doesn't like to read, why his staff must reduce his briefings to one page, why he gets most of his intel from a television network (despite his constant claims of "fake news" from any critical outlet) and why he loves using Twitter, which only allows you to post three or four sentences at a time.
If you have a president who has a learning disorder, and that president is also a narcissist, that places the country in a much more vulnerable position. POTUS is trying to protect his own psyche and trying to keep the rest of the country from seeing him as anything other than an expert on everything. This is why he constantly has to say things like "I have a big brain" or "I'm very smart." How do you reconcile the learning disorder and the narcissism? There is an elaborate dance going on in Trump's ego when it comes to that.
But here's the crucial part of this: the nation needs an informed president who makes informed decisions, and if the president doesn't like reading, that president is going to make some very uninformed choices, and, in fact, may be listening to people intending to do harm to our country, or, at the very least, are doing things to benefit either the president or themselves personally, simply because they are in close proximity to him and can advise him.
By continually giving POTUS the "Cliff Notes" version of these highly complex issues, he cannot make decisions that are in the best interest of our nation and of the world simply because he doesn't have all the information he needs to make those decisions..
But here is the worst element of Trump's presidency: he has not become POTUS. He has, instead, remained the Republican Nominee, doing the things that only the GOP and his supporters approve and ignoring or even attacking everything else. This is why Democrats, liberals and everyone else is reacting to Trump by saying "#NotMyPresident. It's not because we are hoping he fails; it's because he has actively chosen not to be president for the rest of us too.
Note that I haven't even touched upon anything to do with Russia, Vladimir Putin, North Korea, Kim Jong Un, or any of the elements that are still pending in those areas. I haven't mentioned Trump's refusal to divest from his companies, his continual trips to his properties on the US Taxpayer's dime. I didn't say a word about his praise for dictators and his ambivalence towards our allies. I didn't mention how he has reduced the rhetoric in the nation to the sandbox level.
I think I've made the case (without doing any bashing) for why Donald Trump is, quite reasonably, the worst president in US history, but I'm willing to listen to any counterarguments there might be.
Trump is a lech. Trump is a noted womanizer, an abuser, a man who might have been brought up on charges if our entire society wasn't sexist. This is not breaking news. It was true from the day he appeared on the New York Stage.
The only thing about it is that what ended the careers of many politicians over many eras of US History seemed to do nothing against his chances of winning both the Republican nomination or the Presidency. If you think that a person's morality has something to do with what sort of leader they would be, this could have been an indicator, an insight into who they really are, before he took office.
Trump is a textbook narcissist. Admittedly, a lot of people in NYC have a pretty high opinion of themselves, after all, if you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere. But Trump thrives on people worshiping him, honoring him, making any fuss over him. That has become his normal. And now, all he has to do is set up some rally in in some state where people went wild for his rhetoric. Instant adulation.
The problem is that if applause and acceptance is your motivator, you're going to do the stuff that gives you the ego stroke rather than the stuff that is the proper decision. I hope I don't have to explain how that can be a major issue for the country.
Trump is just as racist as any white guy of his age. I don't want to dwell on this very long. Here's the point I have to say about racism: we are all compelled to act and react to racism, based on who we are, white or black. We have been handed this system, and it really is a system and we "act out" our "parts" which produces the same results, generation after generation.
Racism, like sexism, is a lot more complicated than it first appears, so I'm tabling this unless you have a question. And this is my only mention of the Central Park Five, just to give a nod to the most glaring example of his politics when it comes to it. Just know that, at best, Trump has no interest in being specifically beneficial to persons of color.
Trump has a "Code of Honor." At some point, probably very early in his life, Trump was taught that you should always help and support people who help and support you. And, perhaps more importantly, you should shun and/or attack anyone who is either getting in your way or is trying to stop you from accomplishing what you want. Any casual observer could see this in action throughout his life.
Think about this concept. Trump was a supporter of Barack Obama's candidacy and success during the 2008 election. But then, the United States had an economic collapse, practically on the verge of a depression, just at the time of the election itself.
When President Obama took office and examined the circumstance, he wanted to make sure that the American people would be safe from another, similar disaster, so he put sanctions on banks, lending houses and on real estate brokers to prevent them from doing the risky stuff that got the country into that mess.
It seems apparent that Donald Trump was making money from those sorts of practices because as soon as those new rules went into the system, that's about the same time that Trump started with his "Birther" accusations. By attempting to claim that President Obama was born outside of the US, it seems he was trying to have him removed from office and having those sanctions, likewise, removed so he could go back to making money that way.
Trump's greed created a wedge in the country, specifically because it allowed people who had hate for Obama a "reason" to despise him that wasn't the more obvious one. And when Trump couldn't oust Obama, he decided to run for office himself. Sure enough, when he won, one of the very first things he did was to overturn President Obama's safeguards for our economy, allowing all of these money institutions to go back to their pre-collapse ways. Coincidence? I think not.
It's also why Trump has continually attacked the press from the very start of his candidacy, right through to the moment you're reading this. Knowing that the press can and will expose anything and everything they find on Trump meant he needed to discredit their findings. By continually claiming the press are issuing "fake news" about him, he can dismiss any negative reporting that happens as untrue and keep on moving forward, knowing that his base will believe him and not the report.
But looking at the other side of this coin, during the 2016 US Presidential Campaign, when Joe Arpaio was one of the first to loudly and proudly support Trump, he returned the favor when he had the chance and pardoned Arpaio for the racial profiling cases of suspected illegal aliens.
This is what the code of honor is all about. Help the people who helped you. This is why Trump couldn't issue an unequivocal statement against the so-called "white nationalists" who staged that protest in Charlottesville, nearly a year ago (really, doesn't that seem like it was SEVERAL years ago? The date was August 12, 2017). Those people helped him get elected.
This is why Trump supported James Comey who came out with a report that maybe there was a new load of emails from Hillary Clinton's server, less than two weeks before the election. That was potentially instrumental in the last push before the vote.
Later, Trump asked Comey for "loyalty," a sign that he was using this "Code of Honor." And when Comey refused to kowtow, Trump fired him, a sign of the reverse of that code.There are other examples of this code at work. You don't have to look very carefully to find many more.
But let's keep in mind, this "Code of Honor" is Trump's personal code. In other words, his code could be counterproductive to what the nation needs specifically because the Code is about how people treat him, not how they treat the office of POTUS.
Trump is highly likely dyslexic and/or has ADD. There has to be a reason why Trump doesn't like reading and is the first president who didn't have anything more than a bachelor's degree and hadn't served in the Armed Services, dating back to Herbert Hoover. It's most probably that he has a learning disorder like dyslexia or Attention Deficit Disorder. That would make perfect sense as to why he doesn't like to read, why his staff must reduce his briefings to one page, why he gets most of his intel from a television network (despite his constant claims of "fake news" from any critical outlet) and why he loves using Twitter, which only allows you to post three or four sentences at a time.
If you have a president who has a learning disorder, and that president is also a narcissist, that places the country in a much more vulnerable position. POTUS is trying to protect his own psyche and trying to keep the rest of the country from seeing him as anything other than an expert on everything. This is why he constantly has to say things like "I have a big brain" or "I'm very smart." How do you reconcile the learning disorder and the narcissism? There is an elaborate dance going on in Trump's ego when it comes to that.
But here's the crucial part of this: the nation needs an informed president who makes informed decisions, and if the president doesn't like reading, that president is going to make some very uninformed choices, and, in fact, may be listening to people intending to do harm to our country, or, at the very least, are doing things to benefit either the president or themselves personally, simply because they are in close proximity to him and can advise him.
By continually giving POTUS the "Cliff Notes" version of these highly complex issues, he cannot make decisions that are in the best interest of our nation and of the world simply because he doesn't have all the information he needs to make those decisions..
But here is the worst element of Trump's presidency: he has not become POTUS. He has, instead, remained the Republican Nominee, doing the things that only the GOP and his supporters approve and ignoring or even attacking everything else. This is why Democrats, liberals and everyone else is reacting to Trump by saying "#NotMyPresident. It's not because we are hoping he fails; it's because he has actively chosen not to be president for the rest of us too.
Note that I haven't even touched upon anything to do with Russia, Vladimir Putin, North Korea, Kim Jong Un, or any of the elements that are still pending in those areas. I haven't mentioned Trump's refusal to divest from his companies, his continual trips to his properties on the US Taxpayer's dime. I didn't say a word about his praise for dictators and his ambivalence towards our allies. I didn't mention how he has reduced the rhetoric in the nation to the sandbox level.
I think I've made the case (without doing any bashing) for why Donald Trump is, quite reasonably, the worst president in US history, but I'm willing to listen to any counterarguments there might be.
