Another Thing He Consistently Gets Wrong
There’s a long list of basic psychology principles that the guy in the White House doesn’t seem to understand. For starters,
- He values feigned loyalty and obsesquiousness more than real friendship, and he never seems to have loyalty to anyone else—not even his wives and kids—with the possible exception of his abusive late father. He thinks some dictators, including the murderous Vladimir, are his friends and doesn’t notice how they play on his need for flattery to accomplish an agenda diametrically opposed to our country’s interests (I write as a US citizen).
- He thinks he has the right to desecrate and destroy public property.
- He thinks he can establish his greatness by slapping his name—or the name of our continent (which he doesn’t even seem to understand is NOT the name of our country)—on landmarks he had nothing to do with.
- He squanders our tax dollars on these personal vanity projects, on the illegal war, and on the persecution of immigrants and his perceived enemies—even when he says it will all be privately paid for or funded by another government, as he claimed for his ballroom and the border wall, to name two prominent examples.
- He also not only accepts but actively solicits payments that sure look like bribes or blackmail attempts: from media, from universities, from nonprofits, from billionaires, from corporations and foreign leaders with business before the government, etc.
- And he thinks the laws—he’s violated dozens of them—don’t apply to him because he’s president (which, unfortunately, the Republican majorities in Congress and on SCOTUS have perpetuated by refusing to hold him in check).
But the one I want to talk about today is his perverse idea that attempting to censor or punish the press makes the problem the press is reporting on go away. This crazy mindset has been one of his hallmarks since his first presidential campaign.
This kind of “thinking” is more dangerous than it seems on the surface. By surrounding himself only with people who will give him bad advice to advance their own agendas but never criticize him and by blasting attacks on those who question anything he does, he takes away the guardrails on his actions. He is an impulsive person who not only acts without thinking things through, over and over again, but has somehow internalized a belief that he knows more than the experts on any question, no matter how far outside of his actual knowledge base.
In his first term, he had Cabinet members who could help him navigate at least some of the shoals. Those guardrails don’t exist in his second administration, with a Cabinet composed largely of incompetents, grifters, or both, and unofficial advisors or former advisors who’ve wielded real and destructive power, which, interestingly enough, often ends up benefiting those advisors directly (talking about you, Mssrs Musk and Kushner).
And that has led the US into a downward spiral. This president who said he would not start wars invaded Venezuela in a coup after killing civilians in multiple attacks on their boats. He listened to another of his thug-dictator friends and started the unwinnable war in Iran that no previous US president would touch, leaving an enemy in a far stronger position and the US far weaker than before the war. He has torched decades-long alliances for capricious reasons—even making repeated threats against other nations’ sovereignty—leaving the rest of the world to understand that the US can’t be trusted and they’d better make their way in the world without allying with us. His changing-all-the-time tarrifs and his squandering tax dollars in a war against his own residents (in the name of immigration policy) have wrecked the economy and alienated many in his own base.
It will take decades to undo the damage, hold the perps responsible, and build trusted relationships again
Please remember all of this when you vote on or before November 3rd (and if voting before, please vote in person, as he has ordered the post office to sabotage mail-in voting). The best way out of this morass is to provide unassailable majorities of Democrats in both houses of Congress. Believe me, I know the Dems are far from perfect. We need to get out of the hole we’ve dug ourselves where we have to vote for a lesser evil rather than a greater good. All the way back in 2007, I endorsed a whole package of voting reforms that I’d love to see, including a parliamentary system and ranked-choice voting (known at that time as instant-runoff), which would combine to give us a lot more choices. I’d add a few more to that list today, but I’ll let it stand as my thinking at the time. But in the current framework, the only way to get the Republicans out is to get the Democrats in.
