Matt Taibbi — Trump 2020: Be Very, Very Afraid

Middle Americans got so used to getting nothing out of elections, they started treating national politics for what it had become to them, a distant, pretentious sitcom.

By Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone (8/19/19)

Early evening, August, Cincinnati. The Queen City’s many bridges are sealed off, its sky is dirty with helicopters, and seemingly every cop for 100 miles is patrolling Pete Rose Way along the Ohio River. A crowd of 20,000 or more stands in punishing heat, waiting to enter U.S. Bank Arena. The evil rumor buzzing down the line of MAGA hats is that not everyone will get in to see Donald Trump.

“Can we just get in for a minute?” complains a boy of about 10 to his mother. There are a lot of kids here.

Donald Trump doesn’t visit Middle America. He descends upon it. His rallies are awesome spectacles. Gawkers come down from the hills. If NASA traveled the country holding showings of the first captured alien life-form, the turnout would be similar. The pope driving monster trucks might get this much attention.

For the 10 millionth time since he launched his presidential campaign, Trump seemed to make a fatal miscalculation, revealing himself to be a meandering, incoherent racist on a political suicide mission. But we should recognize by now, these outbursts by Trump are never fatal.

Almost everyone in line is wearing 45 merch. Trump is the most T-shirtable president in history, and it’s not even close. Trumpinator tees are big (“2020: I’LL BE BACK”), but you’ll also see Trump as Rambo (complete with headband, ammo belt, and phallic rocket-launcher), Trump as the Punisher (a Trump pompadour atop the famous skull), even Trump as Superman (pulling his suit open to reveal a giant T).

Slogans include “Trump 2020: Grab ’em by the Pussy Again!” and the ubiquitous “Trump 2020: Fuck Your Feelings.”

One merch hawker — an African American man with a visor, wraparound sunglasses, and spiked, dyed-white hair — is snaking through the crowd, pushing a T-shirt: “Donald Fuckin’ Trump.” On the back, the shirt reads “Bitch I’m the President!” “Five bucks for hats, 10 for tees!” he yells. “ ‘Bitch, I’m the president!’ ‘Make America great again!’ ”

“Four more years!” someone in the crowd yells back, to cheers.

Two and a half years into his presidency, Trump has already staked a claim to a role in history usually reserved for hereditary monarchs at the end of a line of inbreeding. Historians will list him somewhere between Vlad the Impaler and France’s Charles VI, who thought his buttocks were made of glass.

Much of America loves its Mad King, whose works are regularly on display. Russians under Ivan the Terrible used to watch dogs being hurled over the Kremlin walls when the tsar’s mood was bad. Americans have grown used to late-night insults tweeted at nuclear powers from the White House bedroom.

Royal lunacy is traditionally a secret, but in Twitter-age America it’s a shared national experience. We are all somersaulting down and out the sanity chute. …

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  • Trump Declares Himself “King Of Israel” & “Second Coming Of God” — It’s been an eventful 18 hours in the fevered mind of Donald Trump.Yesterday, the president unleashed an anti-Semitic rant in the Oval Office in which he declared that Jews who vote for Democrats are either uneducated or disloyal. Unfortunately, with about 70% of Americans Jews being registered Democrats, that’s a lot of disloyalty. So Trump looked elsewhere for answers, and lo, he found an unhinged supporter who says Israelis (the real Jews!) love Trump like the “King of Israel” and “the second coming of God.” … Read the Rest

(Commoner Call cartoon by Mark L. Taylor, 2018. Open source and free for non-derivative use with link toe www.thecommonercall.org )

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‘He’s empty’: Psychiatrist Warns Trump Is In A ‘psychotic-like state’

By Sarah K. Burris
Raw Story (8/21/19)

Dr. Lance Dodes warned that things were going to get worse under President Donald Trump in 2017. That’s precisely what happened.

“Is that what we’re seeing this week?” MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell asked the psychiatrist.

“There is a fundamental way in which he’s empty. There’s something fundamentally different about him from normal people. It’s a psychotic-like state. The more you press him, the more you see how disorganized and empty he is.”

“Absolutely. Donald Trump, because he has a fundamental need to be all-powerful and all loved, can’t stand challenges,” Dr. Dodes said. “And the nature of democracy is that it challenges people. We have more than one opinion. So the more — it was predictable once he got into a position where people would challenge him, there are two parties, he would become more unhinged.

Wednesday’s press availability on the White House South Lawn showed exactly that, he explained.

“As you watched him respond to people, the more they challenged him, the more he ranted,” Dr. Dodes continued. “He stopped responding to the questions, and instead, he started to talk about how people were agents of fake news. He said that they would go out of business soon. They would die…This is the same kind of thing that he did when he was a candidate when he suggested someone protesting at his campaign rally be taken out and beaten up.”

The psychiatrist explained that Trump can’t handle when people disagree with him. …

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