Trumpism part two

 

 

Trumpism

 

PART II

 

 

 

The New Republic

December 14, 2018

 

Escape From The Trump Cult

 

Millions of Americans are blindly devoted to their
Dear Leader. What will it take for them to snap out of it?

 

By Alexander Hurst

 

On December 20, 1954, some 62 years before Donald Trump would be sworn in as president of the United States, Dorothy Martin and dozens of her followers crowded into her home in Chicago to await the apocalypse. The group believed that Martin, a housewife, had received a message from a planet named Clarion that the world would end in a great flood beginning at midnight, and that they, the faithful, would be rescued by an alien spacecraft.

 

Unbeknownst to the other “Seekers,” three of their group—Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter—were not there to be saved, but to observe. Psychologists from elite institutions, they had infiltrated the pseudo-cult to study Festinger’s recently elaborated theory of “cognitive dissonance.” The theory predicted that when people with strongly held beliefs were presented with contrary evidence, rather than change their minds they would seek comfort and “cognitive consonance” by convincing others to support their erroneous views.

 

Festinger’s prediction was right. When neither the apocalypse nor the UFO arrived, the group began proselytizing about how God had rewarded the Earth with salvation because of their vigil. His subsequent book, When Prophecy Fails, became a standard sociology reference for examining cognitive dissonance, religious prophecy, and cult-like behavior. What the three researchers probably never predicted, though, was that over half a century later Festinger’s theory would be applicable to roughly 25 percent of the population of the United States and one of its two major political parties. Nor could they have foreseen that the country’s salvation might well depend on its ability to deprogram the Trump cult’s acolytes—an effort that would require a level of sympathetic engagement on the part of nonbelievers that they have yet to display.

 

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Personality cults are a hallmark of populist-autocratic politics. The names of the various leaders are practically synonymous with their movements: Le Pen, Farage, Duterte, Orbán, Erdogan, Chávez, Bolsonaro, Putin. Or if we were to dip farther back into history: Castro, Franco, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin. Like religious cult leaders, demagogues understand the importance of setting up an in-group/out-group dynamic as a means of establishing their followers’ identity as members of a besieged collective.

 

Trump, like the populist authoritarians before and around him, has also understood (or, at least, instinctually grasped) how indispensable his own individual persona is to his ultimate goal of grasping and maintaining power. Amidst his string of business failures, Trump’s singular talent has been that of any con man: the incredible ability to cultivate a public image. Of course, Trump did not build his cult of followers—his in-group—ex nihilo; in many ways, the stage was set for his entrance. America had already split into two political identities by the time he announced his campaign for president in 2015, not just in terms of the information we consume, but down to the brands we prefer and the stores we frequent. And so with particularly American bombast and a reality TV star’s penchant for manipulating the media, Trump tore pages from the us-against-them playbook of the European far right and presented them to a segment of the American public already primed to receive it with religious fervor.

 

In an interview with Pacific Standard, Janja Lalich, a sociologist who specializes in cults, identified four characteristics of a totalistic cult and applied them to Trumpism: an all-encompassing belief system, extreme devotion to the leader, reluctance to acknowledge criticism of the group or its leader, and a disdain for nonmembers. Eileen Barker, another sociologist of cults, has written that, together, cult leaders and followers create and maintain their movement by proclaiming shared beliefs and identifying themselves as a distinguishable unit; behaving in ways that reinforce the group as a social entity, like closing themselves off to conflicting information; and stoking division and fear of enemies, real or perceived.

 

Does Trump tick off the boxes? The hatchet job he has made of Republican ideology and the sway he holds over what is now his party suggest he does not lack for devotion. His nearly 90 percent approval rating among Republicans is the more remarkable for his having shifted Republican views on a range of issues, from trade, to NATO, to Putin, to even the NFL. Then there are the endless rallies that smack of a noxious sort of revivalism, complete with a loyalty “pledge” during the 2016 campaign; a steady stream of sycophantic fealty (at least in public) from aides in the administration and its congressional Republican allies; and an almost universal unwillingness by Republican congressional leadership to check or thwart Trump’s worst instincts in any substantive way.

 

As for disdain, or disgust even, for nonmembers, who include “globalists,” immigrants, urbanites, Muslims, Jews, and people of color? “I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate / He stirred up that bloodroot of human hearts,” Woody Guthrie sang in 1950 about Fred Trump’s discriminatory housing practices. Those words could just as easily apply to Fred’s son Donald, as The New York Times details, about his birtherism, his view that dark-skinned immigrants come from “shithole countries,” his frequent classification of black people as uppity and ungrateful, his denigration of Native Americans, his incorporation of white nationalist thought into his administration, his equivocation over neo-Nazis. The “lock her up!” chants of his rallies are less about Hillary Clinton individually, and more about who belongs and who doesn’t, and what place exists for those who don’t. In perhaps the pettiest form of their disdain, Trump’s supporters engage in “rolling coal”—the practice of tricking out diesel engines to send huge plumes of smoke into the atmosphere—to “own the libs.”

 

Trump sold his believers an engrossing tale of “American carnage” that he alone could fix, then isolated them in a media universe where reality exists only through Trump-tinted glasses, attacking all other sources of information as “fake news.” In the most polarized media landscape in the wealthy world, Republicans place their trust almost solely in Fox News, seeing nearly all other outlets as biased. In that context, the effect of a president who lies an average of ten times a day is the total blurring of fact and fiction, reality and myth, trust and cynicism. It is a world where, in the words of Rudy Giuliani, truth is no longer truth. “Who could really know?” Trump said of claims that Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman had ordered the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “It is what it is.”

 

Reason rarely defeats emotion—or, as Catherine Fieschi, an expert on political extremism, told me, gut instinct. If it did, right-wing populist movements from Brexit to Bolsonaro would be on the retreat, not in the advance. Those caught in the web of Trumpism do not see the deception that surrounds them. And if scandals too numerous to list have not dented faith in Trump, those holding out for an apocalyptic moment of reckoning that suddenly drops the curtain—the Russia investigation, or his taxes—will only be disappointed. In all likelihood, the idea that Trump is a crook has been “priced in.”

 

When presented with his actual record, which has often fallen short of what he promised on the campaign trail, Trump supporters time and again have displayed either disbelief or indifference. As a Trump supporter explicitly stated in reference to the president’s many, many lies, “I don’t care if he sprouts a third dick up there.” What actually is doesn’t matter; what does is that Trump reflects back to his supporters a general feeling of what ought to be, a general truthiness in their guts.

 

Amidst the frenetic pace of disgrace and outrage, Trump’s support remains stable among too large a chunk of the American public to just ignore. Trump, who insisted on the presence of voter fraud by the millions in an election he ultimately won, and a coterie of prominent Republicans spent the week after the 2018 midterms delegitimizing the very notion of counting all the votes in key races in Florida, Georgia, and Arizona. Trump’s claim that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and still retain the loyalty of his followers is jokingly referred to as the truest thing he’s ever said, but it’s less funny that 52 percent of them would hypothetically support postponing the 2020 election if he proposed it. What happens when a man who has already promoted political violence, and whose most hardcore supporters have shown their willingness for such violence, finds on election night two years from now that he has just narrowly lost? Do any of us truly believe that Donald J. Trump and his followers will simply slink away quietly into the night?

 

So, how do we get those caught up in the cult of Trump to leave it?

 

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Daryl Davis has played the blues for over 30 years, including with the likes of Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis. He’s also spent 30 years talking to Klansmen, over 200 of whom have quit the KKK as a result of their conversations, handing over their robes to Davis—who is black. “When two enemies are talking, they’re not fighting,” Davis told NPR in 2017. “I didn’t convert anybody,” he explained. “They saw the light and converted themselves.”

 

Davis’s success is more than a cute, feel-good story. It involved the real-world application of techniques that scholars advocate employing to help individuals leave cults. A 2011 study by the RAND Corporation concluded that, “Factors associated with leaving street gangs, religious cults, right-wing extremist groups, and organized crime groups” included positive social ties and an organic disillusionment with the group’s beliefs or ideology. As psychologists Rod and Linda Dubrow-Marshall write in The Conversation, it’s extremely difficult for people to admit they are wrong, and it’s crucial for them to arrive at that realization on their own.

 

The debate over how to deal with Trump’s anti-democratic following has largely avoided the question of engaging it directly. These days there is no shortage of articles and books dealing with radical-right populism, despots, democratic backsliding, and the tactics that authoritarian leaders deploy. Dozens of experts have pointed out that liberal democratic institutions need constant attention and reinforcement in order to be effective bulwarks. But most of the solutions on offer are institutional in nature: maintaining the independence of the judiciary, thwarting a would-be autocrat’s attempts to grab hold of the levers of justice, maintaining a legislative check on executive authority, enshrining political norms more clearly into constitutions.

 

In their 2011 book, Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Post-Communist Countries, Valerie Bunce and Sharon Wolchik conclude that democratization in Eastern European nations like Croatia owed much to assistance from transnational pro-democracy networks, civil society, and energetic election campaigns run by a united opposition. In some ways this analysis offers us a modicum of hope: Trump, despite his desires, commands far less power over the political system than did any of the autocrats that Bunce and Wolchik studied, and the United States enjoys many of the elements they cite as critical, like robust civil society, energetic elections, and a mostly unified opposition. But at the same time, the very things responsible for the success of democratic transition are under near constant assault from Trump and his Republican abettors.

 

Democracy, especially liberal democracy, has always been dependent on the trust and belief of the self-governed. It is one thing to implement tangible measures to prevent the decay of bedrock institutions, and when it comes to voting rights, elections, the courts, and restraints on executive power, we know what these measures should look like. It’s another, far tougher thing to figure out how to maintain the legitimacy of these same institutions—and how to restore it once lost.

 

Javier Corrales, a political science professor at Amherst College and expert on the Chavez regime, has written that one lesson from Venezuela’s experience is for the opposition to avoid fragmentation within the broader electorate and, when possible, polarization. When it comes to Trump, he told me that rather than pursuing impeachment, which could backfire by polarizing institutions and the general environment even more, “the opposition needs to focus on strengthening institutions of checks and balances, and embracing and defending policies that produce majoritarian consensus rather than just cater to the base. The more defections they can get from voters that would otherwise side with the illiberal president, the better. If the opposition can get the other side to split, they win.”

 

When it comes to helping individuals leave cult-like groups, many sociologists agree: Positive social factors are more effective than negative sanctions. Lalich counsels using dialogue to ask questions and reinforce doubts, rather than “to harp” or criticize. Testimonials from former cult members can be particularly helpful in fueling disillusionment, she says.

 

On a nationwide scale, this would probably look a lot like a field called “conflict transformation.” John Paul Lederach, professor emeritus at Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, laid out the basics of conflict transformation in his 1998 book, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies. He argued that outsiders should work with mid-level members of the community who could simultaneously engage ordinary people and their leaders. He also called for an “elicitive approach” whereby solutions were developed by people themselves, in accordance with their own specific cultural contexts.

 

Of the places in the world where conflict transformation has worked, Northern Ireland probably most approximates the United States, in the sense that it was part of a wealthy nation with a democratic tradition (though in the 1980s, Northern Ireland was in a far worse situation of political division and communitarian violence).

 

Maria Power, a researcher in conflict transformation studies at Oxford, sees strategies from Northern Ireland that could be deployed on the other side of the Atlantic. She cited the example of dialogue-building between Unionist and Republican women, who faced much tougher obstacles to reconciliation since they were “risking their lives” every time they met in East Belfast during The Troubles. She said that the peace effort in Northern Ireland hinged on incredibly tough, person-to-person groundwork carried out by dozens of organizations and ecumenical groups. She emphasized above all the importance of investing effort and time into building trust, first within, and then later between, identity groups.

 

Power said that conflict transformation in the United States would likely involve local, grassroots community development in the areas that Trump likes to hold rallies. “I don’t mean that progressives should go to these communities and start knocking on doors,” she explained, “that would be the worst thing that could happen to exacerbate tensions. I mean that there should be a focus on real community development in these areas.”

 

Individuals would be led through a “single identity dialogue,” a safe-space where someone who has gained the community’s trust can guide them through discussion of their identity, why they feel threatened, and why they feel the need to otherize those they see as different. This does presume some legitimacy to their fears; as The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, among others, has written convincingly, Trumpism is not primarily a story of globalism’s dispossessed, but rather one of identity politics. But there is reality, and there is perception, and the truth is that Trump voters perceive themselves as victims who have been culturally dislocated, disdained, and in danger of being left behind.

 

Power said that, in the mid-1980s, Northern Ireland had some 300 of these single-identity groups. She added that there was a tough balance to strike between allowing people “to become comfortable enough with their own place in society that other people don’t seem to be a threat,” and “dripping” in truth in such a way that avoided a reinforcement of their existing beliefs.

 

Only once that step had been undertaken on a local level were people able to have cross-community conversation, and eventually to engage with each other through social action projects—schemes to bring people together, not over political discussion, but in tasks beneficial to their communities. Power lamented that overall this is quite a long-term process, perhaps even a generational one.

 

That sentiment was echoed by Emma Elfversson, who researches peace and conflict at Sweden’s Uppsala University. Elfversson told me that because trust in the state and institutions is often crucial to reconciliation, democratic backsliding in the U.S. is worrying. “Important work to overcome divides is done at the grassroots level—through NGOs, religious initiatives, social service programs, schools, at the workplace, etc.,” she said, adding, “Civil society organizations that cut across identity borders can promote reconciliation and reduce conflict.”

 

Such an approach might seem fuzzy to those who seek to buttress qualitative observations with hard data, but there are concrete examples of places where community-based peace building has been effective. Fieschi thinks that the way to short-circuit populism is to create an environment where people can think. “Populism encourages every fiber of your being not to think,” she told me. “In fact, it pretty much posits that if you have to think you’re not to be trusted. We need to create those spaces and times that offer the opportunity to exercise agency, to think things through.”

 

The problem for the modern left is that none of this is emotionally satisfying. It’s just hard, hard work. Push too hard, and you risk fostering even greater resentment and reaction. But let people off the hook, and the myths they perpetuate about race and national identity might never get punctured.

 

Above all, it also rings as profoundly unfair. Why should a group that still enjoys the momentum of historic privilege, and is still afforded outsize political weight, be handheld through an era of demographic change? And why should minority groups, who continue to suffer from oppression, be the ones to extend that hand?

 

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After the end of the Vietnam War, Thomas Robbins and Dick Anthony, two researchers of cults, wrote, “There is a recurrent sequence in American history in which sectarian (and sometimes rather authoritarian) religions emerge and elicit tremendous hostility.” The decline of Cold War orthodoxy after Vietnam, the two noted, had produced a crisis in American civil religion, resulting in “the proliferation of cults as well as the growth of anticult demonology.”

 

We can understand Donald Trump’s rise as a civil religion giving way to its cultic expression. Con man, cult leader, populist politician: Trump is all of these, rolled into one. He has become all-encompassing, even to nonbelievers. We all feel the fatigue of merely existing in the Trump era, the rapid-fire assault on all of our political and social senses. We want immediate solutions to the Trump problem. We want to beat reason into his followers, until they recognize how wrong they are, or at the very least, submit. We want to blame them—justifiably—for perpetuating his sham.

 

I want these things. I want them in my gut. But I also know that the cult’s pull is so powerful that it risks destroying its opponents, by eliciting a counterproductive reaction to it. If we want to bring members of the Trump cult back into the mainstream of American life—and there will be plenty of those who say we should move on without them—resistance means not only resisting the lure of the cult and exposing its lies, but also resisting the temptation to punish its followers.

 

“When the cultic behavior is on a national scale, [breaking it up] is going to take a national movement,” Lalich says. Such an approach promises no immediate gratification. But it also might be the only way to move forward, rather than continue a dangerous downward spiral. Andrés Miguel Rondón, a Venezuelan economist who fled to Spain, wrote this of his own country’s experience of being caught up in an authoritarian’s fraudulent promises: “[W]hat can really win them over is not to prove that you are right. It is to show that you care. Only then will they believe what you say.”

 

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Salon

Feb. 22, 2019

 

Yale psych prof: If Trump weren’t president

he would be “contained and evaluated”

 

By Chauncey DeVega

 

At the center of the chaotic maelstrom that is the Trump presidency is the question of Donald Trump’s mental health. His public behavior (and, by most accounts, his private behavior as well) is that of a man who is a compulsive liar and malignant narcissist, is paranoid, lacks in impulse control and lives in an alternate reality of his own creation.

 

Donald Trump has recently declared a “national emergency” in order to further expand his power and gut American democracy and the Constitution in the service of his radically destructive right-wing agenda. But in reality it is Donald Trump who is the actual national emergency, an obvious threat to this country and the entire world.

 

Former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe recently revealed that officials in the Justice Department discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove President Trump from power. Yet it also may be true that Trump’s apparent mental health problems are actually helping him to remain in power and to control his supporters.

 

How are mentally unwell leaders more dangerous than leaders who are “merely” criminals? How have the American people become so numb to Trump and the Republican Party’s assault on American democracy and the common good? How is dangerous behavior normalized in an unhealthy society — such as ours? How are Trump and his movement affecting negatively the mental and physical health of the American people?

 

In an effort to answer these questions I recently spoke with Dr. Bandy Lee. She is a psychiatrist at Yale University and a leading voice among the growing number of mental health and other medical professionals who have been trying to raise public awareness about Donald Trump’s mental health.

 

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NowThis News

 

Who is Jared Kushner?

 

Narrated by Anna Akana

March 4, 2020

 

We know him as Ivanka Trump’s husband, senior advisor to President Trump, and heir to a $1.8 billion dollar real estate empire that was tarnished with tax evasion scandal. Here’s what you should know about Trump’s one percent-er son-in-law.

 

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Channel 4 News
March 19, 2019

 

Jared Kushner: power hungry and intent on enriching himself?

 

They were once considered a moderating influence on Donald Trump’s Presidency. A new book, though, portrays Mr Trump’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka and Jared Kushner, as a power-hungry couple, concerned primarily with enriching themselves.

 

The White House has dismissed it as “fiction”. But there are long-standing concerns in the US over Mr Kushner’s business dealings and the level of influence he has over foreign policy. Kushner has been caught up in investigations by the Mueller Inquiry and Congress. We report from Baltimore.

 

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Democracy Now!
March 22, 2019

 

Vicky Ward on “Kushner, Inc.”

 

Web-only extended interview and conversation with investigative journalist Vicky Ward, author of Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.

 

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The Mueller Report – A PBS NewsHour

FRONTLINE Special

 

March 25, 2019

 

The nearly two-year investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election has concluded, with Mueller’s final report delivered to Attorney General William Barr for review.

 

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MSNBC

 

Morning Joe

May 8, 2019

 

‘It Was Always A Scam; He Was Always Losing Money’

 

The New York Times obtained ten years of Donald Trump’s tax information, beginning in the mid-1980s, and the Times found Trump lost $1.17 billion from 1985 to 1994. Trump responded to the reporting Wednesday morning on Twitter.

 

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LAVIN

Politics & Society

June 24, 2019

 

Are We Living in 1984?

George Packer Revisits Orwell’s Dystopian Novel

for The Atlantic

 

1984 – George Orwell’s seminal work – has enjoyed a

cultural resurgence in the wake of Donald Trump’s presidency.

 

 

“Orwell never intended his novel to be a prediction, only a warning,” George Packer writes in Doublethink is Stronger than Orwell Imagined, his latest article for The Atlantic. The book, originally published in 1949, envisions a dystopian future in which the world has fallen prey to ruthless totalitarianism, fueled by terror, surveillance, and political propaganda. Though there are startling similarities between the world today – the haunting phrase “fake news” comes to mind – and Orwell’s nightmarish dystopia, we don’t live under a totalitarian regime. “We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time,” Packer writes. “Today the problem is too much information from too many sources, with a resulting plague of fragmentation and division – not excessive authority but its disappearance, which leaves ordinary people to work out the facts for themselves, at the mercy of their own prejudices and delusions.”

 

Packer offers us a new reading of 1984; today, the heart of the issue is not the state, but the individual. It’s not that Trump might abolish democracy, Packer argues, “but that Americans had put him in a position to try.” Regardless of the political ideologies of the day, 1984 will remain fundamental reading because it wrestles with the enduring concept of truth. Does it exist? Who gets to decide what is and isn’t true? According to Packer, the real political war is the one we wage internally.

 

George Packer is a staff writer for The Atlantic. His recent book, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century, was released in May 2019.

 

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MSNBC

July 12, 2019

BREAKING NEWS

 

ACOSTA RESIGNS AS LABOR SECRETARY

AFTER EPSTEIN CONTROVERSY

 

The Pedophile, The Prosecutor, And The President

 

Former US Attorney Joyce Vance, WaPo’s Ashley Parker, former Assistant Director at the FBI Frank Figliuzzi, Move On’s Karine Jean-Pierre, and Bloomberg’s Tim O’Brien on Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta’s resignation, despite Trump saying he had given him his full support.

 

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MSNBC

August 21, 2019

 

The Last Word

with Lawrence O’Donnell

 

Psychiatrist On ‘The Essential Emptiness

Of President Donald Trump’

 

Dr. Lance Dodes, one of the first mental health professionals who questioned Donald Trump’s stability, discusses how Trump has devolved since the beginning of his presidency.

 

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60 Minutes Australia

September 1, 2019

 

White House insiders reveal damning

allegations against Donald Trump

 

. . . And as Karl Stefanovic reports, one of the most embarrassing claims is that the supposed “unbreakable” alliance between our two countries, far from being Trumped, was almost dumped.

 

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The Atlantic

December 2019 Issue

 

HOW AMERICA ENDS

 

A tectonic demographic shift is under way.

Can the country hold together?

 

 

By Yoni Appelbaum

 

Democracy depends on the consent of the losers. For most of the 20th century, parties and candidates in the United States have competed in elections with the understanding that electoral defeats are neither permanent nor intolerable. The losers could accept the result, adjust their ideas and coalitions, and move on to fight in the next election. Ideas and policies would be contested, sometimes viciously, but however heated the rhetoric got, defeat was not generally equated with political annihilation. The stakes could feel high, but rarely existential. In recent years, however, beginning before the election of Donald Trump and accelerating since, that has changed.

 

“Our radical Democrat opponents are driven by hatred, prejudice, and rage,” Trump told the crowd at his reelection kickoff event in Orlando in June. “They want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.” This is the core of the president’s pitch to his supporters: He is all that stands between them and the abyss.

 

The United States is undergoing a transition perhaps no rich and stable democracy has ever experienced: Its historically dominant group is on its way to becoming a political minority—and its minority groups are asserting their co-equal rights and interests. If there are precedents for such a transition, they lie here in the United States, where white Englishmen initially predominated, and the boundaries of the dominant group have been under negotiation ever since. Yet those precedents are hardly comforting. Many of these renegotiations sparked political conflict or open violence, and few were as profound as the one now under way.

 

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PBS

FRONTLINE

January 2020

 

AMERICA’S GREAT DIVIDE

 

From Obama to Trump

 

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FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2020

 

“Trump’s Acquittal Shows The GOP Senate Acts Like A Cult”

 

[ed. – Longtime observers of Robert Burton and The Fellowship of Friends will recognize the commonalities between Donald Trump, Burton and their devoted followers.

 

Three “cult experts,” two of whom were interviewed for the article below, have studied The Fellowship of Friends. (Links are provided to their work directly related to the Fellowship.)

 

In the August 31, 2016 GQ article, “The Cult of Trump”, Rebecca Nelson spoke with Rick Alan Ross, whose Cult Education Institute has tracked The Fellowship of Friends for decades:]

“Cult leaders are most often narcissists,” Ross explains. “They see themselves as the center of the known universe, and everyone revolves around them.” Trump, he says, fits the warning signs of narcissistic personality disorder—an exaggerated sense of self-importance, preoccupation with success, power and brilliance, behaving in an arrogant or haughty manner—to a T (for Trump, probably). Lest we forget, Trump says he went to the “best school in the world,” has “the world’s greatest memory,” and will be “the greatest jobs president God has ever created.”

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WhaleRider – May 11, 2020 – Fellowship of Friends Discussion blog

 

“…he is actually testing people’s loyalty to the ‘laws’ of his mind over the laws of nature, or even impulse for survival. The more he abuses them, the greater their devotion grows, since the psychological cost of admitting their mistake is ever higher — and so it becomes easier to dig a well of unreality than to see the obvious truth.

 

Mental symptoms do not discriminate between levels of intelligence. What we are seeing is what mental health experts warned would happen if we left a severely impaired person in an influential position without treatment, and what others have described as a cult.

 

But what I find most insidious is the contagion of symptoms: prolonged exposure…causes you to ‘catch’ his worldview, and even the healthiest, soundest people turn ‘crazy,’ as if afflicted with the same condition.

 

This is a known phenomenon I have encountered a great deal from working in underserved settings. It is interchangeably called ‘shared psychosis,’ ‘folie à plusieurs’ or ‘induced delusional disorder.’ The cure is removal. Then, quite dramatically, an entire afflicted family, street gang or prison cell-block that seemed almost ‘possessed’ returns to normal.

 

When experts call out abnormal signs, it is not a diagnosis but important information… It is not up to mental health experts to say how it is to be done, but it is our responsibility to say what must be done, based on our best assessment. Our prescription is removal.”

 

~ Dr Bandy X. Lee, on testing loyalty in the cult of Trump.

 

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INDEPENDENT

 

The coronavirus pandemic has made Trump’s psychiatric issues clear. We should remove him for our own safety.

 

As the death toll from Covid-19 mounts, we have a decision to make.

 

Bandy X. Lee 
Yale University | March 24, 2020

 

We knew this presidency would be deadly. We were not exaggerating when, three years ago, we put together the public-service book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President. We meant in part that the president would be dangerous to civic life, to democracy, and to the nation’s mental health — but we also meant that he would endanger lives.

 

Politics did not concern us. We are health professionals. Everything falls secondary to life and death, including politics.

After we got together to write the book, hundreds, and later thousands, more mental health professionals gathered from all over the country and the world with their shared concerns. Together we formed first the National Coalition, and then the World Mental Health Coalition, to organize around our goal of societal safety.

 

Through consultation with Congress members, letters, petitions, and education of the public, we tried to emphasize that mental impairment in the office of the US presidency is a serious matter.

“Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were—they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,” an intelligence official recently said about the lack of mobilization around the now deadly coronavirus pandemic.

 

His behavior is exactly what we expect of someone who is dangerously lacking in mental capacity. Just when surveillance was needed, he was more preoccupied with “keeping the numbers low” than testing and containment. And when behavioral change would decide the scale of the eventual calamity, he defiantly appeared in crowds, shaking hands and touching surfaces all the more.

 

As his rallies were canceled, he used daily press conferences for his emotional compulsion to create a desired, alternative reality, through delusional-level distortion and misinformation, rather than working to save lives. The pandemic makes stark the deadliness of his symptoms, and if we believe those around him will be able to contain or go around them, we are mistaken.

 

Here we enter the realm of pathology. What is truly dangerous is not the overt symptoms — even a psychotic patient wearing a tinfoil hat is not very dangerous — but the denial and the extent to which one would go to cover up symptoms. And this also goes for the president’s handlers, by extension. We call this “loss of insight.” It is the loss of ability to take care of oneself or to see that one has a problem, which diminishes all the more in those who need intervention the most.

 

On top of this, mental symptoms such as denial, projection (blaming others for what one is doing), and the inflation of non-realities while suppressing reality will be all the more unrelenting and non-negotiable when severe. Not only that, but where there is prolonged exposure to severe symptoms, previously sound individuals will start losing their own grounding in reality and take on similar symptoms.

 

Disease is unlike normal variation. It brings damage and death, which is why we treat. Just as with the viral pandemic, early signs may be difficult to detect, and warning signs may not always be visible to the untrained eye. But those who have seen similar cases in the past can recognize the signs early, know how serious will be their course, and bring greater precision to needed management, even if the circumstances are novel. In other words, expertise makes a difference. Without it, the danger of minimizing and normalizing pathology is too great.

 

Normal choices are flexible, adaptable, and life-affirming. Pathology is rigid, stereotypical, and follows very closely other cases of disease. No matter the immediate, accidental advantages — which the president calls his “gut”, when they are actually symptoms — the course is destructive: whether we look at healthcare, domestic tranquility, global security, pandemic preparedness, or an artificially bloated economy, pathological decisions have one eventual trajectory. It is the definition of disease.

As the death toll from coronavirus mounts, we have a decision to make. We have learned from the pandemic that prevention is key. A leadership worse than its absence can mean the difference between a contained outbreak and a catastrophe.

 

There will be many more critical junctures in not just the coming months but days and even hours as the crisis deepens. A president’s mental incapacity, at this level of severity, is not an issue that non-experts can grasp or handle. Whether it is impeachment, the 25th Amendment, or an ultimatum on resignation is for the politicians to decide, but our prescription is removal. It is a prescription for survival.

 

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“Under Control” by Brian Stauffer

 

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#UNFIT: The Psychology of Donald Trump

 

“As a Narcissist, Trump can not admit he’s wrong and change course, even when American lives are at stake. We can not let him take the country down with him.”

 

– Hans Royal, June 2020

 

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FRONTLINE

June 16, 2020

 

The Virus: What Went Wrong? (full film)

 

As COVID-19 spread across the globe, why was the U.S. caught so unprepared? An investigation of how America’s leaders failed to prepare and protect us — and who is accountable.

 

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eSkeptic

August 14, 2020

 

Plagued By Nonsense

 

Pandemics Throughout History: How Mistakes, Fakes,

and Missing Facts Make Epidemics Worse

 

Right now, we are all confronting one of humanity’s scariest enemies: epidemic disease. Are we brave enough to face this horror? You bet we are! We’ve done it every day during the Covid-19 pandemic.

 

Covid is new. Other diseases have plagued our ancestors since ancient times. Mighty civilizations have been devastated by the invisible invaders we call “germs.” But people are not helpless! Over centuries, we learned how to fight back against disease. Our strongest weapons are science and critical thinking. However, germs have a powerful ally: misinformation! How do ignorance and bad ideas help the germs win—and what can we do about that?

 

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60 Minutes

September 17, 2020

 

Inside Donald Trump’s 18 recorded interviews

with Bob Woodward for his book Rage

 

In taped conversations with a Washington Post journalist, President Trump said he wanted to downplay the severity of the coronavirus. And the recordings reveal the President’s view on how close the United States came to nuclear war with North Korea. Scott Pelley reports.

 

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Saturday Evening Post

November 18, 2020

 

Con Watch: Two COVID

Scams to Avoid

 

Criminals are using the coronavirus to part you from your money or your personal information. Learn how to avoid these scams.

 

By Steve Weisman, a lawyer, college professor, author, and one of the country’s leading experts in cybersecurity, identity theft, and scams. See Steve’s other Con Watch articles.

 

 

Clinical Trial Scams

 

Many people are quite optimistic about the progress of companies such as Pfizer and Moderna in developing viable vaccines. Many other companies are also intensely working on a vaccine. Presently, there are dozens of clinical trials being conducted. Many people are interested in participating in these trials, both to be able to contribute to the battle against the coronavirus and to collect the payment that participants in such clinical trials receive, which is generally between several hundred and several thousand dollars. Unfortunately, scammers are all too willing to lure you into participating in a phony clinical trial. These sham clinical trials are offered through legitimate-appearing websites, emails, and other promotional material.

 

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RAWSTORY
Investigates

September 21, 2020

 

Expert on cult movements: Trump’s attempts
to falsify reality follows ‘pattern of the Nazis’

 

 

By Igor Derysh, Salon 

 

A prominent psychiatrist who spent years studying Nazi Germany has called for mental health professionals to speak out about President Trump’s “falsification of reality” ahead of the election, warning that his attacks on the truth echo those of the Nazis.

 

Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, distinguished professor emeritus at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a leading psychohistorian who has written extensively about doctors who aided Nazi war crimes, has long called for mental health experts to defy warnings from the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and speak out about Trump’s mental health. Lifton recently published a book entitled Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry and was one of the 27 mental health experts featured in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the bestseller edited by Yale psychiatrist Dr. Bandy X. Lee in which mental health professionals assessed the president.

 

Lifton told Salon that the book and a Yale conference on the topic began the movement of “psychologists and psychiatrists speaking out against Trump.”

 

“I spoke about what I called malignant normality that was being imposed on us, and the need to be witnessing professionals who told the truth and oppose the malignant normality,” he said in an interview last week.

 

Lifton said that Trump’s supporters and enablers exhibit the same “cult-like behavior” that he has studied, adding that the current administration has “Trumpified” every part of the federal government, in much the same way that the German government was “Nazified” under Adolf Hitler.

 

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Professor Jason Stanley, in his book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, observed that “The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors.” Stanley says recent global events, including the pandemic and the protests, have substantiated his concern about how fascist rhetoric is showing up in politics and policies around the world. ~ Wikipedia

 

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David Hoffman: How & Why Germans Bought Hitler’s Pitch

 

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“Say Their Names” by Kadir Nelson

 

 

REVISISTING MENGELE’S MALIGNANT

 

“RACE SCIENCE”

 

The study of Nazis still offers moral instruction on how evil arises.

 

By Adam Gopnick

June 15, 2020

 

Have we come, at last, to the end of morally instructive Nazis? After eight decades, Nazis may seem to have retreated into a class with orcs and cable-TV sharks, fantastic creatures representing evil, rather than historical figures who actually were evil. It is fine to say we should look past the History Channel Nazis—“Hitler and the Occult”—to the real thing, but there comes a time when the iconic imagination really does overwhelm the historical imagination. No one any longer objects to jokes about the Spanish Inquisition, which burned skeptics and Jews alive, but which exists now first of all as a Monty Python sketch (“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”), while Henry VIII and the Tudors, who burned men, too, and brutalized thousands, are a soap opera before they are a sermon.

 

Two new books suggest that we may not have come to the end, and that, on the contrary, our struggle to understand how evil happens is still best helped by understanding how evil happened. The subject of David G. Marwell’s Mengele: Unmasking the “Angel of Death” (W. W. Norton) is one of the leading orcs: Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death at Auschwitz, who oversaw selections on the train ramp—sending some family members off to be gassed or worked to death, while conducting bizarre medical experiments on others—and who then escaped scot-free to a secret life in South America. Mengele’s name became synonymous with pure evil of the sinister, educated sort: the movie “Marathon Man,” with Laurence Olivier as the Dustin Hoffman-torturing dentist, making dental visits difficult for a generation, was inspired by Mengele.

 

Marwell’s life has much new to tell us, both about Mengele himself and, more significant, about the social and scientific milieu that allowed him to flourish. There is nothing surprising in educated people doing evil, but it is still amazing to see how fully they construct a rationale to let them do it, piling plausible reason on self-justification, until, like Mengele, they are able to look themselves in the mirror every morning with bright-eyed self-congratulation.

 

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The Atlantic

June 2020 Issue

 

THE PROPHESIES OF Q

 

American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase.

 

By Adrienne LaFrance

Illustrations by Arsh Raziuddin

 

 

This article is part of  “Shadowland,” a project about conspiracy thinking in America.

 

If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You would look like any other American. You could be a mother, picking leftovers off your toddler’s plate. You could be the young man in headphones across the street. You could be a bookkeeper, a dentist, a grandmother icing cupcakes in her kitchen. You may well have an affiliation with an evangelical church. But you are hard to identify just from the way you look—which is good, because someday soon dark forces may try to track you down. You understand this sounds crazy, but you don’t care. You know that a small group of manipulators, operating in the shadows, pull the planet’s strings. You know that they are powerful enough to abuse children without fear of retribution. You know that the mainstream media are their handmaidens, in partnership with Hillary Clinton and the secretive denizens of the deep state. You know that only Donald Trump stands between you and a damned and ravaged world. You see plague and pestilence sweeping the planet, and understand that they are part of the plan. You know that a clash between good and evil cannot be avoided, and you yearn for the Great Awakening that is coming. And so you must be on guard at all times. You must shield your ears from the scorn of the ignorant. You must find those who are like you. And you must be prepared to fight.

 

You know all this because you believe in Q.

 

 

VII. APOCALYPSE

 

WATCHKEEPERS FOR THE End of Days can easily find signs of impending doom—in comets and earthquakes, in wars and pandemics. It has always been this way. In 1831, a Baptist preacher in rural New York named William Miller began to publicly share his prediction that the Second Coming of Jesus was imminent. Eventually he settled on a date: October 22, 1844. When the sun came up on October 23, his followers, known as the Millerites, were crushed. The episode would come to be known as the Great Disappointment. But they did not give up. The Millerites became the Adventists, who in turn became the Seventh-day Adventists, who now have a worldwide membership of more than 20 million. “These people in the QAnon community—I feel like they are as deeply delusional, as deeply invested in their beliefs, as the Millerites were,” Travis View, one of the hosts of a podcast called QAnon Anonymous, which subjects QAnon to acerbic analysis, told me. “That makes me pretty confident that this is not something that is going to go away with the end of the Trump presidency.”

 

QAnon carries on a tradition of apocalyptic thinking that has spanned thousands of years. It offers a polemic to empower those who feel adrift. In his classic 1957 book, The Pursuit of the Millennium, the historian Norman Cohn examined the emergence of apocalyptic thinking over many centuries. He found one common condition: This way of thinking consistently emerged in regions where rapid social and economic change was taking place—and at periods of time when displays of spectacular wealth were highly visible but unavailable to most people. This was true in Europe during the Crusades in the 11th century, and during the Black Death in the 14th century, and in the Rhine Valley in the 16th century, and in William Miller’s New York in the 19th century. It is true in America in the 21st century.

 

The Seventh-day Adventists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are thriving religious movements indigenous to America. Do not be surprised if QAnon becomes another. It already has more adherents by far than either of those two denominations had in the first decades of their existence. People are expressing their faith through devoted study of Q drops as installments of a foundational text, through the development of Q-worshipping groups, and through sweeping expressions of gratitude for what Q has brought to their lives. Does it matter that we do not know who Q is? The divine is always a mystery. Does it matter that basic aspects of Q’s teachings cannot be confirmed? The basic tenets of Christianity cannot be confirmed. Among the people of QAnon, faith remains absolute. True believers describe a feeling of rebirth, an irreversible arousal to existential knowledge. They are certain that a Great Awakening is coming. They’ll wait as long as they must for deliverance.

 

Trust the plan. Enjoy the show. Nothing can stop what is coming.

 

This article appears in the June 2020 print edition with the headline “Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming.” It was published online on May 14, 2020.

 

 

Adrienne LaFrance is the executive editor of The Atlantic. She was previously a senior editor and staff writer at The Atlantic, and the editor of TheAtlantic.com.

 

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How Evangelicals became Republicans

 

J. J. McCullough | July 19, 2020

 

A history of the religious right and the role played by Evangelical Christians in the Republican Party, 1979 to present.

 

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Democracy Now!
August 7, 2020

 

Mary Trump on Her Uncle,

President Trump & Why He Must Be Ousted

 

“In my family, being kind was considered being weak,” says Mary Trump, President Trump’s niece, a clinical psychologist and author of Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.

 

We spend the hour with Mary Trump, discussing her book the president doesn’t want people to read, in which she describes his upbringing in a dysfunctional family that fostered his greed, cruelty and racist and sexist behaviors — which he is now inflicting on the world. Mary Trump also discusses the president’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, his long history of lies and misrepresentations, and the dangers of his reelection. “I believe that this country is on the knife’s edge, and I don’t want anybody going to cast their vote in November being able to claim that they just don’t know who they’re voting for,” she says.

 

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MSNBC

July 16, 2020

 

Psychiatrist: Trump Became The Same ‘Sadistic, Tyrannical And Cruel’ Person His Father Was

 

Dr. Lance Dodes joins Lawrence O’Donnell to react to the revelations in Mary Trump’s tell-all book and explain why her description of Donald Trump as a sadist is “consistent with everything we know about him.” 

 

The Atlantic

September 2020 Issue

 

How the Pandemic Defeated America

 

A virus has brought the world’s most powerful country to its knees.

 

By Ed Yong

 

Updated at 1:12 p.m. ET on August 4, 2020

 

Editor’s Note: The Atlantic is making vital coverage of the coronavirus available to all readers. Find the collection here.

 

. . . Beginning on April 16, DiResta’s team noticed growing online chatter about Judy Mikovits, a discredited researcher turned anti-vaccination champion. Posts and videos cast Mikovits as a whistleblower who claimed that the new coronavirus was made in a lab and described Anthony Fauci of the White House’s coronavirus task force as her nemesis. Ironically, this conspiracy theory was nested inside a larger conspiracy—part of an orchestrated PR campaign by an anti-vaxxer and QAnon fan with the explicit goal to “take down Anthony Fauci.” It culminated in a slickly produced video called Plandemic, which was released on May 4. More than 8 million people watched it in a week.

 

Doctors and journalists tried to debunk Plandemic’s many misleading claims, but these efforts spread less successfully than the video itself. Like pandemics, infodemics quickly become uncontrollable unless caught early. But while health organizations recognize the need to surveil for emerging diseases, they are woefully unprepared to do the same for emerging conspiracies. In 2016, when DiResta spoke with a CDC team about the threat of misinformation, “their response was: ‘ That’s interesting, but that’s just stuff that happens on the internet.’ ”

 

[ From the June 2020 issue: Adrienne LaFrance on how QAnon is more important than you think ]

 

Rather than countering misinformation during the pandemic’s early stages, trusted sources often made things worse. Many health experts and government officials downplayed the threat of the virus in January and February, assuring the public that it posed a low risk to the U.S. and drawing comparisons to the ostensibly greater threat of the flu. The WHO, the CDC, and the U.S. surgeon general urged people not to wear masks, hoping to preserve the limited stocks for health-care workers. These messages were offered without nuance or acknowledgement of uncertainty, so when they were reversed—the virus is worse than the flu; wear masks—the changes seemed like befuddling flip-flops.

 

The media added to the confusion. Drawn to novelty, journalists gave oxygen to fringe anti-lockdown protests while most Americans quietly stayed home. They wrote up every incremental scientific claim, even those that hadn’t been verified or peer-reviewed.

 

In March, a small and severely flawed French study suggested that the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine could treat COVID‑19. Published in a minor journal, it likely would have been ignored a decade ago. But in 2020, it wended its way to Donald Trump via a chain of credulity that included Fox News, Elon Musk, and Dr. Oz. Trump spent months touting the drug as a miracle cure despite mounting evidence to the contrary, causing shortages for people who actually needed it to treat lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. The hydroxychloroquine story was muddied even further by a study published in a top medical journal, The Lancet, that claimed the drug was not effective and was potentially harmful. The paper relied on suspect data from a small analytics company called Surgisphere, and was retracted in June.**

 

Science famously self-corrects. But during the pandemic, the same urgent pace that has produced valuable knowledge at record speed has also sent sloppy claims around the world before anyone could even raise a skeptical eyebrow. The ensuing confusion, and the many genuine unknowns about the virus, has created a vortex of fear and uncertainty, which grifters have sought to exploit. Snake-oil merchants have peddled ineffectual silver bullets (including actual silver). Armchair experts with scant or absent qualifications have found regular slots on the nightly news. And at the center of that confusion is Donald Trump.

 

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“Natural Ability” by Barry Blitt

 

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The Washington Post

September 3, 2020

 

What’s the worst that could happen?

 

The election will likely spark violence – and a constitutional crisis

 

By Rosa Brooks

 

We wanted to know: What’s the worst thing that could happen to our country during the presidential election? President Trump has broken countless norms and ignored countless laws during his time in office, and while my colleagues and I at the Transition Integrity Project didn’t want to lie awake at night contemplating the ways the American experiment could fail, we realized that identifying the most serious risks to our democracy might be the best way to avert a November disaster. So we built a series of war games, sought out some of the most accomplished Republicans, Democrats, civil servants, media experts, pollsters and strategists around, and asked them to imagine what they’d do in a range of election and transition scenarios.

 

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The Atlantic

September 4, 2020

 

Why Trump Supporters Can’t Admit

Who He Really Is

 

Nothing bonds a group more tightly than a common enemy that is perceived as a mortal threat.

 

 

By Peter Wehner

 

. . . In just the past two weeks, the president has praised supporters of the right-wing conspiracy theory QAnon, which contends, as The Guardian recently summarized it, that “a cabal of Satan-worshipping Democrats, Hollywood celebrities and billionaires runs the world while engaging in pedophilia, human trafficking and the harvesting of a supposedly life-extending chemical from the blood of abused children.” Trump touted a conspiracy theory that the national death toll from COVID-19 is about 9,000, a fraction of the official figure of nearly 185,000; promoted a program on the One America News Network accusing demonstrators of secretly plotting Trump’s downfall; encouraged his own supporters to commit voter fraud; and claimed Biden is controlled by “people that are in the dark shadows” who are wearing “dark uniforms.”

 

Trump believes his own government is conspiring to delay a COVID-19 vaccine until after the election. He retweeted a message from the actor James Woods saying New York Governor Andrew Cuomo “should be in jail” and another from an account accusing the Portland, Oregon, mayor of “committing war crimes.” The president is “inciting violence,” in the words of Maryland’s Republican Governor, Larry Hogan. Trump defended 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a supporter who is charged with first-degree homicide; and stated that if he loses the election in November it would be because it was “rigged.” At the same time, the second-ranking House Republican, among other of the president’s supporters, has shared several manipulated videos in an effort to damage Biden.

 

This is just the latest installment in a four-year record of shame, indecency, incompetence, and malfeasance. And yet, for tens of millions of Trump’s supporters, none of it matters. None of it even breaks through. At this point, it appears, Donald Trump really could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose his voters.

 

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Los Angeles Times

September 11, 2020

 

Why nothing matters to Trump voters

 

 

By David Lauter | Washington Bureau Chief

 

WASHINGTON – President Trump’s recorded interviews with Bob Woodward, in which he admitted to deliberately downplaying the danger of the coronavirus, blasted through the presidential campaign this week. His words dominated discussion and diverted the candidates from any other topics they had planned to focus on.

 

What they probably did not do is change many minds.

 

The same goes for the previous week’s eruption — the Atlantic magazine article quoting anonymous officials who said Trump had disparaged military service members as “losers” — and the one before that, and the one before that and so on.

 

Many Democrats find the lack of reaction baffling. Surely, they say after each new revelation, this piece of evidence will be the one to cause Trump supporters to abandon their candidate en masse.

 

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The Atlantic 

September 11, 2020

 

Donald Trump Is Waiting for You in First Class
‘I Moved on Her Very Heavily’: Part 3

 

Story by E. Jean Carroll

 

In her 2019 memoir, What Do We Need Men For?, E. Jean Carroll accused Donald Trump of rape, in a Bergdorf’s dressing room in the mid-1990s. After the president denied ever meeting her and dismissed her story as a Democratic plot, she sued him for defamation. Carroll was not, of course, the first woman to say that Trump had sexually harassed or assaulted her, but unlike so many other powerful men, the president has remained unscathed by the #MeToo reckoning. So in the run-up to the November 3 election, Carroll is interviewing other women who alleged that Trump suddenly and without consent “moved on” them, to cite his locution in the Access Hollywood tape. “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them, it’s like a magnet … And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy.”

 

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NowThis News

 

Narrated by Julianne Moore
Premiered October 28, 2020

 

Who is Donald J. Trump?

 

Donald Trump is the only presidential candidate on the ballot who has publicly agreed that his own daughter is a ‘piece of ass.’ The bronze-gilded mogul is as notable for his multiple rape allegations and history of racist renting practices as he is for putting children in cages and shamelessly funding a campaign to execute 5 innocent Black teens. So how did the man who once said he’d choose Oprah as his running mate end up with yet another campaign endorsement from former KKK grand wizard David Duke?

 

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60 Minutes Australia

September 20, 2020

 

EXCLUSIVE: Melania Trump’s former friend

reveals White House secrets

 

Just as the world has never experienced a United States President quite like Donald Trump, it’s not seen a First Lady like Melania Trump either. Despite being one of the most photographed women on the planet, she remains virtually unknown. But wealthy New York socialite Stephanie Winston Wolkoff is now controversially trying to change all that. She says she was “besties” with Melania for 15 years, and because of their friendship was not only appointed a senior adviser to the First Lady, she was also asked to organise Trump’s presidential inauguration.

 

But two years ago the friendship between the two women soured. Stephanie claims she was the victim of an orchestrated political hit and was bitterly disappointed when Melania abandoned her. Many are calling it a despicable act of revenge, but Stephanie has now written a tell-all book about the First Lady and her secrets, and as she explains to Liam Bartlett in an exclusive interview, there are plenty of secrets to tell about Melania and the Donald.

 

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NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

September 24, 2020

 

Say it plainly: The president is a psychopath

 

 

By Alan D. Blotcky and Seth D. Norrholm

 

 

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The Atlantic

September 28, 2020

 

The Tedium of Trump

 

No matter how many crazy things happen, the fundamentals are the same: The president is a greedy racist and misogynist who does not understand his job.

 

By Quinta Jurecic

 

Donald Trump has built his public persona around the central importance of grabbing attention—whether his actions provoke delight or fury. And yet he is, and has long been, boring.

 

. . . Read any of the tell-alls written by Trump’s former close associates or family members—not to mention journalists such as Bob Woodward—and you will come away with basically the same understanding. As the journalist Jennifer Szalai wrote in her New York Times review of Woodward’s latest chronicle of the Trump administration, “The Trump that emerges in ‘Rage’ is impetuous and self-aggrandizing—in other words, immediately recognizable to anyone paying even the minimal amount of attention.”

 

There is something uncanny about this. The English novelist E. M. Forster argued that the difference between a fictional character and a real person is that it is possible to know everything about a character in a novel; real people, however, see one another through a glass, darkly. And yet while it may not be possible to know every hidden detail of Trump’s life, it is trivially easy to understand everything about his personality. If he were a character, Forster would call him flat, unrealistic: He does not, as Forster requires, have the capacity to surprise. At some point over the course of the Trump era, this became a running joke among political commentators, who, every time Trump does something appalling and yet obvious, make cracks on social media about how hackneyed the Trump presidency would seem if it were fiction.

 

This has created a problem for artists as well. Surveying the landscape of anti-Trump art in February 2019, the cultural critic Jillian Steinhauer argued that the work had failed to hit the mark: It was missing, she wrote, “the critical introspection to accompany the laughter.” But such introspection is hard to achieve when the person prompting it is so lacking in depth or interiority.

 

Likewise, four years into this presidency, uncovering fresh insight into Trump or his administration is difficult. Activists, journalists, and commentators found those insights earlier on. Use of the phrase The cruelty is the point, coined by The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer in 2018, has become widespread in part because it continues to be uncomplicatedly true: A lot of the time, the motivations of Trump and those around him are not actually more involved than a desire to hurt others. The idea is so simple that it’s more or less become a meme, which isn’t to deride its perceptiveness but rather to say that the Trump White House is fundamentally simple. Personally, I wrote a great deal in the first few years of the administration about Trump’s understanding of law as a cudgel against the vulnerable before it dawned on me that I was writing the same article over and over again.

 

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The Story Behind TIME’s ‘Plague Election’

Donald Trump Cover

 

 

By D.W. Pine

August 6, 2020

D.W. Pine is the Creative Director at TIME.

 

For the cover of the Aug. 17, 2020 issue of TIME, longtime collaborator Tim O’Brien revisited his award-winning series depicting the mounting troubles facing President Trump. The new cover is the fourth installment and the first to depart the Oval Office, painting Trump at sea surrounded by COVID-19, as the White House recedes from view. It accompanies a cover story by TIME national correspondent Molly Ball on the ways the pandemic is transforming the 2020 election.

 

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MSNBC

October 1, 2020

 

Trump Announces He’s Tested Positive For The Coronavirus

 

Early Friday morning on the East Coast, the president announced on Twitter that he and the First Lady had tested positive with the coronavirus after his close aide Hope Hicks tested positive for the virus.

 

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VICE News 

October 5, 2020

 

After Trump’s Doctors Lied,

New COVID Conspiracy Theories Are Exploding

 

Conspiracy theorists think Trump is faking it but also that he was infected by Nancy Pelosi.

 

By David Gilbert

 

“Joe Biden’s campaign team is coordinating with Russian dissident Alexei Navalny to assassinate President Donald Trump.”

 

“Trump has been using a body double in recent days to hide the seriousness of his symptoms.”

 

“Trump was seen using an oxygen tank days before he tested positive for coronavirus.”

 

These are just a tiny selection of the tsunami of conspiracy theories that flooded social media over the weekend, as people rushed to fill the vacuum created by a series of confusing and misleading statements from White House officials and Trump’s own doctors at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

Anthony Fauci Was ‘Absolutely Not’ Surprised

Trump Got Covid

 

In an interview with 60 Minutes, Fauci said he believes

the president “equates wearing a mask with weakness.”

 

By Paul Blest | Oct 19, 2020

 

. . . While it’s not totally clear where Trump contracted the coronavirus, several high-profile figures who attended the Barrett event and were exposed to people who attended later tested positive for COVID-19. Trump himself was hospitalized earlier this month but has since returned to the campaign trail.

 

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New York
Intelligencer

 

The National Interest

October 6, 2020 

 

Trump Turning Down Pelosi’s Stimulus Deal

Is the Worst Political Blunder in History

 

 

By Jonathan Chait

 

In May, the House of Representatives passed a $3 trillion economic relief bill. Over the next four and a half months, Republicans in the White House and Senate dithered, alternating between good-faith engagement and lethargy. The apparent final blow came in the form of a series of tweets by President Trump announcing an end to negotiations.

 

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The David Pakman Show 

October 6, 2020

 

Anthony Scaramucci Tells All:

Trump an “Unstable Nutjob”

 

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NBC NEWS

October 8, 2020

 

Whitmer says Trump ‘complicit’ after feds

reveal thwarted plot to kidnap her

 

 

By Allan Smith

 

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said Thursday that President Donald Trump is “complicit” in fomenting extremists as she addressed a thwarted plot to kidnap her revealed earlier Thursday. 

 

“Just last week, the president of the United States stood before the American people and refused to condemn white supremacists and hate groups like these two Michigan militia groups,” she said, pointing to Trump’s comments about the “Proud Boys” group during last week’s presidential debate. “‘Stand back and stand by,’ he told them. Stand back and stand by.”

 

“Hate groups heard the president’s words not as a rebuke, but as a rallying cry,” she said. “As a call to action. When our leaders speak, their words matter. They carry weight. When our leaders meet with, encourage, or fraternize with domestic terrorists, they legitimize their actions and they are complicit.”

 

Whitmer thanked law enforcement after more than a dozen men were charged with federal and state crimes in connection to the plot. Six of the men were arrested on federal charges while seven more were hit with state charges. Federal investigators had utilized informants and were tracking the individuals for months.

 

According to the federal criminal complaint, the men sought to take Whitmer hostage before the November election and conducted surveillance of her vacation home. They had also conducted combat training and sought this week to purchase explosives.

 

The president has repeatedly criticized Whitmer over her strict efforts to contain coronavirus, calling her the “lock-up queen” in an interview just hours before news of the alleged plot broke. In an April tweet that began recirculating after the charges were announced, Trump wrote: “LIBERATE MICHIGAN.”

 

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Yahoo! news

 

Wisconsin is battling Americas’s worst

coronavirus outbreak, and the state’s

broken politics are partly to blame

 

Andrew Romano West Coast correspondent • October 10, 2020

 

Look at a map of daily COVID-19 cases in the U.S. Most of the Northeast and West Coast is yellow, indicating limited spread. The numbers across the Southeast tend to be moderate, or orange. Move into the Upper Midwest and more red hot spots start to appear. 

 

And then there’s one state that’s covered in crimson: Wisconsin. 

 

Right now Wisconsin is battling the worst coronavirus outbreak in America. The question is why. What about Wisconsin is different from, say, the neighboring states of Michigan, Minnesota and Illinois, where the virus isn’t spreading nearly as fast? 

 

The answer, at least in part, is politics: specifically, the brand of cavalier, it-will-go-away politics propagated by President Trump and parroted by lower-level Republicans who seem hell-bent on resisting efforts to sustain social distancing and mask wearing when the spread is still low enough to contain — and in Wisconsin’s case, who continue to resist even after infections spiral out of control.  

 

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MSNBC

October 13, 2020

 

‘He Knows’: Trump Fixated on ‘Likely’ Loss To Biden, Per Trump Insider

 

New reporting shows Trump’s inner circle worried he failed to handle Covid hitting the White House, bungled debates over a final stimulus package before the election, and ‘blew’ his chance to reset the campaign – raising broader questions of whether he is self-sabotaging. ‘Art of the Deal’ co-author Tony Schwartz discusses Trump’s penchant for hurting himself, how his approach has coarsened over the years, and the wider potential danger facing the U.S. if Trump loses and tries ‘to bring us down with him’ before leaving office, in this interview with MSNBC’s Ari Melber.

 

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HUFFPOST

Politics

 October 22, 2020

 

Trump’s Crackdown On Diversity Training Is Fascist.

And Terrifying.

 

The White House ban on anti-racism training is an authoritarian attack on free speech and already doing serious damage.

 

By Emily Peck

 

THE BALTIMORE SUN

 

Associated Press

October 23, 2020

 

Trump and Biden clash over raging COVID-19 pandemic in final debate that showcased their vastly different visions for the nation

 

By Jonathan Lemire, Darlene Superville, Will Weissert and Michelle L. Price
 

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“In With The New” by Harry Bliss

 

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INDEPENDENT

January 2, 2021

 

A photo op, World War III, and bleach injections:

The wildest politcal moments in the US in 2020

 

So much has happened in 2020 that people often forget

Donald Trump was impeached.

 

Griffin Connolly and John T. Bennet

 

HARPER’S

January 2021 Issue

 

The Gate of Heaven Is Everywhere

 

Among the

contemplatives

 

By Fred Bahnson

 

 

All happy religious families are alike; each unhappy religious family is unhappy in its own way.

 

The family of American Christianity has been unhappy for quite some time, so much so that it’s hard for many of us to imagine that it could be otherwise. The past four years have brought these feuds into the open. For Catholics, there is the glaring pedophilia scandal. For evangelicals, there is disagreement over church leaders’ alliance with power, their unwavering fealty, since 2016, to the crotch-grabbing Caligula of Mar-a-Lago, whose every abuse of office made them double down on their support.

 

For mainline Protestants like me, the discontent has been less visible. Denominational squabbles over human sexuality have made headlines, but across every denomination a certain lassitude pervades, a general lukewarmness that makes it feel as though Protestantism has run its course. When the five hundredth anniversary of the Reformation rolled around in 2017, a few academics published monographs on Luther, and a commemorative study Bible appeared, but with church membership declining in every mainline denomination, Protestant circles shrugged. We knew there wasn’t much to crow about. What was it, exactly, we were still protesting?

 

Outwardly, it might look as if the family dynasty is on the wane, a decline that deepens with every new Pew study. What of the alternatives? A growing number of people are simply leaving the Christian household altogether, becoming Spiritual But Not Religious. Among some conservatives, there is talk of “strategic withdrawal” into tiny neighborhood enclaves. In The Benedict Option, Rod Dreher asserts

 

that serious Christian conservatives could no longer live business-as-usual lives in America, that we have to develop creative, communal solutions to help us hold on to our faith and our values in a world growing ever more hostile to them.

 

Dreher laments “the breakdown of the natural family, the loss of traditional moral values, and the fragmenting of communities,” which he blames on “the flood of secularism.” But the Ben Op, as Dreher calls it, feels a lot like old culture-war stuff repackaged with a catchy title; what Dreher really means by “our values” is protecting the Christian family from “the LGBT agenda.” By accepting gay marriage, his argument goes, the church has failed. “I have written The Benedict Option to wake up the church . . . while there is still time,” he warns.

 

Meanwhile, those on the Christian left are also digging in politically. The primacy of race-class-gender (in the world of progressive theological education it’s often said breathlessly, as one word) as an interpretive grid, the focus on political advocacy, the intense energy directed toward voter registration or climate justice or affordable housing—all of this can make it feel as if progressive churches have become religious versions of MoveOn. The drive to stay politically relevant makes it hard to talk about prayer or salvation or Jesus, unless it’s a prayer that everybody at a rally can get behind, a salvation that exists in this world, or a Jesus who is just a political rabble-rouser. If conservatives like Dreher fear assimilation, progressives fear being too Christian. Having grown up in one camp (conservative), I long ago threw in my lot with the other (progressive), but my point here is not to promote camps or criticize platforms. It is precisely to say that religious life, to its detriment, has been reduced to a platform.

 

Like the Kardashians, the American Christian family has become obsessed with its own profile. It has become faith as public spectacle, faith as political engagement, as party affiliation, as reputation—anything but faith as paradox, as mystery, as the hidden and seductive dance between spiritual desire and satiation, the prolonging of a hunger so alarmingly vast and yet so subtle that it disappears the moment it’s made public.

 

In early monastic Christianity, that hunger was acknowledged and channeled, given shape and form and expression. It went by different names—contemplatio (silent prayer) or hesychia (stillness)—which led first to an inner union with Christ, and then to a deep engagement with the suffering of the world. The order was important. In John Cassian’s Conferences, a fifth-century account of the early Christian monastic movement in the deserts of Egypt, a certain Abba Isaac describes how the monks modeled their prayer on Jesus’ practice of going up a mountain alone to pray; those who wished to pray “must withdraw from all the worry and turbulence of the crowd.” In that state of spiritual yearning, God’s presence would become known. “He will be all that we are zealous for, all that we strive for,” Abba Isaac said. “He will be all that we think about, all our living, all that we talk about, our very breath.”

 

What the early monks and the Christian mystics who followed sought union—an intense experience of inwardness that is glaringly absent in what many of us get from American Christianity today. Perhaps this absence is the real reason for the mass exodus from churches. Perhaps it is not Christianity that many followers are disappointed in, but Christendom.

 

While the mysteries of contemplative Christianity were once handed down by emaciated anchorites in the Egyptian desert, the modern wisdom seeker might find himself, as I did, in the Albuquerque Convention Center, watching Richard Rohr speak on a Jumbotron.

 

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USA TODAY • 1/5/2021

 

Nation’s capital braces for violence as extremist groups converge to protest Trump’s election loss

 

Will Carless

 

Protests planned for Washington, D.C., this week are likely to attract large numbers of President Donald Trump’s supporters, including conspiracy theorists, militia groups and members of the extremist group the Proud Boys, raising concerns of violent confrontations.

 

The rallies are planned to coincide with the official congressional vote to certify the Electoral College votes from the November presidential election and declare President-elect Joe Biden the winner. Far-right groups from around the country have vowed to descend on the capital to protest the vote and attempt to pressure lawmakers into voting against certifying the results, an outcome that even the leaders of the effort admit is extraordinarily unlikely to happen.

 

Trump himself has amplified conspiracy theories about the election and encouraged his supporters to show up at the protests. “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!” he tweeted on December 18. On Sunday, the president again promoted the protests, writing on Twitter, “I will be there. Historic day!”

 

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ABC News

January 7, 2021

 

World leaders react to siege on the Capitol

 

International headlines offered reactions to the thousands of Trump supporters storming the Capitol building.

 

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CNN

Investigates

 

Extremists intensify calls for violence ahead of

Inauguration Day

 

 

By Rob Kuznia, Curt Devine, Scott Bronstein and Bob Ortega

Updated 9:28 PM ET, Friday, January 8, 2021

 

“Trump or war. Today. That simple.”

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The New Republic

May 5, 2021

 

Our Friend, the Trump Propagandist

 

We knew David Horowitz when he was a radical leftist. Then he became a conservative. Then he joined the MAGA cult.

 

By Ronald Roddosh and Sol Stern

 

According to our old friend David Horowitz—the radical leftist turned thoughtful conservative turned Trump propagandist whom we’ve been acquainted with, in his various political guises, for more than 60 years—America is on the brink of destruction by way of a communist takeover that only the patriots of the MAGA movement can prevent. That’s the main message in Horowitz’s new book, The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement Is Destroying America. On the book’s cover are portraits of the seven Democrats allegedly plotting the revolution: Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar.

 

This third book Horowitz has published about Trump since 2017, The Enemy Within, is even more of a jihad against liberals and progressives than his previous two (both bestsellers). Horowitz’s justification for writing yet another Trumpist screed is that, in the aftermath of the Democrats stealing the 2020 election, an event he describes (in lip sync with the former president) as “the greatest political crime in the history of the country,” the “totalitarian” threat the party poses is now imminent.

 

The book begins with a lamentation: “Americans are more divided today than at any time since the Civil War.” The trouble is that almost everything Horowitz has recently written has been calculated to fan the flames of division. Yet he can’t make up his mind whether the tyranny the Democrats are about to install would be more like twentieth-century communism or fascism. He asserts, for example, that the diversity training programs favored by Democrats are akin to the surveillance system of “people’s commissars” created by the Bolsheviks. In practically the same breath, he announces that the Biden administration “has clearly defined itself and its party as a fascist vanguard.”

 

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