Donald Trump shrugs off Kim's human rights record: 'He's a tough guyAs Fox News host presses Trump over North Korean regime, president is dismissive: ‘A lot of people have done bad things’
Ed Pilkington in New York
Guardian
Thu 14 Jun 2018 10.47 BST
Donald Trump has dismissed concerns about the widely condemned human rights record of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un, praising him as a “tough guy”, a “smart guy” and a “great negotiator”.
In an interview with Bret Baier of Fox News as he was leaving Singapore following the denuclearization summit with the North Korean leader, Trump declined to condemn the record of his interlocutor. International bodies have accused Kim of crimes against humanity including assassinations of political rivals, public executions and holding captive tens of thousands of political prisoners.
Speaking in a wood-paneled office aboard Air Force One, Baier put it to the US president that Kim was “a killer. He’s executing people.”
Trump replied by praising Kim as a “tough guy. Hey, when you take over a country, tough country, with tough people, and you take it over from your father, I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have – if you can do that at 27 years old, that’s one in 10,000 could do that.”
Trump went on: “So he’s a very smart guy, he’s a great negotiator and I think we understand each other.”
Baier, sounding taken aback by the president’s flippant response, pressed Trump on the issue: “But he’s still done some really bad things.”
To which Trump said: “Yeah, but so have a lot of other people done some really bad things. I could go through a lot of nations where a lot of bad things were done.”
Trump’s failure to condemn one of the worst human rights records on the world stage is certain to inflame criticism that is already being leveled at him from both Democrats and Republicans in the wake of the summit. The presidential center of the former Republican president George W Bush has been tweeting about North Korea’s abuses, giving a clear indication of how he views the matter.
Other public figures have been more directly critical. A Democratic senator from Connecticut, Chris Murphy, said of the outcome of the Singapore summit: “Kim’s gulags, public executions, planned starvation, are legitimized on the world stage… What the hell?”
The issue of human rights was notably absent from the joint statement signed by Trump and Kim at their five-hour summit on Tuesday. Nor has there been any mention of human rights in the early discussions about follow-up meetings between the Trump administration and the North Korean regime.
Among the outrages that could be put on the agenda are the up to 120,000 political prisoners that are thought to be held in four political prison camps in North Korea. A UN inquiry accused the regime of “systematic, widespread and gross human rights violations” rising frequently to the level of crimes against humanity.
The UN added: “These are not mere excesses of the state; they are essential components of a political system that has moved far from the ideals on which it claims to be founded. The gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a state that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.”
North Korea under Kim amounted, the UN concluded, to a totalitarian regime that “seeks to dominate every aspect of its citizens’ lives and terrorizes them from within”.
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Mike Pompeo loses temper when asked about North Korean disarmamentSecretary of state told reporters joint statement did not contain all that had been agreed in principle with Pyongyang
Julian Borger in Singapore and Benjamin Haas in Seoul
Guardian
Thu 14 Jun 2018 05.31 BST
Mike Pompeo has said the US and North Korea are close to agreement on a broad range of issues, but has lashed out at reporters when asked about how Pyongyang’s disarmament would be verified.
The US secretary of state was talking to journalists the day after a joint statement signed by Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un in Singapore, on North Korean disarmament and bilateral relations.
The statement has been criticised by arms control experts because it used the vague language favored by the regime rather than the more precise definition of disarmament the Trump administration had said it would insist on before the summit.
When pressed on whether Trump and Kim had discussed verification, which would involve the deployment of weapons inspectors to North Korea, the secretary of state lost his temper. “I find that question insulting and ridiculous and, frankly, ludicrous,” the former Republican congressman said. “I just have to be honest with you. It’s a game and one ought not play games with serious matters like this.”
Most observers agree that the Singapore meeting went some way towards defusing tensions on the Korean peninsula, but had not made clear whether the Pyongyang regime was serious about giving up its nuclear weapons.
Pompeo spoke after arriving in Seoul to brief the South Korean and Japanese governments on the summit’s outcome. He said the joint statement did not contain all that had been agreed in principle with Pyongyang.
He added that there would be more bilateral talks soon, and expressed hope that “major disarmament” would be achieved in the next two-and-a-half years, before the end of Trump’s first term.
At a later joint media conference with Japanese and South Korean counterparts, Pompeo said: “Kim Jong-un understands the urgency of denuclearisation and that we must do this quickly.”
“We’re going to get complete denuclearisation and only then are we going to lift sanctions,” Pompeo added. “The mistakes of the past were they were providing economic relief before complete denuclearisation.”
Pompeo also backed Trump’s claim on Twitter that “there is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea”, despite Kim maintaining his nuclear arsenal and a range of ballistic missiles.
Pompeo’s outburst came when he highlighted that US and North Korean officials meeting in the demilitarised zone (DMZ) had made a lot of progress in the run-up to the summit that would soon become public.
“Not all of that work appeared in the final document, but [there were] lots of other places where there were understandings reached,” Pompeo said. “We couldn’t reduce them to writing, so that means there’s still some work to do, but there was a great deal of work done that is beyond what was seen in the final document.”
In the joint statement, Kim agreed his country would work towards “complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula”.
It is a stock phrase the regime has used since 1992, but which it defines loosely as a distant aspirational goal that would take place in the context of global disarmament by nuclear weapons powers.
Before the Singapore summit, the Trump administration, and Pompeo in particular, insisted the US would demand more rigorous terms, specifically “complete, verifiable, irreversible disarmament” (CVID), which is favoured by arms control experts to reduce wiggle-room in negotiations.
Before the Singapore meeting, Pompeo repeated the phrase almost daily in interviews and speeches, and in a tweet on the eve of the summit.
But when he was asked why the words “verifiable” and “irreversible” were not in the joint statement, he argued the two terms were encompassed in the single word “complete”: “You could argue semantics, but let me assure you that it’s in the document,” Pompeo said.
When asked again how disarmament would be verified, Pompeo replied: “There’s a long way to go, there’s much to think about, but don’t say silly things.
“No, don’t, don’t,” he continued in face of the questioning. “It’s not productive. It’s not productive to do that, to say silly things. It’s just – it’s unhelpful.
“It’s unhelpful for your readers, your listeners, for the world,” Pompeo said. “It doesn’t remotely reflect the American position or the understandings that the North Koreans have either.”
On returning to the US from his historic meeting with Kim, the first ever between US and North Korean leaders, Trump declared in a tweet: “There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.”
The president blamed the media for scepticism over what had been achieved in Singapore. “They are fighting hard to downplay the deal with North Korea. 500 days ago they would have “begged” for this deal – looked like war would break out,” Trump said. “Our country’s biggest enemy is the fake news so easily promulgated by fools!”
North Korean media declared the summit a victory for Kim, and highlighted Trump’s announcement after the meeting that the US would suspend joint military exercises with South Korea, news which appeared to take Seoul by surprise.
According to Trump, Kim pledged to dismantle a missile engine testing site, but that has so far not been mentioned by Pyongyang.
Arms control specialists warned that the vagueness in the language in Singapore suggested that the summit had done little to close the gap between the two sides in their approach to disarmament.
“Headed into the summit, the US and North Korea failed to reconcile their definitions of denuclearisation, and this failure paradoxically allowed them to talk,” Mira Rapp-Hooper, a senior fellow at Yale Law School’s China centre, said. “By eliding these distinct definitions in the joint statement in ‘complete denuclearization of the Korean peninsula’, they have once again failed to commit to the same objective.”
Kelsey Davenport, the director for non-proliferation policy at the Arms Control Association, said: “Pompeo is assuming that North Korea shares his interpretation that ‘complete denuclearisation of the Korean peninsula’ implies ‘verifiable’.”
“That is a dangerous assumption because North Korea has exploited ambiguity in the past to derail agreements,” Davenport said.
Joseph Cirincione, the head of advocacy group the Ploughshares Fund, said that there had been plenty of arms control agreements before the George W Bush administration coined CVID.
“Pompeo is right that ‘complete denuclearisation’ implies and could include those concepts. But Pompeo personally and the administration overall made such a big deal about it before the summit that its absence is striking,” Cirincione said.
“The weakness in the communique is not the absence of this slogan but the absence of any reference at all to verification or inspections,” he added. “Every other agreement since 1992 has included a commitment to verification.”
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Now we know the outrageous scale of the Trumps’ White House dividendJill Abramson
Guardian
14 Jun 2018 18.59 BST
I’m feeling nostalgic for Hillary’s Goldman Sachs speaking fees. Remember when we got our ethical knickers in a twist over Clinton’s $225,000 (£170,000) Wall Street speeches? Those worries seem positively quaint when compared with what’s happening now. At least Bill and Hillary put off their offensive buckraking until after they had left public office. The Trump family shows no such restraint. Why wait? Donald, Ivanka and Jared are getting theirs while serving in the White House. And, as with much scandalous behaviour in Washington these days, they insist their behaviour is perfectly acceptable.
All three are still connected to the highly profitable companies they operated in New York before Trump’s election in 2016. Since their arrival in Washington, the president and Javanka have been reaping profits from the various family businesses in tandem with their public service, while cynically pretending they have suspended their wheeling and dealing. But the president still monitors who stays at the Trump International Hotel down the street from the White House; Ivanka is still winning trademarks for her clothing line in the notoriously difficult to penetrate Chinese market; and Jared Kushner took in more money from his family real estate empire in 2017, the first year of the Trump administration, than he did the previous year.
This week, Kushner’s new financial disclosure records were released, showing the considerable rise in his assets. Their value ranged between $179m and $735m, up from a range of $137m to $609m the previous year. (White House officials are required to report their assets in broad ranges). For Jared, it was a very good year, indeed.
Just last month came the happy news that Ivanka’s brand had won seven additional Chinese patents for items ranging from cushions to books. The new patents were issued at the same time that her father vowed to save ZTE, a major Chinese telecommunications company, from going bust – a rare and surprising move for a president who is a foreign trade hardliner. The New York Times noted: “Even as Mr Trump contends with Beijing on issues like security and trade, his family and the company that bears his name are trying to make money off their brand in China’s flush and potentially promising market.”
Then there is the president himself. His Trump International Hotel is doing brisk business, its lobby always full of White House favour-seekers, its pricey rooms often filled with industry executives and lobbyists. The hotel is siphoning business from other local hotels and convention centres, according to the District of Columbia and the state of Maryland, which have both filed lawsuits. They charge that Trump’s profits from the hotel violate the US constitution’s anti-corruption clauses. The Justice department, unsurprisingly, has defended the president’s continuing role as a hotelier, but a federal judge on Monday sharply criticised the department’s legal reasoning. The case is probably heading for the US supreme court.
All of this money-grubbing comports with everything we know about the Trump family, whose addiction to luxury and wealth is always on conspicuous display, whether on reality television or on the world stage. David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, recently summed up the “Trumpian world-view” writing, “Trump takes every relationship that has historically been based on affection, loyalty, trust and reciprocity and turned it into a relationship based on competition, self-interest, suspicion and efforts to establish dominance.” Mainly, Brooks was talking about the G-7 debacle but his words apply perfectly to the family’s self-interest and flouting of ethical rules that have governed Washington for centuries. The Trump family’s ethical tin ear is hardly surprising, but their greed is disgusting nonetheless. The administration and its Republican lackeys blew a hole in the deficit with an enormous tax cut and now they are trying to tax almost all the programmes that help the poor and elderly get by. The false rationale: to bring down the deficit.
Despite the supreme court upholding Obamacare, the Justice department pledged its support for a radical rightwing lawsuit trying, once again, to gut the law’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions. Meanwhile, Ben Carson’s tenure at the department of Housing and Urban Development has been marked by Dickensian cruelty. He has proposed legislation to increase by 20% the monthly rent that the most impoverished families pay for public housing. He has also called for eliminating the childcare and medical deductions that poor families in public housing can subtract from their rent. Other Trump cabinet officials gratuitously milk taxpayers for items such as first-class travel, while gutting consumer financial protection.
Here is a modest proposal: Ivanka and Jared should consider contributing a portion of their gains from sweetheart real estate deals and Chinese favours to help restore funds for the few programmes that still contribute to the health and welfare of Americans in need.
It was only two years ago that we were fretting over the Clinton Foundation taking foreign money, Hillary’s paid speeches, and that private email server. Looking back, it seems like a golden period.
• Jill Abramson is a Guardian US columnist
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Trump just endorsed a Senate candidate who is linked to notorious white supremacistsDavid Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement
13 Jun 2018 at 10:31 ET
President Donald Trump has just endorsed a white supremacist running for the U.S. Senate. Republican Corey Stewart Tuesday night won the primary in Virginia. He will face Democratic U.S. Senator Tim Kaine.
Congratulations to Corey Stewart for his great victory for Senator from Virginia. Now he runs against a total stiff, Tim Kaine, who is weak on crime and borders, and wants to raise your taxes through the roof. Don’t underestimate Corey, a major chance of winning!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 13, 2018
Stewart appeared in a February HuffPost article titled, “All The White Supremacists Running For Office In 2018.”
“During his 2017 run for governor, Stewart made several joint appearances with white supremacist Jason Kessler, the organizer of the deadly Charlottesville rally,” HuffPost notes. “After that rally, Stewart chastised his fellow Republicans for criticizing the white nationalists, saying violent people on the left were also to blame for the violence.”
Stewart called Paul Nehlen, a “pro-white” candidate for the U.S. Congress from Wisconsin, his “personal hero,” as The Washington Post reports.
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Jake Tapper torches Trump and GOP for embracing white supremacistsTana Ganeva
Raw Story
13 Jun 2018 at 17:38 ET
On Wednesday, CNN host Jake Tapper excoriated the GOP for its embrace of racists emboldened in the age of Donald Trump.
After all, Trump himself Tweeted his support of white supremacist Corey Stewart, a winner in the Virginia primary. Earlier in the week Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tennessee) also took on his own party for failing to stand up to Trump.
“This morning Mr. Trump embraced Corey Stewart, celebrating the primary win last night writing, ‘congratulations to Corey Stewart for his victory and don’t underestimate Corey,'” Tapper read.
“He’s known for his ties to unrepentant bigots including organizers in the Charlottesville rally last year,” Tapper continued.
Watch:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6ltjq9**********
The Trump movement has created an epidemic of fanatically self-righteous cheaters, liars and griftersJeremy Sherman, AlterNet
14 Jun 2018 at 13:43 ET
“The True Believers” is a psychology classic, a study undertaken by Eric Hoffer, a longshoreman moonlighting as a psycho-philosopher shortly after WWII. It profiles the characteristics of authoritarian fanatics, the kind we see falling for ISIS and here at home, for Trumpism or Evangelicalism.
To lump all such believers together as “true” seems a mistake. For starters, there are true and false believers. False believers think that declaring their commitment is enough. They don’t have to actually follow the beliefs or change how they act. They’re members in good standing simply because they declare themselves to be.
Authoritarian movements thrive on growth so they often make accommodations to false believers to fatten out their ranks. They don’t demand what anthropologist Bill Iron called “costly signals,” a term originating in evolutionary biology for hard-to-fake sacrifices, for example, giving up bacon to be a Muslim or Jew. No diet restrictions, no commitment to prayer every day and above all no moral restraint. Fake believers are afforded all of the benefits of membership at a trivial cost.
Authoritarian movements thrive on boldness, so they often welcome the rash and uncontrolled into their movements, for example, storm troopers or anti-communists in Indonesia, hoodlums who cared more for the fun of breaking eggs than for the movement making the omelet utopia it promises. False belief is great for that: Come for the cause, stay for the freedom to be your indulgent self, above the law because you have such a high calling.
The protestant movement started as a revolt against the Catholic Church’s accommodations to false believers, what Martin Luther disparaged as “frequent communion” going to church on Sunday and being a normal everyday slob the rest of the week.
And Protestantism slid into its own accommodations to false believers, for example Born Again baptism being all it takes to be a full-fledged member, all of your sins atoned for, except if you doubt your membership. Existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard railed against Christian false belief. He thought you weren’t really a Christian if you didn’t sweat blood trying to work out your existential status.
Most authoritarian movements start with some disdain for false believers just going through the motions, but end up allowing, inviting and encouraging it.
I would further distinguish honest from dishonest false believers. Honest false believers know and admit that they’re just going through the motions, claiming to be members but no different from other people.
I have great admiration for honest false believers. They join the club in name only, sort of like fans of a professional sports. They rally around the flag ritualistically. They know better than to believe that it makes them better than other people. It’s just a game, cosplay not taken very seriously by the cosplayers.
I just got back from three weeks working in Mainland China. I was impressed by the honest false belief in communism over there. Students dutifully take classes in Marxism and many people belong to the communist party, but from what I can tell, nobody takes it seriously nor needs to pretend that they do. They can’t attack communism in the press but they didn’t seem uncomfortable talking about how little relevance Marx has to social and economic life in China. You see pictures of Mao, Marx, the hammer and sickle too but that’s not where people live. There’s an admirable resigned realism in Chinese culture these days, borne perhaps of its very different cultural history.
Chinese philosophy and religion started 3000 years ago with deference to the “mandate of heaven,” never personified as a authoritarian god. The mandate of heaven was the Tao, the way things are, reality, not some vain and vengeful daddy deity who could grant you excuses for cutting corners on reality in his dutiful service.
Reverence for reality, reality worship – that’s great philosophical and religious prep for science. It’s the recognition that you can’t God-talk your way out from under reality’s constraints. Reality always wins in the end. China has its rituals and customs, of course, but they don’t seem as prone to fall for delusions and denial as we do in the West.
Here in the US, we’re suffering an epidemic of dishonest fake belief, promoted by the people who took over the conservative party. Just call yourself a Christian, a patriot, a True American and you can get away with anything. All the perks, none of the costs of actually behaving in accord with any kind of disciplined lifestyle – license to indulge from the moral high ground. Trump takes it to a new level.
Trump plays classic Western god – self-obsessed, petty, petulant, disappointed, vengeful, cliquish, devoted solely to building his fan club, chronically bitter about being under-appreciated. And most of his followers are typical dishonest fake believers. They love him because they want to be like him. Trump teaches that earning respect by being honest isn’t the only way. Fellow liars will respect you if you lie and always get away with it.
With dishonest false belief you get to swagger like the moral police without living by your proclaimed moral standards. You can claim the piety even as you cheat, lie and steal.
It’s a win-win for the false believer. Your supreme piety rationalizes acting like a pig. You’re free to cheat because you’re fighting on the side of the righteous. You feel both righteous and clever, saintly and sneaky. Smart because you embrace true virtue; smart because you know how to fight dirtier than your dumb opponents.
It’s more tawdry even than the 9-11 fundamentalists drinking and whoring before they suicide bombed the Twin Towers. As Susan Sontag dared to comment right after the bombing, it’s no good calling suicide bombers cowards. They made sacrifices. That’s a costly signal one can’t fake. Dishonest false belief is a better bargain than that.
In sum, three categories for fanatics:
True believers who really try to live by their principles.
Dishonest false believers who don’t try to live by their principles but pretend that they do.
Honest false believers who don’t try to live by their principles and admit it, not taking their beliefs seriously, while still going through the motions for ritualistic sake.
Honest false believers have a peculiar kind of integrity that I admire. If you need to belong to some cultural tribe, and many people do, it’s healthy to admit that it doesn’t really elevate you above others. It’s your thing but it’s not a big thing.
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Rick Wilson nukes GOP’s slavish devotion to Trump: ‘The word ‘cult’ isn’t strong enough’Tana Ganeva
Raw Story
13 Jun 2018 at 14:59 ET
On Wednesday, CNN’s Brooke Baldwin mediated a debate between Republican strategist Rick Wilson and talk show host and Trump fan Ben Ferguson about Sen. Bob Corker’s (R-Tennessee) recent rant against the Republican party’s slavish devotion to President Donald Trump.
Corker called the GOP’s fealty to the President “cult-like,” railing against members of his party for failing to stand up to the President.
Wilson argued that the word cult was not actually strong enough to describe the GOP’s deference to Trump.
“These folks have almost adopted Trumpism as a religion,” Wilson said.
Watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Hw0rSzgim8***************
MSNBC’s Mika warns GOP’s ‘complete compliance’ to Trump puts US on ‘edge of huge crisis’Travis Gettys
Raw Story
14 Jun 2018 at 07:08 ET
MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski sounded the alarm over President Donald Trump’s fawning praise for North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un — and warned the United States was headed toward a dark place.
The “Morning Joe” co-host said the president’s praise for authoritarian leaders like Kim and Russian president Vladimir Putin was worrisome — particularly after Trump had forced the Republican Party to bow before him.
“It is a grave situation,” Brzezinski said. “Yeah, I know it’s not 1968, but we’re on the edge of something. Because when you have almost complete compliance in his party, and you have someone who speaks the way you just heard, you have a country that is on the edge of something extremely serious, and is slowly slipping away from its core.”
Trump boasted to Fox News of his friendly relationship with Putin, while excusing his aggression against former Soviet territories, and attacked his predecessor Barack Obama as feckless ad weak.
“I will tell you that it sickens me to hear him speak that way, to be so flip, to be so pompous, to be so arrogant, to be so stupid about history — so short-sighted and also so unbelievably confident in nothing,” Brzezinski said. “He has no clue what he’s doing, and our prayers will rest on the people around him.”
“But I think we better get with the program,” she added. “No one can do anything under him, that is effective. I’m concerned for Mike Pompeo and I’m concerned for Gen. (Jim) Mattis, and I’m concerned for the members of Congress who have the opportunity to right this ship and are not taking it. I feel like we’re on the edge of a huge crisis.”
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Psychologist warns Trump’s mental state is rapidly deteriorating — and he may be ‘on the boundary of psychosis and reality’Chauncey Devega, Salon
13 Jun 2018 at 13:34 ET
Based on Donald Trump’s public behavior, some of America and the world’s leading psychologists, psychiatrists and other clinicians have concluded that the president of the United States is mentally unwell. Trump appears, in their opinion, to suffer from malignant narcissism. He is also a compulsive liar who lacks empathy for his fellow human beings and shows no remorse for his bad behavior. Most importantly, Trump’s personality defects amplify his authoritarian values, beliefs and behavior. The results of this could be catastrophic.
This article was originally published at Salon
This week, Donald Trump met with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, the first time an American president and a North Korean leader had ever met in person. This encounter quite literally had the potential to be explosive. Trump has alternated between threatening Kim with nuclear annihilation and praising him and other totalitarian leaders for their “strength.” Moreover, in many ways Kim Jong Un is everything Trump would like to be — a despot with no restraints on his personal and political power. Kim is also free to dispense with his enemies as he sees fit. He is literally the law in his nation and leads a society where he is worshiped as a god: North Korea is the ultimate cult of personality.
For the moment, disaster has been averted. At the Singapore summit, Trump and Kim engaged in an alpha-male bromance with one another. At this point, it appears that North Korea’s leader outmaneuvered Trump and the United States. Kim left Singapore with more international prestige and seemingly extracted important concessions. Donald Trump’s ego was stroked while the security of the United States and its allies in the region was weakened. Given Trump’s impulsive behavior, cultivated ignorance and hostility towards serious experts in diplomacy, East Asia and North Korea in particular, war may merely have been postponed for a later date, one that depends on the mercurial whims of Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un.
What role does Donald Trump’s mental health play in how he governs? Is the stress of Robert Mueller’s investigation and the other scandals swirling around Trump’s White House accelerating his mental decline? Why are so many of Trump’s supporters and other members of the general public still in denial about the global and national crisis that is Trump’s assault on American democracy? Can anything be done about a president who appears unstable yet still maintains the unilateral power to order the use of nuclear weapons?
In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Dr. John Gartner, a former professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School. Gartner is also the founder of the Duty to Warn PAC, an organization working to raise awareness about the danger to the United States and the world posed by Donald Trump. Gartner was a contributor to the 2017 bestseller book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” Along with Steven Buser and Leonard Cruz, Gartner has edited a new collection, “Rocket Man: Nuclear Madness and the Mind of Donald Trump.”
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Donald Trump’s presidency remains a global crisis and a national disaster, yet many Americans have quickly adjusted to the situation. I don’t just mean the millions of Trump supporters who are cheering on his assault on democracy and the country’s prestige and well-being. Is this learned helplessness or cowardice? How do you explain the relative non-response to Trumpism?
Part of the reason many people do this is because it really is psychologically overwhelming. It’s just almost too frightening to consider that a madman has control of the nuclear button, and he truly doesn’t care if he destroys us all. In fact, there’s a part of Trump that would almost take glee in it. He’s impulsive, he’s erratic, he’s seeing the world in a grossly distorted way. He’s only concerned with how things impact his own thriving and survival. Trump does not care about the well-being of literally anyone but himself. It really is a kind of dystopian nightmare.
You and I have closely followed Trump’s rise to power and tried to communicate the depth of this disaster to the public. You have written or edited several books on this moment. I am trying to get my Trump book project finished as well. Are there moments when you feel like ignorance is bliss?
I do find myself feeling like, “Dear God, why can these people not see it? And what can we do to open their eyes?” It is like a 1950s or 1960s horror movie where nobody would believe that there was actually a monster that’s about to destroy the town and there are these Cassandra-like figures trying to warn people. But the townspeople remain in denial and they are doomed.
Trump’s political movement meets the criteria for a political cult. You are a psychiatrist. Is it possible to reach someone who is stuck in Trump’s cult? Why does he have such influence over these people?
It does meet the criteria. You’ve got the charismatic leader, and his followers subsume their identity into his group, which makes them feel larger and more powerful. Once you have that kind of blind belief and loyalty, the leader, as Donald Trump has said, could really shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and nothing would happen. The cognitive dissonance is such that the cult members will rationalize anything. For example, something like 50 percent of Republicans say that if Trump wanted to cancel the 2020 election, that would be fine with them.
He is actually the second most popular Republican president in the history of modern polling.
Yes, that’s right. It’s really shocking and frightening. It’s shocking and frightening in a way that just makes you feel like you’re on some kind of bad acid trip.
This is what I have described as a “malignant reality.” Trump, the Republican Party, and their supporters’ sadism is a key part of it.
The sadism is very important. When I first started talking about Trump as a malignant narcissist, people could see the narcissism, the paranoia and the antisocial element. But the fourth component of malignant narcissism is sadism. You see it in everything he does, from the separating of the children at the border to how Trump tortures anyone who doesn’t give him what he wants. There’s a way in which he takes a kind of manic glee in causing harm and pain and humiliation to other people.
At this point in Trump’s presidency, are things better or worse than you initially thought, regarding his behavior and public evidence of his mental health and well-being?
The theme of my chapter in “Rocket Man” is that Donald Trump is actually deteriorating psychologically. We’ve not seen the bottom. We’re not in a static situation. We’re actually in a dynamic situation. Now, some people look at it as, OK, he’s not crazy, he’s just an authoritarian and we’re going through a period where American democracy is being degraded. That may be true, as horrible as it is. But from a mental health point of view, Trump is getting worse in several regards.
Malignant narcissists deteriorate. When they gain power, they become more inflamed in their grandiosity and in their paranoia. They also become more unrestrained in their sadism and in their will to power. Malignant narcissists like Trump are antisocial and have a willingness to do anything to get and keep power. The noted psychologist Erich Fromm actually argued that such personalities then begin to verge on psychosis at that point, becoming so grandiose and paranoid that they really live on the boundary of psychosis and reality.
In addition to that, I think Donald Trump is deteriorating for a second completely independent reason, which is that we’re seeing clear evidence of organically based cognitive decline. If you look at the interviews that he did in the 1980s, he was actually surprisingly articulate. He still expressed what I think we would considered by many to be loathsome views, but he spoke with a high level of vocabulary that included polished sentences and complete paragraphs. If you compare that to how Trump speaks now, he almost can’t complete a thought or a sentence without meandering into something nonsensical.
Trump’s defenders would point to the alleged fact that he passed a “mental health screening” and is in great shape.
First of all, I was part of a group that sent the letter to Dr. Ronny Jackson, asking him to give Trump the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test. What you need to understand about the test is it asks questions like, “Can you identify a camel? Can you repeat three words back, three numbers backwards?” These are things that, if you can’t do them, it means you are grossly demented. It doesn’t mean that if you can do them, you’re free of all cognitive and psychological problems, as Dr. Jackson explicitly said. Especially for people who are at high levels of intelligence, because they can fall a pretty long way before they can’t identify a camel.
The simplest explanation is that Donald Trump is experiencing substantial organic cognitive decline, but he hasn’t reached the bottom of the hill yet. He’s fallen, let’s say, 25 stories, but he’s going to continue to deteriorate. Cognitive deterioration only goes in one direction. It doesn’t stand still and it doesn’t get better. No, Trump is not ready for the nursing home. But that doesn’t mean he’s capable of managing the White House. Once you factor in nuclear weapons the possibilities are truly horrific.
As we’ve learned from history, a person can be an authoritarian and also a sociopath.
They actually help each other. Nobody with a conscience could really be a good dictator.
Trump’s spokesman Rudy Giuliani has been doing the media rounds, making threatening remarks about James Comey and Robert Mueller. This is banana-republic dictator behavior. There is also the memo where Trump’s attorneys argued that he could pardon himself and is a de facto king who is above the law. Given his personality, how does this impact Donald Trump emotionally and cognitively? Is he excited? Titillated?
I think he does feel that way. Giuliani really is his alter ego. This is what he wanted in his spokesman and lawyer. Someone who would just make up vicious lies and just keep slashing and burning and hurling mud and threats, devaluations and false accusations and conspiracies to muddy the waters, to make Trump look like the victim. You’re right, this is not a metaphor. This is organized crime stuff. It is the same psychology where there are all kinds of open extortionist threats
Trump and Kim Jong Un just met in Singapore for their so-called summit. Kim is a totalitarian dictator who literally has the power of life and death and runs North Korea like his own playground. Trump has a history of publicly praising autocrats and other demagogues but has also threatened Kim with nuclear annihilation. What is the dynamic when two such personalities encounter each other?
This is like a new axis of evil getting together and dividing up the world. That is the kind of statesmanship which Donald Trump understands. Trump attacks our closest allies in the G7 and wants Russia included in that group. His overtures to North Korea — it’s almost like in the mob, when the Brooklyn boss and the Manhattan boss and the New Jersey boss all sit in a room and divide up the territory to try to keep the peace.
I think we have to hold out hope about what happens in the future. In a very paradoxical way, the two alpha dogs showing respect for each other’s power and coming to some kind of deal would be the best outcome. But of course, those alpha-dog mob bosses also tend to get into wars with each other, don’t they? It’s not very stable because they are psychopathic, paranoid and quick to take aggressive action to seize the initiative. When you’re dealing with personalities like Trump and Kim Jong Un anything can ultimately happen. Hitler turned on Stalin.
As Dr. David Reiss points out in your new book, Donald Trump probably wouldn’t qualify as a police officer, never mind not being able to get a security clearance. A man who literally has access to the nuclear football could destroy the world and you wouldn’t want to trust him as a beat cop. Yet he’s the president.
Dr. David Reiss does “fitness for duty” evaluations for police departments. His approach is that when he interviews a policeman who has fired his gun, he wants to hear what the reasoning was. What was the situation? What were the alternatives? Looking back on it afterwards, would you do anything differently? When you listen to Trump, you can’t see any of these connections. You don’t understand why he’s taking a certain policy. He’s not giving a rationale that fits the action.
Trump’s behavior is either based on a faulty premise or some kind of paranoid conspiracy theory or a denial of reality. On that basis, Dr. Reiss argues that if Trump were a policeman, he would take away his gun. In the book, other contributors such as Dr. Steven Buser and former Gen. William Enyart argue that Trump would not be able to qualify for a security clearance to be a nuclear missile launch officer.
Dr. Buser argued in a New York Times op-ed that Trump’s behavior and character suggest that he is not stable. Trump is not trustworthy; he’s not of the highest character. He’s not of the highest honesty. Therefore, Trump would fail to gain the clearance that allows an airman to handle nuclear weapons. He would be disqualified. Yet this person who is not qualified to even load the bombs onto the planes is the commander in chief and has the unilateral authority for any reason at any time to launch nuclear weapons.
Trump also has a blatant disregard for expert knowledge, which signals to a broader problem with American culture at present and especially to how American conservatives embrace anti-intellectualism. Trump bragged that he would not need to prepare for his meeting with Kim because he works on instinct. Is Trump even capable of processing the seriousness of his meeting with North Korea’s leader?
No. Trump’s grandiosity is such that he actually believes he is an expert on everything. Based on his speeches and interviews, Trump is apparently the world authority on 25 different issues. This also speaks to a bigger problem, which is the death of expertise. For authoritarians and malignant narcissists like Trump an independent source of authority, whether it’s the press, the bureaucracy or the experts, are threats to his authority. Trump leaves positions at the State Department unfilled because he doesn’t want experts telling him what to do. He knows that he knows more than everybody else. What’s really frightening is that he actually believes that he has this kind of papal infallibility.
How would you explain to Republican leaders and other right-wing elites the seriousness of Trump’s mental and personality issues and the danger he poses to America and the world?
I truly believe that the elected Republican politicians are completely lost souls. They are like the characters in a zombie movie who keep their father in the basement because they don’t really understand that he is a zombie. He’s not coming back. I really, truly think it’s that bad. There a few Republicans who are trying to sound the alarm about Trump, but the Republican Party as a whole is like organized crime at this point, and Trump is the boss. There’s absolutely no other conclusion you could draw.
How would you respond to those people who would say that you are panic-stricken? The world hasn’t ended because of Donald Trump, and this is all misplaced concern and worry. You are possessed by what his defenders call “Trump derangement syndrome.”
It’s a little bit like that patient who falls forward nine stories. He goes, “So far, so good.” We just haven’t hit the ground and splattered yet, but we are falling.
I have long argued that Donald Trump is version 1.0 of the American fascist. American fascist 2.0 or 3.0 is going to be far worse. We’ve crossed the Rubicon at this point, and the old version of American democracy, however flawed and [in] need of improvement, is gone.
Look at the people who are winning nomination on the Republican side. Nazis are running for office as Republicans. There are candidates who take Trump as a role model and will be even more extreme than him. There have been elections where Republican candidates and officeholders who dared to criticize Trump have been punished by Republican voters. It’s almost like a refinement process. This happens in fascist societies. We saw this with Nazi Germany.
As this crisis continues with Donald Trump, his party and his voters, will we reach a crescendo at some point? Or given his personality and behavior, will it be a series of seemingly never-ending events that just keep dragging the United States farther down?
It all reminds me of the saying about how people go broke very slowly and then all at once. I think that’s what we’re heading for right now. What if there is a global crisis like a war? What if Trump refuses to step down, if he is impeached and convicted? It is a coup that is not moving slowly anymore. It is accelerating.
