Day 1277 – So Sociopathic, So Sad, So Bad

Saturday July 18, 2020

106 Days until the election on November 3^rd

186 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

We are learning what we already knew. That Donald Trump is a racist sociopath. Mary Trump’s book adds family background and detail, which allows for more understanding and analysis.

There are several new phrases that she uses which makes things clearer than before. “Learned Disability” is, apparently, a psychological term and if I understand it, speaks to the idea that in an abusive relationship there are abusers and the abused. One learns to be psychologically impaired to allow the dysfunction to continue and for the abused to survive. This speaks to the idea of intergenerational abuse. Fred Trump, Donald’s father was abusive in that he berated and scolded his children in such a way that they learned to be submissive and abusive. It was and is a survival technique. The family was dysfunctional and it was passed along to Donald.

Mary Trump also talked about the casual and assumed way “the older generation” as she put it talked about black people and Jews. They used the N-word and spoke of Jews in discriminatory ways. She heard Donald use those terms (and the N-word). She spoke of it in terms of the casualness and acceptableness of it all. Some people now seemed shocked. I’m not and I’m surprised others are. Jews were discriminated in WWII, not just by Germans but here in America. There were tacit understandings about African-Americans and Jews at that time. One of the houses I bought in the 1980s the owners showed me the covenants their old title had. It included two large paragraphs that took up most of a page outlining whom they agreed not to sell to. This included: Jews, negroes, Arabs, Muslims, and the list went on and on. My point being that this kind of accepted discrimination wasn’t that long ago. 

The issue of how could Ivanka marry a Jew was brought up in an interview of her by Rachel Maddow. The explanation by Mary was “they had money.” This is the essence of the nature of prejudice. You may not like all people of a particular race or religion, but you are willing to make exceptions for ones you actually know because they are different from the stereotype you have in your mind. 

The other thing about prejudice is that the persons you make exception for may indeed be different than the people you don’t like of that religion or ethnicity, and that gets into a question of class. Many black people in the U.S. were of a lower class, and by that I mean what they valued was different, therefore white middle class people upon seeing a black person assumed they were lower class. Class in this sense is a question of values. Much of that is driven by education, economic conditions, and environment. 

The Jews living in Vienna Austria in the 1930s were aghast when they saw the peasants from the rural areas of Russia moving in following the pogroms of that country. The city folks had nothing in common with the Jewish people who showed up in donkey pulled carts.

I mention that example to try to illustrate that this kind of behavior is universal. Not that it should be condoned. The only way to ameliorate the situation is to bring both sides into equal status conditions, and that, is very hard to do. It requires being aware – constantly.

I think there’s another reason why Ivanka and Jared were accepted within both families and that is that both families were (and are) dysfunctional in similar ways. The Kushner family had to escape the horrors of the Jewish ghettos of Poland. They lived in the forest in winter, emigrated to Italy, hoping for passage to Italy (good thing Trump wasn’t president then!), made it to New Jersey where they began building houses. 

There’s a story about someone complaining that their life was so hard and being screamed at by one of the survivors of the escape from the ghetto where they literally had to burrow under the wall to get out. (“You think this is hard?” I can hear it.)

This also meant both in the Kushner family and in the Trump family that making the sale was important. So what if you stretched the truth? You did what you did to survive. The problem is that those behaviors become ingrained and then you have, as Mary Trump wrote “cheating as a way of life.”

Cheating, bullying, lying, intimidating are part of the shtick. 

Rachel asked Mary about another incident where Donald in introducing her to Melania said that Mary had overcome a terrible drug problem. Mary had never done drugs and said as much to Donald. Donald doubled down and insisted, all the while smiling slightly to Mary. It was as if to say, “I know, that you know, that this isn’t true.”

So why do it? Mary explained. Remember, she’s a clinical psychologist. At the time of the incident Mary was gathering material to write a book about Donald. She explained that for Donald it sounded better to say that she was in this pathetic drug abused state “and then I gave her a job,” and miraculously she is all better now (due to my munificence.) 

Oh boy.

So we know, once again, that Donald is a lying abusive sociopath. Great. Now what?

We have to get him out and all his enablers. They’ve been abused. They need help, but they don’t need to be running our country.

106 Days until the election on November 3^rd

186 Days until the Inauguration on January 20, 2021

PS Big Rock Candy Mountain (?) 

(No, Somewhere in Angkor)