UD’s mother’s favorite film was I Know Where I’m Going, featuring a conventional, materialistic young woman waylaid in her money and status ambitions by a dashing young man and the phantasmagoric Scottish island culture that surrounds him.
Early in the film she observes a friend of the man’s acting bizarrely. She turns to the man and says:
“He’s a bit odd, isn’t he?”
And the man answers:
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As the Cheshire Cat says, “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
But there’s conventionally, universally, prosaically, woman-in-the-street mad, and there’s bedlam-mad. Our current president is arguably a confirmed bedlamite.
Gail Collins, in this post’s headline, dares to anticipate a new, non-crazy president in three months. Like many pundits, psychiatrists, and ordinary people, she has concluded that Mr Trump is mentally ill, and UD‘s inclined to agree. Immaturity, hyper-irritability, petulance, grandiosity, mendacity, manipulation – these are character flaws, but not necessarily signs of pathology. We have watched DJT exhibit them all with increasing frequency and intensity as the election looms, and though they clearly designate a horrible person, it hasn’t been – at least for me – until the last week or two that they begin also to designate a clinically unbalanced one.
For me the tipping point came when I realized that he hates everyone. Watching the president, I keep thinking of that line from Ubu the King, when Ubu describes his political plans (If you put Ubu in my search engine, you will see that from the beginning of the last presidential campaign, UD has identified Trump as “Trubu,” the Ubu of our day):
I shall soon have made my fortune, and then I’ll kill everybody and go away.
Everybody – everybody – Trump meets every day — Leslie Stahl, Anthony Fauci, his followers (he calls them “disgusting”), debate moderators, debate commissioners – he hates. Everyone’s a monster, an idiot, a catastrophe, a zero, a disgrace, a joke, pathetic, stupid, vile, sickening… It’s the nihilistic sweep of his rejection of humanity (I’m thinking Melania gets the absolute worst of it, which explains why she wisely absents herself from as much of their life as she can – she’s America’s most invisible first lady) that gets you thinking that you’ve got something schizy and not merely misanthropic. He’s killing everybody before he goes away.
If he is going down, he wants to bring everyone and everything down with him. He has no hesitation to break laws or destroy people. Democratic institutions and principles mean nothing to him.
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Yes, I’m saying that Trump’s mental violence – again, see Ubu – threatens to become physical in these last days. Remember when he confined his violence to fantasies? Remember his comment about the 2016 Democratic National Convention?
“You know what, I wanted to hit a couple of those speakers so hard. I would have hit them — no, no — I was gonna hit them… I was gonna hit one guy in particular, a very little guy. I was gonna hit this guy so hard, his head would spin. He wouldn’t know what the hell happened… I was going to hit a number of those speakers so hard, their heads would spin, they’d never recover. And that’s what I did with a lot of people — that’s why I still don’t have certain people endorsing me. They still haven’t recovered, okay, you know?”
Pretty fucking graphic for purely mental violence, huh? Do you really have a lot of trouble imagining a moment during the next debate (if Trump actually agrees to it), when the moderator mutes the president’s mic, and this so enrages the president that he punches the moderator – or Biden? Remember how he physically stalked Hillary Clinton during their debates? Can actual physical contact – under far more pressurized circumstances – be far behind? Can’t you hear him shrieking at Biden?
You’re the head of the worst criminal family in the entire history of the country! Someone has to stop you before you take control of the country! Turn my mic back on or I’ll hit him so hard he won’t know what the hell happened!
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A couple of additional points: Is this suggestion at odds with my earlier claim that the president is possibly suicidal?
Of course not. Suicide is homicidal aggression directed against the self, but no one’s surprised when suicides first direct their aggression outward and pick off the people closest to them. They do it quite often. Nihilists loaded with rageful death instinct can go either way, or both ways.
Also: It wouldn’t even be strategically dumb for Trump to become physically violent, given the enthusiastic violence of many of his most devoted followers. I don’t just mean the bloodthirsty LOCK HER UP LOCK HER UP crowd; I mean the Proud Boys and all the other big ol’ shoot ’em up gangs. Nihilists love nihilism, babe.