Impeachment

[Antiphon1]

People don't like Trump and Trump isn't a smooth orator, but he's not mentally ill or likely to be violent based on current evidence.

Malignant narcissism is mental illness.   

[mahagonny]

I suspect Trump has a voyeuristic attraction to violence. He talks about it and encourages it. He's probably too afraid of getting hurt to get into it himself.

[secundem_artem]

The ranting cabinet monologue makes me think someone's becoming more deeply unhinged...I hope they have a psychiatrist on speed-dial.

The charges of mental illness don't hold up.    The snippets in the media of rallies and such show more the disconnected, rambling grandpa who probably shouldn't live alone, but I'm not seeing deeply unhinged.

I do see very sheltered behavior common among those who have had money and/or power for long enough that they aren't used to being told that something can't/won't happen and have those assertions stick.

I see the typical "push the red button and get a rant related to someone's personal annoyance" that's not rare in any subpopulation of the US.

I foresee tantrums that are unpleasant. 

I foresee a continued "Do it my way or be fired, regardless of legal, physical, or moral reality that prevents doing it my way".

I foresee display of US military might in ways that probably aren't what diplomats or career ranking military officers would choose as part of a coherent plan to achieve some US diplomatic or humanitarian goals.

I don't see personal violence against self or nearby others.  If that were a thing, then we'd have voluminous reports of thrown objects etc. as a history.

People don't like Trump and Trump isn't a smooth orator, but he's not mentally ill or likely to be violent based on current evidence.

Thank you Dr Freud for your drive-by diagnosis.

[mamselle]

I was basing my analysis on three things.

1. I've done work in effort-shape as a predictive modality for diagnostic differentials. A perceived "body split" in how bodily integration occurs or doesn't occur in motion and stasis is one of the components in this analysis. I spotted a young woman with severe, early abuse as a child based on this. I also correctly perceived a serious split in the words, gestures, and posture of a well-known church official. Being unwilling to bring it to anyone's attention, which I regret, I said nothing. Two months later, he shot himself.

I'm seeing something similar here. The split in this case seems to me to be horizontal: the front part of the body and the dorsal part are moving in disjunction, putting a drag on forward movement.

2. I lived with an abusive spouse for two years before divorcing him. He, too, was mostly a bully who attacked outwardly, not inwardly. But certain dimensions of rage and waywardness in gesture, again, became predictive. One began to be able to see when an abusive event was likely and start planning to get out of the house before it did.

The object/subject of the abuse may vary, but in the case under discussion here, the perpetrator tends to do things that redound badly to them as well as others. There is almost an ingrained ambivalence to their use of the capacity for harm.

By cutting off those you disagree with, you erode the stem of the island of support you're marooned on, too. At some point it might break away and float off...validating the megalomania, but not having many friends left to find food and help fend off dangerous animals...

3. I worked in hospitals and women's shelters, at one point, and one of the tasks was working an occasional overnight as backup to the psych nurse staying up all night with a suicidal patient. One had to keep checking for hidden knives, glass bottles, scissors, etc.; a nurse once said to me, "I've just emptied the whole silverware drawer into a trash bag and locked it in my car ... can you remind me to put it back and sort it out in the morning?"

So, I've been around people in those situations, personally, and you do get a seismic sense for when something's about to blow. The carapace that is social structure becomes too cognitively disjunctive with core ego beliefs in invulnerability, absolute rightness, and a kind of secondary divinity that to their mind deserves worship, not censure.

I'm saying this pastorally.

When someone is seething, and about to blow, it's important for everyone's sake to have precautions in place.

M.

[fast_and_bulbous]

I don't see personal violence against self or nearby others.  If that were a thing, then we'd have voluminous reports of thrown objects etc. as a history.

I doubt this was made up: https://www.facebook.com/scottmelker/posts/10154800337414739 and it seems right in character.

[Parasaurolophus]

I doubt this was made up: https://www.facebook.com/scottmelker/posts/10154800337414739 and it seems right in character.

Alternately, there's his first wife's account of being raped by him after his hair plugs didn't work out. Or any of the other women who've accused him of sexual assault or rape.

[mamselle]

Twenty-four Republicans forced entry into the hearing chambers, causing the intended deposee, Laura Cooper, to have to leave.

M.

[mamselle]

Twenty-four Republicans forced entry into the hearing chambers, causing the intended deposee, Laura Cooper, to have to leave.

M.

Pondering this later, it seems to me that this is not only harassment of a witness, but further obstruction of justice.

I'm also wondering what happened that the security guard let them in. Were they physically overpowered? Have some official-looking paper that suggested they should? Find their palms to have been greased beforehand?

Weird and worrisome.

I've also begun re-reading Hoffer's "The True Believer."

His analysis begins with the observation that demagogues cultivate the anxiety of wanna-bes and have-nots to feel important, and play with the big fish, feeding their frustration with polarizing observations that sound prophetic and empathic.

I'm also guessing that, along with Machiavelli, this idea has been encoded and cynically fed back into the current leadership playbook as a tactical starting point.

Not new news, maybe, but re-reading it, after 50 years, it sounds disturbingly fresh...

M.

[kaysixteen]

Perhaps the guard, caught off guard, so to speak, by this stunt, simply elected not to physically intervene against vaunted members of the HOR.  Hard to fault him for that CYA-motivated choice.

[spork]

I wish the media would drop its constant use of "quid pro quo" -- which the vast majority of Americans don't know the meaning of -- and use a more accurate term, like "extortion."

[polly_mer]

I wish the media would drop its constant use of "quid pro quo" -- which the vast majority of Americans don't know the meaning of -- and use a more accurate term, like "extortion."

Was that not one of the things we picked up in general education that we thought we'd never use?  Do we need another competency to ensure we all have big enough vocabularies in our back pockets?

[mamselle]

As I've said before, I never expected to have to know, hear, or understand the phrase, "Unindicted co-conspirator" twice in my life, either...

M.

[Ruralguy]

Anyone who cares can type "quid pro quo" into Google and get the meaning. Its like automatic college!

[mamselle]

True.

The trouble is, those who might be swayed by the import it conveys in legal terms, if they understood it, might not care, or would see it as an opaque term they wouldn't understand, instead of the rather simple crux of the matter that it represents.

So they won't look it up out of a sort of despair, I think.

Such simple matters, obfuscated, add to the irritation/tension/frustration/sense of not-belonging-to-the-educated-elite-trying-to-persecute-poor-Mr. T/alienation of those who see this as (pick your T-bone terms, I strongly object to "witchhunt," in particular, having researched the 1692 event rather closely; "lynching' as a complaint by a privileged white male is absolutely abhorrent).

But to the degree that the jury is rapidly becoming the American public at large, anything that helps them see into the other side of the polarized conflict they've already identified with, in their perception of shared victimhood, is an essential step to take towards a return to sanity.

Breached lines are so easily trampled down once the first crossing has been made.

M.

[mamselle]

In fact, as it turned out, our main daily's lead article above the fold was on the term, its history of use, its meanings, etc.

So someone else was thinking  along those lines, too.

And...this will sound very odd,  perhaps, but I suddenly snapped awake, sat up in bed, and said to myself, " Hmmm...Greenland would make an excellent jumping-off-point, from which a place like Russia could attack a place like the U.S.

Is THAT why he wanted to buy it?

NB: I may not be a conspiracy theorist,; my subconsciouse clearly is.

M., again...