"Inflation is rising, even though eggs were supposed to be 79 cents a dozen under his presidency. That’s all made him particularly sensitive to the unpopularity of his tariffs, so he keeps delaying his plans, a phenomenon Wall Street has dubbed “TACO” — Trump Always Chickens Out." Worst is yet to come. Donald "The Beast" Trump is building a wall once again. Colossal tariff wall that is the beginning of the end for the system of down. At first the beast will pull the plug out of the global economy. The worst financial crisis of human history will pull a swarm of the banks underwater and the bank run begins. Then the beast will collapse a mountain of debt shattering the backbone of the monetary system causing a systemic risk to realize. Finally the beast will cast American citizens into a system slavery under the name of Ronald Wilson Reagan, just to "honor his legacy" count the number. After the destruction a new world order will be established in the US. And the Golden Age begins from the ruins of the world wide collapse. All of the system slaves will love it. No more cash - just digital transactions. No more traditional criminal activity. No more tax evasion. No more transactions without the "all seeing eye". Outcasts will hate the world without freedom, hope and privacy. To cover up the mess and distract the public by smoke and mirrors, the beast will engage in a war with Iran. Lies and deceit, corruption and decay, dancing on the graves will continue. Until; Black hole sun, won't you come, won't you come... I want to play a game. Time has come to opt out of the empire of filth. Live or die...
TACO is playing the war card since he has nothing else ti use to improve his stature and poll numbers. Americans seem to have this urge to always back a president who goes to war, as both Bush presidents show. Both had 90% approval for their war efforts. While there may have been a case for Bush l, Bush l lied US into a deadly war for his own ego. trump is running with the fact that he will get a bump in support for putting millions of lives at risk, including those in the military. Beware the mad king...
Your primary premise is flawed. We do NOT know what he knows. He's like Dusty in the final scenes of 'A Face In The Crowd', impaired, mumbling to himself, still believing fragments of his glorious past, desperate for any validation he can get.. his servants... anybody, until it all fades to black. At some point, one of two things happens in this scenario. Either someone, I have no idea who, quietly removes or nullifies the codes in the Football and the Cabinet invokes the 25th Amendment for POTUS override, or this whole project ends in flames because no one was willing to step outside of a line. That would be strange, though, since they have spent the last decade stepping outside of lines.
We have all learned from this long journey that there is a lot more we don't know about what happens in those halls than we do. It is entirely possible that the scenario has already been executed and they're just letting him flop while they decide what the least-damaging offramp (for them) would be. You can't bank on that, but it's not like we can do anything one way or the other anyway. This past weekend applied pressure, it's possible the combination of pressures have pushed him over the edge, which is what we want. We'll see what we get, though.
The problem is though that DOGE is STILL grinding away every day taking away more and more of our government and freedoms and taking control of ALL of the information on ALL of us anywhere. AND Republicans in Congress and America see this as their time to drive through as much of Project 2025 as they can........and they are doing it. They have their foot on the gas to get as much as they can as fast as they can. Plus, they show little to no sense that they are willing to listen to or to bow to public pressure to stop. (Example - their bill is opposed by around 2/3's of Americans - and would be more if they knew what was coming to hurt them, but do they listen or do they care? NO). These are very dangerous times for the future of America. We were warned by the Founding Fathers and George Washington of this and HERE it is!
Trump wouldn't be the first republican president to amp up a foreign policy crisis when his domestic agenda and polling are circling the drain. He's following the same playbook GW used, including unfounded claims about weapons of mass destruction being imminent and pushing for regime change. We know this playbook. We know what comes next - a decades-long quagmire, trillions of dollars, and no clear outcome. Spineless republicans, assisted by too many complicit Democrats, got us into the last regime-change war. Trump is decidedly stupid enough to fall for Netanyahu's masterful manipulation. Like a toddler, Trump ALWAYS wants to see things blow up, and his bruised ego is crying for it after last Saturday's humiliation.
But what about us? Are we really stupid enough to do this again? I think the G7 got it entirely wrong when their statement talked about Israel's right to defend itself. Israel isn't playing defense with Iran. They started this conflict. They can't turn around now and claim self-defense, and no other countries should let them get away with that claim.
Trump needs a distraction, and I fear it's going to be getting us into another endless war in the Middle East.
Unfortunately for the whole world Trump is not a sulky toddler. He is a malignant narcissist/psychopath--so, a guy who wants, needs and demands applause, and could care less who he hurts in the process. He also has attention deficit problems and is likely to remain an ignoramus, also. Not to mention the many indications of increasing dementia, aka degeneration of the thinking in favor of the unleashed emotion-unleashing parts of the brain. What could possibly go wrong? This, members of Congress, is why the 25th Amendment to the Constitution and Impeachment are a thing.
You can bet that if Biden had said and done 1/1000th of what tRump does every day he'd have been immediately declared incompetent and carried out on a gurney. (But that only applies to Democrats.)
“ I’ve always believed that the theory that Donald Trump is, at his core, a sulky toddler, downplays the extreme danger he poses — not just to America, but the entire world order.”
Good article, Susan. It was a good weekend for the NO-KINGS rallies. And thank you for reminding me of Pope Leo XIV. Don't need to be a Catholic to think that the world could use a good dose of his words, thoughts and prayers.
Forgetting Trump for a minute: I'd love for a psychiatrist (or group of psychiatrists, like the one Bandy Lee put together for "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump") to tell me why Stephen Miller—a Jew and the "ghoulish architect of Trump's violent immigration purges"—feels the need to out-Gestapo the Gestapo.
My understanding is that he shut down in high school or college by a Latina girl he asked out. I also read a few years ago that his family had some economic challenges and had to move from a more white and affluent area to one that was significantly Latino. If both of those are accurate and combined with his scrawny persona, it seems very possible that he has an endless animus toward non-white people.
Good points. And thanks for his (apparent) background.
I realize psychiatrists are not allowed to diagnose from afar (the "Goldwater Rule", which Bandy Lee's violation of got her fired from Yale), and I realize, from your post, that there may have been things in his life that contributed to his warped, "ghoulish" state of mind, but, circumstances or not, that man would have wound up psychotic without any "help", and every mental health professional knows it, as they do with Trump.
Your assessment is very plausible. Some people are almost destined to be highly destructive without early and consistent intervention. The problem is when you have a group of people like this coalesced in positions of great state power. That's why the Soviet and Nazi regimes were so ugly and why also we're seeing the same thing here.
I’m a psychotherapist, not a psychiatrist and, while I can’t diagnose someone I haven’t treated, I do have some very strong hunches. Stephen Miller - from what little I know of his history - appears to have been “that kid.” The unattractive, thoroughly unlikable kid who I’d guess nurtured his pain until it became a pathological grudge. By high school, he was itching for leadership, but it wasn’t collaborative, it was arrogant and autocratic. He fits the profile of the scrawny, thoroughly nasty child who was shoved into his locker too many times and is now spending his life taking out his rage on everyone he feels is inferior. For Miller to feel adequate, I’m guessing he would have to deport every last person in the country.
Strangely enough: wittingly or not, in describing Stephen Miller, you appear to have described almost every Republican in government—especially the likes of Mitch McConnell, Mike Johnson, Mike Lee, and ad infinitum—and, quite frankly, the millions of Americans who voted for them, or who applaud their appointment, if that's how they got their government position.
So, that's where we're at: scores of Republican officials taking out their infantile grievances on the rest of us—and being applauded for doing so—the same way Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, etc., did in their time. "The more things change, the more they stay the same."
Personally, I don't see any way out, especially if the corporate media keeps lapping this stuff up, going from one horrible, outrageous person to another—Hegseth to Miller to Bondi to Patel to RFK, Jr. to Leavitt to Gabbard and ad infinitum—all because these dangerous idiots "MAKE NEWS", and therefore increase ad revenue.
Also, because virtually no human being ever admits they made a mistake; in fact, just the opposite: they DOUBLE DOWN on their decision: "I think Trump is doing a terrific job." "But he's destroying people's lives, destroying the (delicately-balanced) world economy, abandoning Ukraine in favor of Russia." "Yeah, well, he's only doing what he said he'd do if re-elected, so he's my kind of guy!" "But don't you realize you're being conned: Trump only cares about one thing: MONEY, and he's stealing this nation blind! He doesn't give a crap about you, about this country, about the world. Doesn't any of that matter to you?" "I told you: he's my kind of guy. Period. End of story."
In fact, if taking the vote away from people like that is one of the end results of this country descending into a fascist autocracy, it's pretty hard to make an argument AGAINST such descent. And that might be the most frightening aspect of what's going on.
You mean the ICE-apo? Here's a hint: you might have heard many stories of self-hating gay men, who proceed, as a form of denial of their 'weakness,' persecute openly gay men. Like, who hasn't hated themselves for loving potato chips and ice cream, on occasion, and wished they didn't have such an appetite? The persecution is a form of denial, and an assertion of a power that self-hating gay men would desperately like to feel. So. Let's take a quick look at Mr. Miller. Raised in a family where the adults in the room were all traumatized by the Holocaust, felt targeted, fearful, and weak as well as impotently angry--how do you imagine little Stephen wanted to be when he grew up, instead? You see this in families where there's an abusive dad--sonny goes on to become the abuser of his own family, as a way to deny his own vulnerability. Enough, said?
Well, it has been a known fact for many decades now that Western economies strongly depend on peace and stability in the Middle East. And rather than coming up with a sustainable solution and focusing on its implementation, we have rather stuck to having one dirty deal with dictators after the other each adding to the accusations of being highly hypocritical e.g. when it comes to defending human rights at home but not in those regions. This has been resulting in people suppressed by those dictators and its western allies rising up as terrorists considering all western democracies and their frontrunner US to be demolished.
I definitely do not defend such terrorists. But all this fighting back and forth could become rather obsolete if we'd start focusing on consolidating our economies by decoupling them from a continuous demand for gas and oil as good as possible by focusing on renewable energies. For sure, living with a BEV and a heat pumpt at home both fed by solar power on my roof does not make me fully independent of oil, but the then necessary amount is a lot easier to gather resulting in a lot less economical stress than what might be facing now as well as we have kept facing for the last five decades at least.
This is so spot on. You hit all the right notes. Thanks.
"Inflation is rising, even though eggs were supposed to be 79 cents a dozen under his presidency. That’s all made him particularly sensitive to the unpopularity of his tariffs, so he keeps delaying his plans, a phenomenon Wall Street has dubbed “TACO” — Trump Always Chickens Out." Worst is yet to come. Donald "The Beast" Trump is building a wall once again. Colossal tariff wall that is the beginning of the end for the system of down. At first the beast will pull the plug out of the global economy. The worst financial crisis of human history will pull a swarm of the banks underwater and the bank run begins. Then the beast will collapse a mountain of debt shattering the backbone of the monetary system causing a systemic risk to realize. Finally the beast will cast American citizens into a system slavery under the name of Ronald Wilson Reagan, just to "honor his legacy" count the number. After the destruction a new world order will be established in the US. And the Golden Age begins from the ruins of the world wide collapse. All of the system slaves will love it. No more cash - just digital transactions. No more traditional criminal activity. No more tax evasion. No more transactions without the "all seeing eye". Outcasts will hate the world without freedom, hope and privacy. To cover up the mess and distract the public by smoke and mirrors, the beast will engage in a war with Iran. Lies and deceit, corruption and decay, dancing on the graves will continue. Until; Black hole sun, won't you come, won't you come... I want to play a game. Time has come to opt out of the empire of filth. Live or die...
TACO is playing the war card since he has nothing else ti use to improve his stature and poll numbers. Americans seem to have this urge to always back a president who goes to war, as both Bush presidents show. Both had 90% approval for their war efforts. While there may have been a case for Bush l, Bush l lied US into a deadly war for his own ego. trump is running with the fact that he will get a bump in support for putting millions of lives at risk, including those in the military. Beware the mad king...
Your primary premise is flawed. We do NOT know what he knows. He's like Dusty in the final scenes of 'A Face In The Crowd', impaired, mumbling to himself, still believing fragments of his glorious past, desperate for any validation he can get.. his servants... anybody, until it all fades to black. At some point, one of two things happens in this scenario. Either someone, I have no idea who, quietly removes or nullifies the codes in the Football and the Cabinet invokes the 25th Amendment for POTUS override, or this whole project ends in flames because no one was willing to step outside of a line. That would be strange, though, since they have spent the last decade stepping outside of lines.
We have all learned from this long journey that there is a lot more we don't know about what happens in those halls than we do. It is entirely possible that the scenario has already been executed and they're just letting him flop while they decide what the least-damaging offramp (for them) would be. You can't bank on that, but it's not like we can do anything one way or the other anyway. This past weekend applied pressure, it's possible the combination of pressures have pushed him over the edge, which is what we want. We'll see what we get, though.
The problem is though that DOGE is STILL grinding away every day taking away more and more of our government and freedoms and taking control of ALL of the information on ALL of us anywhere. AND Republicans in Congress and America see this as their time to drive through as much of Project 2025 as they can........and they are doing it. They have their foot on the gas to get as much as they can as fast as they can. Plus, they show little to no sense that they are willing to listen to or to bow to public pressure to stop. (Example - their bill is opposed by around 2/3's of Americans - and would be more if they knew what was coming to hurt them, but do they listen or do they care? NO). These are very dangerous times for the future of America. We were warned by the Founding Fathers and George Washington of this and HERE it is!
Trump wouldn't be the first republican president to amp up a foreign policy crisis when his domestic agenda and polling are circling the drain. He's following the same playbook GW used, including unfounded claims about weapons of mass destruction being imminent and pushing for regime change. We know this playbook. We know what comes next - a decades-long quagmire, trillions of dollars, and no clear outcome. Spineless republicans, assisted by too many complicit Democrats, got us into the last regime-change war. Trump is decidedly stupid enough to fall for Netanyahu's masterful manipulation. Like a toddler, Trump ALWAYS wants to see things blow up, and his bruised ego is crying for it after last Saturday's humiliation.
But what about us? Are we really stupid enough to do this again? I think the G7 got it entirely wrong when their statement talked about Israel's right to defend itself. Israel isn't playing defense with Iran. They started this conflict. They can't turn around now and claim self-defense, and no other countries should let them get away with that claim.
Trump needs a distraction, and I fear it's going to be getting us into another endless war in the Middle East.
>>"Trump needs a distraction, and I fear it's going to be getting us into another endless war in the Middle East."
The term for that is called "Wag the Dog." They did a movie about it.
The only thing missing is the symbolic “Old Shoe,” which was the false narrative distracting the public from the real issues at hand.
Unfortunately for the whole world Trump is not a sulky toddler. He is a malignant narcissist/psychopath--so, a guy who wants, needs and demands applause, and could care less who he hurts in the process. He also has attention deficit problems and is likely to remain an ignoramus, also. Not to mention the many indications of increasing dementia, aka degeneration of the thinking in favor of the unleashed emotion-unleashing parts of the brain. What could possibly go wrong? This, members of Congress, is why the 25th Amendment to the Constitution and Impeachment are a thing.
You can bet that if Biden had said and done 1/1000th of what tRump does every day he'd have been immediately declared incompetent and carried out on a gurney. (But that only applies to Democrats.)
“ I’ve always believed that the theory that Donald Trump is, at his core, a sulky toddler, downplays the extreme danger he poses — not just to America, but the entire world order.”
There’s a Twilight Zone episode about this.
Which one, please tell! I need some “light tv watching” in between credible current events news casting!
Good article, Susan. It was a good weekend for the NO-KINGS rallies. And thank you for reminding me of Pope Leo XIV. Don't need to be a Catholic to think that the world could use a good dose of his words, thoughts and prayers.
Call Leo a Catholic, or call him that rarest of things, a fully mature human being, we need him and people like him at the helm.
Forgetting Trump for a minute: I'd love for a psychiatrist (or group of psychiatrists, like the one Bandy Lee put together for "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump") to tell me why Stephen Miller—a Jew and the "ghoulish architect of Trump's violent immigration purges"—feels the need to out-Gestapo the Gestapo.
Hands?
My understanding is that he shut down in high school or college by a Latina girl he asked out. I also read a few years ago that his family had some economic challenges and had to move from a more white and affluent area to one that was significantly Latino. If both of those are accurate and combined with his scrawny persona, it seems very possible that he has an endless animus toward non-white people.
Good points. And thanks for his (apparent) background.
I realize psychiatrists are not allowed to diagnose from afar (the "Goldwater Rule", which Bandy Lee's violation of got her fired from Yale), and I realize, from your post, that there may have been things in his life that contributed to his warped, "ghoulish" state of mind, but, circumstances or not, that man would have wound up psychotic without any "help", and every mental health professional knows it, as they do with Trump.
Your assessment is very plausible. Some people are almost destined to be highly destructive without early and consistent intervention. The problem is when you have a group of people like this coalesced in positions of great state power. That's why the Soviet and Nazi regimes were so ugly and why also we're seeing the same thing here.
I’m a psychotherapist, not a psychiatrist and, while I can’t diagnose someone I haven’t treated, I do have some very strong hunches. Stephen Miller - from what little I know of his history - appears to have been “that kid.” The unattractive, thoroughly unlikable kid who I’d guess nurtured his pain until it became a pathological grudge. By high school, he was itching for leadership, but it wasn’t collaborative, it was arrogant and autocratic. He fits the profile of the scrawny, thoroughly nasty child who was shoved into his locker too many times and is now spending his life taking out his rage on everyone he feels is inferior. For Miller to feel adequate, I’m guessing he would have to deport every last person in the country.
Strangely enough: wittingly or not, in describing Stephen Miller, you appear to have described almost every Republican in government—especially the likes of Mitch McConnell, Mike Johnson, Mike Lee, and ad infinitum—and, quite frankly, the millions of Americans who voted for them, or who applaud their appointment, if that's how they got their government position.
So, that's where we're at: scores of Republican officials taking out their infantile grievances on the rest of us—and being applauded for doing so—the same way Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, etc., did in their time. "The more things change, the more they stay the same."
Very apt description. Sadly. And now we are in a hell hole from which we may not emerge.
Personally, I don't see any way out, especially if the corporate media keeps lapping this stuff up, going from one horrible, outrageous person to another—Hegseth to Miller to Bondi to Patel to RFK, Jr. to Leavitt to Gabbard and ad infinitum—all because these dangerous idiots "MAKE NEWS", and therefore increase ad revenue.
Also, because virtually no human being ever admits they made a mistake; in fact, just the opposite: they DOUBLE DOWN on their decision: "I think Trump is doing a terrific job." "But he's destroying people's lives, destroying the (delicately-balanced) world economy, abandoning Ukraine in favor of Russia." "Yeah, well, he's only doing what he said he'd do if re-elected, so he's my kind of guy!" "But don't you realize you're being conned: Trump only cares about one thing: MONEY, and he's stealing this nation blind! He doesn't give a crap about you, about this country, about the world. Doesn't any of that matter to you?" "I told you: he's my kind of guy. Period. End of story."
In fact, if taking the vote away from people like that is one of the end results of this country descending into a fascist autocracy, it's pretty hard to make an argument AGAINST such descent. And that might be the most frightening aspect of what's going on.
You mean the ICE-apo? Here's a hint: you might have heard many stories of self-hating gay men, who proceed, as a form of denial of their 'weakness,' persecute openly gay men. Like, who hasn't hated themselves for loving potato chips and ice cream, on occasion, and wished they didn't have such an appetite? The persecution is a form of denial, and an assertion of a power that self-hating gay men would desperately like to feel. So. Let's take a quick look at Mr. Miller. Raised in a family where the adults in the room were all traumatized by the Holocaust, felt targeted, fearful, and weak as well as impotently angry--how do you imagine little Stephen wanted to be when he grew up, instead? You see this in families where there's an abusive dad--sonny goes on to become the abuser of his own family, as a way to deny his own vulnerability. Enough, said?
Well, it has been a known fact for many decades now that Western economies strongly depend on peace and stability in the Middle East. And rather than coming up with a sustainable solution and focusing on its implementation, we have rather stuck to having one dirty deal with dictators after the other each adding to the accusations of being highly hypocritical e.g. when it comes to defending human rights at home but not in those regions. This has been resulting in people suppressed by those dictators and its western allies rising up as terrorists considering all western democracies and their frontrunner US to be demolished.
I definitely do not defend such terrorists. But all this fighting back and forth could become rather obsolete if we'd start focusing on consolidating our economies by decoupling them from a continuous demand for gas and oil as good as possible by focusing on renewable energies. For sure, living with a BEV and a heat pumpt at home both fed by solar power on my roof does not make me fully independent of oil, but the then necessary amount is a lot easier to gather resulting in a lot less economical stress than what might be facing now as well as we have kept facing for the last five decades at least.