Trump Derangement Syndrome "The Next Pandemic"? Don't Make Me Laugh!

"Da Donald can do no wrong! He da man! It da left dat derange!"

One of the tropes still circulating amongst the Trumpkins is that the Left is hysterical and over-reacting to their beloved, brain dead buffoon - manifesting in TDS or "Trump Derangement Syndrome".  In the fantasies of these Right wing pundit knuckle draggers, most of the Left  as well as Democrats are in the throes of TDS and now even going through "five stages".  So writes the latest imp to make such a claim, Joseph Epstein (WSJ, July 10, p. A17,  'The Next Pandemic: Trump Derangement Syndrome' )

  This balmy bozo-  because that's precisely what Epstein is-   given  his reputation for sloppy thinking and misleading  journalism precedes him, e.g.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/07/22/when-misleading-op-ed-wall-street-journal-irks-academics-its-time-fact-check-faculty


Trots out this latest codswallop as all Trump's poll  numbers are sinking, even eroding among his  base.  This has incited them to flail and render any kind of crappola to try to convince us it's all the Dems' fault,  or else that this animated pustule isn't as degenerate as we know he is.  Anyway in his WSJ op-ed  Epstein confabulates five "stages" as integral to the TDS   onset  and I cite these below:

Stage (1) The "afflicted decides before 2016 that Trump has serious, even strenuous character flaws that disqualified him from the presidency or any other public office".

Well, let's see. How about advocating pussy grabbing (in that 2005 'Access Hollywood' tape with Billy Bush)  as well as assaults on various women including at Miss Universe pageants?  One of the women  (Summer Vernos)  even brought a lawsuit after Trump "thrust his genitals at her."  Sounds disqualifying enough to me and I will take Summer at her word 1 million times before the lying Trump.  (Who's now amassed over 16,000 lies according to the running WaPo tally over the last 3 1/2 years.)

Stage (2) "One dwells upon Donald Trump's looks", the hairdo and golf apparel.

Actually, I could care less about this bloated buffoon's looks.. But I do castigate the orange imp for how he's consistently disparaged the appearance of women,   e.g.

https://www.businessinsider.com/trumps-worst-insults-toward-women-2018-10


whether calling 2016 Reep candidate Carly Fiorina and  the adult-film actress Stormy Daniels "Horseface,"  or calling other women "sluts", "dogs" or worse.  All of these examples say more about this reprobate's basic character than anything any critic could say about his appearance.   Knowing that, it's incredible to me Epstein would even go there.

Stage (3)  "One is ready to believe anything- pernicious or salacious- about Mr. Trump - and to reject anything that might be good for the country."

Oh, oh, you mean like Stormy Daniels taking  the Donald across her knee and spanking him with a copy of FORBES?   E.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2018/01/why-do-white-evangelicals-worship.html


Wherein we learn:

The spanking was revealed in a string of emails.  Subsequently,  Mother Jones basically confirmed all the sordid details that Daniels described from her 2006 encounters  For reference, see:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/01/stormy-daniels-trump-spanking-forbes-and-shark-week.html

"According  to a trove of  2009 emails exchanged between political operatives (advising Daniels at the time on a possible political campaign), the adult film actress claimed that her affair with Trump included spanking him with a copy of Forbes.  By one account,  a political consultant to Andrea Dubé related in an email that:

"He made her sit with him for three hours watching Shark Week. Another time he had her spank him with a Forbes magazine," 

The magazine used evidently had Dotard's  face on the cover which no doubt provides endless material for any Freudian school psychiatrists and psychologists. "

Stormy having sex with this turd then whacking his fat ass?  Sounds pretty perverse - and convincing to me. Not to mention allowing Russian prostitutes to urinate all over him in a Moscow hotel while the Miss Universe pageant was held in Moscow in 2013.  All integrated into the dossier prepared by Christopher Steele - which the Right's  nitwits now try to disparage.

According to an earlier (2017)  AP report in the Denver Post ( 'Ex Spy Regarded as Dependable') :

"Three British intelligence agents interviewed by the Associated Press described Steele as well regarded in the intelligence community, with excellent Russian skills and high level sources."

According to one Financial Times account, Steele was the "UK intelligence expert on Russia".

James Nixey, the head of Chatham House's Russia and Eurasia program, informed the AP that sections of the dossier document created by Steele "read exactly as reports from the secret services"

In other words, professional through and through, no exaggerations and no fillers that hadn't been  sourced.  So the Trumpkins and their hacks like Epstein,  Dan Henninger,  Holman Jenkins Jr. or Kim Strassel can squawk all they want about the "corrupt Steele dossier"  but I will make a Vegas bet on its veracity any day before anything coming out of Trump's piehole. Or that of his enablers and acolytes.

Epstein then inserts the example of TDS "afflicted" going so low and over the edge as to aver "he secretly admires King Jong Un's wardrobe"".   Actually, I  was more concerned with how he's openly professed love for the North Korean tyrant, i.e after saying numerous times he's "in love" with Kim.  And Kim sent him a "love letter."  These are all well documented, not fantasies or ideations.

Stage (4) "One imputes evil to Mr. Trump."

Actually, as an atheist I am averse to appending the term "evil" to anyone.  Having said that,  I do maintain a human can over time reach such a level of moral turpitude and character degradation he can at least asymptotically approach evil.  That is Trump, as when he had  migrant children locked up in cages, separated them from their parents.  Also, when he equated Charlottesville (2017) protesters with the Nazis and white nationalist scum who attacked them, including killing one woman (Heather Heyer).  Trump  claiming there were "some very fine people" on both sides. No, only on one!  As Nicole Wallace put it at the time:

"There are not two sides to this. There are hideous, hateful enemies of America, enemies of freedom, and there were people truly exercising their free speech."

Stage (5)  "One is weighted down with all the symptoms of the first four stages but brings to them an added choleric intensity of anger."

If Eppie means anger at the way Dotard has totally fucked up the response to the coronavirus so that over 130,000 if our fellow citizens are now dead- he has it right!  Or how Trump has not  only botched the initial U.S. response but is now actively inciting an even larger death toll by pushing for a premature opening of schools.  As Michelle Goldberg wrote(NY Times, 'Trump Threatens To Turn Pandemic Schooling Into Culture War'):


"Donald Trump has approached the extraordinarily complex challenge of educating children during a pandemic just as he’s approached most other matters of governing: with bullying, bluster and propaganda."

Reinforcing what Chris Hayes' timely take two nights ago:

"Also today he said he disagreed with the CDC guidelines for opening the schools. So he's now pushing the CDC to override their own guidelines.

So if I've got that right, we don't want the guidance of the nation's top health agency on how to stay safe in a pandemic to be the reason why we don't send our kids to school,  while we're suffering from the worst outbreak in the world.  So the president will tell them to change the guidance.  And it's not the first time he's done that.  He did it back in April and May when he didn't like the CDC reopening guidance for business.  He even pressured governors to ignore that guidance, just like he pushed the CDC to change their guidance for reopening churches. And now he's not happy with the CDC guidance on schools.

So what do you think is going to happen? Look, the last person in the world you can trust right now with the safety of your kids is Donald Trump."

 Epstein ends by saying those he fancies suffering from TDS can end the malady and "they don't even have to put on a mask" only "turn off the television set."  

Yeah, but see, Eppie, Trump will find a way to get back into our attention by again insinuating himself in some other outrageous way, whether via a new, demented executive order - maybe trying to fire Anthony Fauci, or threatening to send active military against Black Lives Matter protesters.

Methinks Eppie has got the wrong derangement syndrome and the wrong cast of victims who are afflicted.  

The great Dem Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once described ever lowered thresholds for accepting deviant and disreputable behavior in terms of "defining deviancy down."  With Epstein's article on a "TDS pandemic"  we now see just how low Trump's media apparatchiks are prepared to go to justify his deviancy.

Update:  We can now add WSJ columnist Barton Swaim to the stable of Trump defenders and  acolytes determined to 'define deviancy down' for their master.  This after his op-ed piece today ('Will Democrats Accept A Trump Victory', p. A13), writing:

"The president now seems likely to lose. But if he wins may I suggest an alternative theory (to stealing the election)?   A Trump victory in November will have nothing to do with the Russians, the Chinese,  the coronavirus or 'voter suppression'.

It will have everything to do with Democrats' foul behavior over the previous four years."

Democrats' foul behavior?  Is Swaim living on an alternate Earth, or simply blind and fucking nuts?  Did Dems lock migrant kids - often as young as two or three- in cages and separate them from their parents:? Did Dems side with marching Nazis and KKK'ers in Charlottesville?  Did Dems appoint a toady to foul any concept of justice and turn the DOJ into Trump's personal protectors?  Did Dems seek help from a foreign nation (Ukraine)  to take out his political opponent? Thereby violating his oath of office by using it for personal gain?  Did the Dems call the pandemic a 'hoax' for two weeks, wasting valuable time to control the virus, then upend CDC guidelines while also failing to organize a national response? Instead letting states compete with  each other for personal protective gear as is happening again now? Did Dems embrace the notion that masks are for 'elites'  - thereby setting the unmasked against the masked and enabling the virus to spread?

The answer to all the above is 'NO!' - leaving Trump as the only foul entity to be singled out.  As well as now Swaim in his perverse effort to defend him. And no, there is no way in hell we will accept a Trump election win, after the way this demented orange maggot has sought to undermine mail ballots-- which  elimination even he admitted would be the "only way to win".  


See Also:

2020 Elections | Election Integrity

Recruiting Poll Workers Is Key to Thwart Trump’s Attacks on Our Voting Systems

And:

The worst president ever keeps getting worse

Excerpt:

"Think about all that has happened since April 5. That was before security forces attacked peaceful protesters  in Lafayette Square so that Trump could stage a bizarre photo-op. 

Before he pushed to send the armed forces into the streets. Before he embraced white  power and called Black Lives Matter a  symbol of hate.  Before he vowed to veto the defense authorization bill to prevent the renaming of military bases named after Confederate generals. Before he used the novel coronavirus as an excuse to  shut down immigration and threatened to revoke  the visas of college students unable to attend classes in the fall. 

Before he ignored reports that a Russian intelligence unit had placed a bounty  on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Before he moved to pull out of the World Health Organization."

• Cartoon: Trump's monuments

American Tinderbox - Blame White Nationalists & The QAnon- "Boogaloo" Extremists Fomenting Riots To Launch a Civil War

THESE are the renegades the Feds ought to be looking at as chaos is unleashed in American cities. These Right wing racist savages - lower image from Charlottesville in Aug. 2017,  chanting "Jews will not replace us!"-  have been itching to start a race war since Charlottesville and before.

One can understand why Janice would be suspicious after watching AG Bill Barr's performance two nights ago, blabbering about the violence accompanying many of the George Floyd protests: "In many cases it appears the violence is driven by anarchic and left wing extremist groups".  Unwilling to pin the tail on the actual messengers of mayhem:  right wing extremists using the upheaval, chaos and violence to hijack the peaceful protests for their own ends.    With the reporting by Vice News overnight, that:

"Far Right extremists are hoping to turn the George Floyd protests into a new Civil War."

Janice had her first evidence that her suspicions were correct, and it is the Right and its dregs (e.g. from 4chan, 8chan, Boogaloo Bois, militias  etc.- such as stormed the Minnesota state house two months ago) behind all the havoc and using the civil protests as a "human shield". I agree with her totally and also that the Swine -in -chief and his toady Barr are trying to callously exploit these events to propound a "law and order" meme to help Trump get re-elected.  

And what do we find Trump doing in the midst of this national agony, with millions of citizens suffering -   over 104,000 deaths from the pandemic, 40 million unemployed, no more stimulus money and facing home evictions in a month?  Is he trying to assuage the pain and bring the country together? Hell no, he's acting the part of the vicious, vile, verminous rat he is, e.g


Firing off a series of tweets at Minnesota's response, vowing "shootings" will soon be done, ridiculing protesters outside his gated mansion at the White House,  and warning them that "vicious dogs will be released."  Thereby putting himself in the same role as the infamous AL sheriff Bull Connor-   who used fire hoses and vicious dogs on peaceful marching men, women and children in Birmingham over 50 years ago.   Only this time going one better than Connor and bragging "there will be some of the most ominous weapons ever seen" - i.e. if protesters attempt to breach the WH fence to get at him.  See also:

America is at a low ebb, shaken by multiple blows, and Trump adds to the distress

 Janice is also aware, of course, of German history and how -when Hitler and the Nazis came to power - they had blamed "Jews, leftists, socialists and unions" for  ongoing civil unrest and violent mayhem and riots that struck German cities in the waning days of the Weimar Republic.  But most of those were incited by Hitler's S.A. (Sturm Abteilung) terror squads.

Ian Kershaw in his magnificent account of Hitler’s rise to power (‘Hitler Nemesis’) noted that Germany's 1930-31 Weimar Republic constituted a weak democracy which had little or no control over the most radical Rightists, especially Hitler’s NSDAP party. They would regularly beat Marxists, socialists, and any leftists on the streets while holding up signs that read: “Tot dem Marxem!” (Death to Marxists!)  (Recall on Thursday, Trump himself Tweeted out a video of a supporter saying, “The only good Democrat is a dead Democrat.”)

My good fortune has been that on two occasions - one in August of 1978, the other in May of 1985-   I was able to meet and talk with actual flesh and blood Germans from the WWII era: one who had been a member of Hitler Youth (forced to at the point of a gun to his mother's head), and two others who had fought for the most fearsome army on the continent - the German Wehrmacht. At different times, they used their own photographs, films and archives to show me just what Hitler and Nazis were about. Looking back on the content of those archival films I see the same echoes now in our present condition, including mass unemployment, riots, and mayhem.

Let's move to the present. In her latest NY Times column Michelle Goldberg wrote:

"But if America feels like a tinderbox at the moment, it’s not just because of pressure coming from the dispossessed. On Wednesday, the journalists Robert Evans and Jason Wilson published a fascinating and disturbing look at the “boogaloo” movement — “an extremely online update of the militia movement” — on the investigative website Bellingcat. “The ‘boogaloo Bois’ expect, even hope, that the warmer weather will bring armed confrontations with law enforcement, and will build momentum towards a new civil war in the United States,” Evans and Wilson write. They add, “In a divided, destabilized post-coronavirus landscape, they could well contribute to widespread violence in the streets of American cities.”

This is exactly what we are seeing now.  Echoing these insights, Mia Bloom on her blog Justsecurity notes:

 "Former FBI agent and CNN commentator, Josh Campbell wrote, that Minnesota “authorities have been monitoring alleged criminals online, including postings by suspected white supremacists trying to incite violence.”

Most disturbing:

"The accelerationists, if you have never heard the term, are an extreme subset of white nationalism whose goal is to bring about chaos and destruction. The basic tenet of accelerationism argues that since Western governments are inherently corrupt, the best (and only) thing supremacists can do is to accelerate the end of society by sowing chaos and aggravating political tensions. “Accelerationist ideas have been cited in mass shooters’ manifestos — explicitly, in the case of the New Zealand killer — and are frequently referenced in white supremacist web forums and chat rooms,” Zack Beauchamp explained.

White Supremacists pretending to host a protest to honor George Floyd on Facebook to whip up violence in San Diego were posted on the BLMSD social media warning people not to go and that it was a white supremacist organized rally. People attending demonstrations remarked on the fact that the demographics were wrong, in places like Oakland where the majority of the destruction was perpetrated by young Caucasian men has inspired not just people on social media but reporting in the mainstream"

Of course we also cannot ignore the possibility that agent provocateurs could be at work as well, such as from within the ranks of the police assigned to the protests.  (As pointed out by Joy Reid this morning in relation to an incident in NYC).  We also read from Mia Bloom's account:

"Experts on political violence (and not just Qanon conspiracy theorists) shared stories on social media that the May 27 looting and arson at AutoZone by an unidentified man in a gas mask carrying an open umbrella (dubbed #umbrellaman) was not necessarily a protester but could be an agent provocateur or member of the police. In video posted to YouTube, while this man smashed windows with a hammer, protesters at the scene accused him of being an outsider and began to film him.

According to reporting in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “The man’s actions were so odd that other rioters in the area paused their own protests to call him out and began filming. “Are you a f—ing cop?” someone else can be heard yelling to the man as he disappeared from view.”

As in the 1960s it appears we are faced with fakes, double fakes, insidious skullduggery and the hijacking of protests  by those who firmly believe "the Great Replacement"  Rightist codswallop.  All this to aid their agenda by compounding violence and deflecting attention. The FBI's Cointelpro  comes to mind, which infiltrated left groups from 1956- 1971 and in many cases saw agents inciting incidents in the midst of normally lawful protests, like against the Vietnam War.  In one secret 1968 memo - since exposed via FOIA release-  Hoover made no bones about the motivation:

"To expose, disrupt and otherwise neutralize the activities of various New Left organizations. We must frustrate every effort of these groups and individuals to consolidate their forces or to recruit new or faithful adherents.”

It very much appears that Trump and Barr are resorting to the same tactics now, and Trump himself keeps pouring more gasoline on the simmering fires that could explode if we are not careful - as well as perceptive.  A lesson the Weimar Germans learned too late.  

Update: Further exhibiting his full blown psychosis, ignorance and incompetence in this crisis, Dotard fulminated that "we will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization".   To jog memories, this was the activist group -  NOT an organization with a clear structure that can be penalized under law- that came to the aid  of numerous Charlottesville citizens in August, 2017.  As I wrote in my Aug. 16 post:

Rev. Traci Blackmon  related on MSNBC  how African-Americans singing a hymn  near an entrance in Emancipation Park were set upon by the White racist loons and goons who proceeded to beat and mace them. As Rev. Blackmon put it, "the only thing that saved them was the intervention of Antifa and other protesters" - one of whom drove the racist louts back using a spray can and a match - effectively engineering a mini flame thrower. 

One can surmise from this that if Dotard Donnie Bonespurs had his way, those elderly black Americans singing their hymns would have been bashed senseless.  Much like this racist loon did to one Antifa member trying to save a fellow  protester that day:

See also:

White supremacy groups are hoping to leverage George Floyd's death into their longed-for 'race war' 

And:

Far-right 'Boogaloo Bois' fanning flames of chaos in Minnesota protests, officials claim

And:

Peace & Justice

Chaos Does Not Have to Destroy Us

And:

Peace & Justice

How Much Violence and Destruction is Enough for Depraved American Leaders and Their Subjects?

And:

• Trump is imploding in real time. The damage may be unrecoverable

And:

Social Justice and Activism

Eruptions of Rage in Minneapolis and across the US over the Cop Murder of George Floyd are Uprisings, Not 'Riots'

by Dave Lindorff | May 31, 2020 - 5:09am | permalink