I get exasperated with the stubborn self-serving accounts of Trump’s shenanigans that I read. It’s not that they’re wrong, but almost all of them are filtered by the point of view of the creator, which means they select only the facts they like and interpret only according to one frame of reference. Some are indictments and some are whitewashes. Part of what makes Trump so unaccountable is that he is a complex of contexts, a slumgullion of social understandings that is close to, but not quite, psychotic. One frame will not contain him, nor does he fill any frame.
Remember that he called his family together the night of the election results to caution them that he probably would not win. If it hadn’t been for Putin’s thumb, he wouldn’t have. But once he was in place, there was a terrific rush to grab his coattails — until they realized the stinking effluent of that position.
“The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” will be published Oct. 3 by St. Martin’s Press. It is reflection by the psych people, the ones who formerly have forbade themselves to comment: now it’s too dangerous not to. Here’s an excellent account of why they are speaking out. It’s the best interpretation I’ve seen so far.
Much speculation is being expended on ways to get rid of this ticking time bomb as he faces his mirror image across the Pacific. Once assassination is off the table, there are several approaches. Most writers put their energy into one or another, according to who they think their readers are. The political people put their energy into impeachment or Article 25.
The economics people do a lot of exclaiming over the revelations that Trump is NOT wealthy, is NOT a deal-maker, is NOT EVEN the person who wrote “his” book about making deals. In short, he’s a fraud, a con artist. But they are still stymied about a strategy for a trapdoor.
The economics people do a lot of exclaiming over the revelations that Trump is NOT wealthy, is NOT a deal-maker, is NOT EVEN the person who wrote “his” book about making deals. In short, he’s a fraud, a con artist. But they are still stymied about a strategy for a trapdoor.
Then there’s the Cold War version in which Trump Tower becomes a nest of traitors, directly connected to Moscow. This is very persuasive. When Trump claimed Obama was wire-tapping him, what he really meant was that American FBI and so on were listening to “alleged” transmissions from Trump Tower suites, managed and enabled by Jared Kushner. I expect that’s the real reason the FBI offices got kicked out even though part of what they were doing was protecting Trump. But Trump thinks he IS the Tower. They say the apartments are also occupied by mafia. I believe it. That tower probably has more bugs than the American Moscow embassy. I think intercepted transmissions among criminals put the FBI onto Trump years ago, before his money borrowing made him a traitor.
Of course, everyone has been hacking everyone's computers EXCEPT that American senators and representatives (and the President himself) are too old and too uneducated to understand much about computers or the Internet. They depend upon their “secretaries” for that, but are so sexist that they never really listen to or believe what they are told. There are exceptions. But even Blumenauer and Wyden can’t approach the powers of real adepts, the ones that live in a separate virtual world. Those are the people who can make your microwave control your life. KellyAnn Conway could not do this, but she knew people who told her they could. (She’s always struck me as someone who wanted to “slum” for the thrill.)
This is the “frame,” to use Ervin Goffman’s technical term, that has been most neglected, the one that explains some of Comey’s decisions: crime, plain and simple, both in the US and international. These have been on the FBI agenda for a decade or more. Money laundering, lies, omissions, and even murder. Not counting terrorism. Paper swindles cost the indigenous peoples everywhere the profits and ownership of their own lands, and has for centuries if not millennia. But the FBI is not pursuing that. They are after corporate CEO fish, so powerful that they control countries.
IMHO both Trump and Putin thought that if Trump were President, he would have unlimited power and could protect the two of them. Now that Putin realizes how much the US was designed to thwart dictators, he says, “Trump is not my bride.” Perhaps it would be more rhetorically accurate to say Trump is his bitch. Such a client is disposable. Putin may spare us all the trouble of a lot of courtroom and hearing panel work by arranging a “heart attack.”
On the other hand, it’s clear that in our care to block King George III, crazy as he was, time has made loopholes for Trump to penetrate. Or grab. So we will need to rethink how we write laws to account for social media and to prevent such toxic results of family pride and faux status-hunger from happening again.
These will be MAJOR shifts, including such things as what land ownership really means, how wealth is managed and taxed, what education will restore our understanding of propaganda and false news, how to keep legislators from making a career for themselves out of what is supposed to be service to the people, and better ways of managing international boundaries.
Lee
Bandy X. Lee is the compiler and manager of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”. When I googled the name, I expected some far-out and furry older male denizen of academia. Instead, in this Pacific-centric New World, she is a determined-looking female Asian. She IS Ivy League. Her powerful partner is Robert Jay Lifton, the man in the Moyers interview. His bibliography is, well, awesome, and too well-known to need reprinting here.
Lifton
Dr. Lee, whose degrees include both MD and MDiv, is a forensic psychiatrist on the faculty of Yale School of Medicine. “Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div., is a faculty member in the Law and Psychiatry Division of Yale School of Medicine. She earned her degrees at Yale, interned at Bellevue, was Chief Resident at Mass. General, and was a Research Fellow at Harvard Medical School. She was also a Fellow of the National Institute of Mental Health. She worked in several maximum-security prisons, played a key role in Rikers Island reforms, co-founded Yale’s Violence and Health Study Group, and leads a violence prevention collaborators group for the World Health Organization. She co-teaches criminal justice clinic and immigration legal services at Yale Law School, and teaches a university-wide course on violence prevention for Yale’s Global Health Studies Program. She’s written more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, edited eleven academic books, and is author of the textbook, Violence.”
She is an editor who links and winnows, a person who sorts to get sense, a type we sorely need as we wallow through our half-baked theories. The books she edits are expensive and expert. You’ll probably need Interlibrary Loan.
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