Quote Of The Day

 

"... The fundamental truth of Donald Trump is that he apparently cannot conceive of any relationship between individuals, peoples or states as anything other than a status game, a competition for dominance. His long history of scams and hostile litigation — not to mention his frequent refusal to pay contractors, lawyers, brokers and other people who were working for him — is evidence enough of the reality that a deal with Trump is less an agreement between equals than an opportunity for Trump to abuse and exploit the other party for his own benefit. For Trump, there is no such thing as a mutually beneficial relationship or a positive-sum outcome. In every interaction, no matter how trivial or insignificant, someone has to win, and someone has to lose. And Trump, as we all know, is a winner.  [snip]

"If we view the president’s actions in light of his psychological need to dominate, it is almost certainly true that his flagrant abuse of the rights of migrants, asylum seekers and foreign-born students in the United States — snatching them off the streets to be imprisoned or, worse, sending them to an unaccountable foreign prison with no practical legal recourse — is just the beginning. In the same way that there was nothing that could stop Trump from imposing a tariff regime that, in his mind, humiliates America’s rivals, there is nothing that can dissuade him from using the coercive power of the state to dominate those he disfavors at home.

"Trump is a winner, and he’ll show it by making all of us the loser." -- Jamelle Bouie in the New York Times, on how "The Tariff Saga Is About One Thing."  

If a team of geneticists wanted to design a person who, because of his epically warped psychology, would be of mortal danger to anything he had control over, they could not have created one more perfectly imperfect than the Malignant Fascist, Donald J. Trump.  Bouie makes the point that, because of his psychological aberration, there's no satisfying his thirst for domination and no reasoning with our "mad king."  With largely unchecked power (kudos to SCOTUS and John Roberts) he's moving fast and breaking things (see post below).  And to think this country walked into this nightmare with eyes wide open makes us wonder about our national sanity.