US Politics

Trudeau - putting the 'sex drive’ back in '24 Sussex Drive’.

^ that's good.

I thought of it when he was elected, and was mildly surprised that I couldn't find any one else using it. #missedhashtagopportunity

Bannon backtracking now.

Comparing himself to Reagan wrt his mental health maybe? WTF?

And a postscript

I think its because he is a CU Next Tuesday...

So Oprah vs The Rock for the Democrat ticket next time out?

Both would (hopefully) wipe the floor with the incumbent wanker.

Bernie or bust

Bernie has no chance this time around, I would love it if he came out as a strong candidate again but I genuinely think he wont really get the chance again.

I haven't thought much about the process of American elections, but it strikes me that you will get so many opponents wanting to throw their hat into the ring (I mean, even that dweeb Zuckerberg...), each of them necessarily dissing each other, that you'll just end up with a mess. If Trump were to stand (mostly) unchallenged for the Republicans then he would have a strong advantage by concentrating the votes. And, bingo, another term.

...throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart...

Trump is where he is because everyone, from all sides, underestimated him. He is stable and really smart. The problem is that he is a stable and smart racist, misogynist, dictatorial bully with a personality disorder.
The narcissist personality disorder is such that he cannot process anything that doesn't glorify his own sense of self. He lives in an alternate reality where the bad things did not happen to him. Things like the bankruptcies, being sued for fraud, sexual assaults, failure to win a majority vote, low ratings, hair loss etc just did not happen. His perception is that anyone who mentions these things or criticises him must be lying and therefore must be trying to destroy him. His response to that is to attack and to attack with malevolence.
Narcissism is almost a prerequisite to be a politician, or a news media star. Trump, however, excels due to his extreme narcissism combined with sadistic malevolence. He really enjoys seeing his enemies suffer and enjoys ridiculing the weak and disadvantaged.

You nailed the personality disorder bit.

However, how you could think he is stable and really smart is beyond me. He is successful, no doubt. But that is very different.

How can you be so certain on this? After everything that has happened.

Trump is where he is because everyone, from all sides, underestimated him.

Misunderestimated.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/donald-trump-appears-to-forget-words-of-national-anthem-during-college-football-match-appearance-a3735141.html

trump may as well have taken a knee during the national anthem

Trump is where he is because everyone, from all sides, underestimated him.

I think most people didn't underestimate him but the stupidity of the american voter.

The problem is that he is a stable and smart racist, misogynist, dictatorial bully with a personality disorder.
The narcissist personality disorder is such that he cannot process anything that doesn't glorify his own sense of self. He lives in an alternate reality...

Alternative realities are never stable, everytime his reality is questioned the fight to reconstruct it begins (with all it's twitter glory)

And he is not smart, ambitious yes but that's another thing.

Would put money on him having the lowest IQ of any President, including Reagan by the end of his term.

hopefully he'll do a good job in raising public awareness of dementia and mental illness during his presidency

so not all bad

I'm not convinced he's a thick or a moron. He's clearly a dense in a way and uniquely uncouth, but he's obviously pretty cunning to have got this far. Or is it just that he plows into everything with a complete lack of ethics and bamboozles those he comes into contact with? I dunno, I just think calling him an idiot is simplistic.

Robert Reich:

Essay: Seriously, How Dumb is Trump?
For more than a year now, I’ve been hearing from people in the inner circles of official Washington – GOP lobbyists, Republican pundits, even a few Republican members of Congress – that Donald Trump is remarkably stupid.
I figured they couldn’t be right because really stupid people don’t become presidents of the United States. Even George W. Bush was smart enough to hire smart people to run his campaign and then his White House.
Several months back when Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called Trump a “f—king moron,” I discounted it. I know firsthand how frustrating it can be to serve in a president’s cabinet, and I’ve heard members of other president’s cabinets describe their bosses in similar terms.
Now comes “Fire and Fury,” a book by journalist Michael Wolff, who interviewed more than 200 people who dealt with Trump as a candidate and president, including senior White House staff members.
In it, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster calls Trump a “dope.” Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus both refer to him as an “idiot.” Rupert Murdoch says Trump is a “f—king idiot.”
Trump’s chief economic adviser Gary Cohn describes Trump as “dumb as sh-t,” explaining that “Trump won’t read anything — not one-page memos, not the brief policy papers; nothing. He gets up halfway through meetings with world leaders because he is bored.”
When one of Trump’s campaign aides tried to educate him about the Constitution, Trump couldn’t focus. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” the aide recalled, "before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”
Trump doesn’t think he’s stupid. “Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” he tweeted yesterday. He earlier recounted “I went to an Ivy League college … I did very well. I’m a very intelligent person.”
Wrong. One of his professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and Finance purportedly said that he was “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had.”
Trump biographer Gwenda Blair wrote in 2001 that Trump was admitted to Wharton on a special favor from a “friendly” admissions officer who had known Trump’s older brother.
But hold on. It would be dangerous to underestimate this man.
Even if Trump doesn’t read, can’t follow a logical argument, and has the attention span of a fruit fly, it still doesn’t follow that he’s stupid.
There’s another form of intelligence, called “emotional intelligence.”
Emotional intelligence is a concept developed by two psychologists, John Mayer of the University of New Hampshire, and Yale’s Peter Salovey, and it was popularized by Dan Goleman in his 1996 book of the same name.
Mayer and Salovey define emotional intelligence as the ability to do two things – “understand and manage our own emotions,” and “recognize and influence the emotions of others.”
Granted, Trump hasn’t displayed much capacity for the first. He’s thin-skinned, narcissistic, and vindictive. As dozens of Republican foreign policy experts put it, “he is unable or unwilling to separate truth from falsehood. He does not encourage conflicting views. He lacks self-control and acts impetuously. He cannot tolerate criticism."
Okay, but what about Mayer and Salovey’s second aspect of emotional intelligence – influencing the emotions of others?
This is where Trump shines. He knows how to manipulate people. He has an uncanny ability to discover their emotional vulnerabilities – their fears, anxieties, prejudices, and darkest desires – and use them for his own purposes.
To put it another way, Trump is a talented conman.
He’s always been a conman. He conned hundreds of young people and their parents into paying to attend his near worthless Trump University. He conned banks into lending him more money even after he repeatedly failed to pay them. He conned contractors to work for them and then stiffed them.
Granted, during he hasn’t always been a great conman. Had he been, his cons would have paid off.
By his own account, in 1976, when Trump was starting his career, he was worth about $200 million, much of it from his father. Today he says he’s worth some $8 billion. If he’d just put the original $200 million into an index fund and reinvested the dividends, he’d be worth $12 billion today.
But he’s been a great political conman. He conned 62,979,879 Americans to vote for him in November 2016 by getting them to believe his lies about Mexicans, Muslims, African-Americans, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and all the "big," “wonderful,” “beautiful” things he’d do for the people who’d support him.
And he’s still conning many of them.
Political conning is Trump’s genius. This genius – combined with his utter stupidity in every other dimension of his being – poses a clear and present danger to America and the world.

A legal letter

a legal smackdown more like.

many warnings from history of defamation suits ending very badly for the claimant