3 Arguments for Dems to Stop Making

  Not a Real School and Not A Real President

3 Arguments for Democrats to Stop Making

Since the election, Democrats have really been down in the dumps.   Despite the tantrums and protests, it strikes me that Democrats must be okay with this state of affairs.   Sure, they claim he’s Hitler with a spray tan, and on some level they might even believe this.   But short of establishing that half the country are total masochists—the safety word is “MAGA”—why are they doing everything in their power to make sure he runs roughshod over them and wins so much he gets sick of winning?   Because that’s what Democrats are doing.

If I wanted to discredit an entire political party, I’d do exactly what Democrats, grassroots and party bosses alike, are doing:  whining and making excuses at every opportunity, right up to insisting there must be some fantastical way to overturn a decisive electoral drubbing.

The first step here should be to shut up and do some meaningful self-reflection about why Democrats lost.   Yet precious few smart and influential Democrats are actually doing this.   To paraphrase Mark Twain, it’s better to remain silent and be thought a loser than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.   The people rejected the Democrats and their message.

Even worse, the bellyaching about the GOP's victory has become tired and predictable even as it amounts to little more than wishing.   Now is the time to be honest, so I implore Democrats, if you catch yourself making any of the following arguments about why Dirt-bag Donnie shouldn’t be president, think before you wreck your party.

1. Dems Won the Popular Vote, Or the Electoral (University?) Is Unfair

Yes, we know she got more than two million more votes than Dirt-Bag Donnie.   But the popular vote is never how presidential elections in this country have been decided.   It’s called the “United States” for a reason.   Nearly the entire premise of the U.S. Constitution—including the Electoral College—is setting up a system of government such that in a large country with as many striking regional and political differences as ours, one state can’t dominate the rest.

Clinton’s margin of victory in California was 4.3 million votes.   The rest of the country has good reason not to want national elections to be determined by California alone.   Maybe next time have your candidate set foot in Wisconsin?   Maybe next time nominate a candidate who’s not so terrible that she runs only a point or two ahead of Donald Freaking Drump in national elections?

Those arguments don’t really address the constitutional rationale for its existence.   Simply venting in the Washington Post that the Electoral System is a “medieval relic” seems ill-advised.   Besides, what does this progressive argument make of the popular vote?   Is it somehow preferable to be saddled with a relic from the sixth century B.C.?

This brings us to another problem with shrieking, “Hillary won the popular vote!”   Look around the country.   Just how popular are Democrats these days?   Not very.   Thirty-three states now have Republican governors.   Republicans have control of the Senate.   A third of the Democratic congressional delegation comes from just three states—CA., Mass., and NY.   Look at a House of Representatives map, does this look like a national party to you?

You can moan about the Electoral System all you want, but to get rid of it, you need to do one of two things.   One, pass a constitutional amendment.   Or two, have the states come together and decide on a new system for allocating electors.   Either way, Democrats need to finish first in a helluva lot more elections to make either of these things possible.

Regarding the reallocation of electors, that’s extremely unlikely because, oh yeah, Republicans control the legislatures in 32 states, and Democrats control the legislatures in just 13.   This means that if Republicans come to control 38 legislatures, which is difficult but not unthinkable the way things have been trending, they could call an Article V convention and start passing their own constitutional amendments without any support from Democrats.   The Democratic party is in sad shape.

At the end of the day, even with Clinton’s popular vote margin, the fact is more Americans are voting for Republicans at the local, state, and federal level.   If you’re a Democrat, this total electoral dominance by Republicans should scare the stuffing out of you.   But when you’re losing the game, you need to play harder—you can’t just make up new rules as you go along.

2. James Comey and the FBI Wanted Trump Elected

It’s conceivable, per Nate Silver, that the Comey letter in late October gave Trump momentum and possibly swung the election.   But my response, like most Americans, is “So what?”   If you’re worried about an FBI investigation influencing a presidential election DON’T NOMINATE A CANDIDATE UNDER FBI INVESTIGATION. 

And you really, really, don’t want to nominate a candidate under investigation whose top aide’s husband is also being investigated by the FBI for child pornography who is also allegedly in possession of emails relevant to the candidate’s FBI investigation that he’s keeping on the same computer as his sex pics.
Seriously, stop and read those two previous sentences again, and think about why any normal person would be in any way sympathetic to this predicament.   As to whether the Clinton email investigation was warranted in the first place, if you take this argument seriously I beg of you to ask one of the millions of Americans who’ve dealt with the rigmarole of getting a security clearance whether they think there’s an obvious double standard.

As to the possibility of Comey playing politics, if he was out to get her why didn’t he recommend charges initially?   The political influence with the Clinton email investigation ran only in one direction, and that benefited Clinton.   The attorney general in the position of bringing charges, Loretta Lynch, was appointed a U.S. attorney by Bill Clinton and later worked for a law firm connected to the Clintons for years.   President Obama formally endorsed Hillary Clinton when the FBI investigation was still ongoing.   That should have been grounds for a special prosecutor.   The issue isn’t that Hillary Clinton was betrayed by Comey;  the issue should be that she skated.   Lest we forget, they were chanting “lock her up” at the Democratic convention as well.

Finally, there’s my favorite argument that many a well-known Democrat has made regarding her email server:  “There’s no proof Hillary Clinton’s server endangered national security.”   Now proof that it did is not a requirement for violating the law.   But let’s get this straight.

On one hand, Democrats have spent the last several months arguing that Clinton did nothing to endanger national security, presumably because we can be certain that Russians couldn’t hack into the server that Hillary was keeping in the closet right the behind the Rubbermaid containers full of Christmas ornaments.

On the other hand, Democrats are now demanding we need a thorough congressional investigation right now because of concerns Russian hackers may have penetrated our entire electoral system across several states to steal the election.   In fact, UFO enthusiast and Democratic capo John Podesta—I’m beginning to think these two avocations are not unrelated—is demanding some pronouncement about how terrible the Russian hacking was before the Electoral College votes ratify the results so they can presumably respond by something something something President Hillary!

Pick one of these arguments and stick with it, please.   Anyway, this brings me to the third argument.

3. The Russians Are Coming!

I don’t want to be too flippant here, because Russia is a serious threat and I have no doubt that they want to meddle in our elections.   The fact that top Trump aides might be, say, laundering money for Russian mobsters makes a lot of people understandably queasy.   Republicans in Congress agree with Democrats that Russia’s attempt at influencing things unduly needs investigating.

However, the evidence that Russians had any real impact on the actual election results is embarrassingly scant and wildly disproportionate to the amount of supposedly legitimate media outlets and public figures taking the idea of Russian hacking seriously.   If the roles were reversed, I have no illusions that the media and their Democratic allies would be pretty dismissive of this given the lack of hard evidence.

As it happens, on October 18 no less than Barack Obama mused, “There is no serious person out there who would suggest that you could even rig America’s elections, in part because they are so decentralized.   There is no evidence that that has happened in the past, or that there are instances that that could happen this time.”

Further, the media wasn’t always troubled by American presidents cozying up to Russia:

Also, isn’t the fact that Russia is so hostile to us now and allegedly undermining our elections a pretty damning judgment on the competence of the woman in charge of overseeing Obama’s “Russian reset” if the point of that was more friendly relations?   The charitable interpretation here is that Russia is, for whatever reason, so afraid of Clinton that they tried to undermine the election.   But there was also a time, not that long ago, when intimidating Russians by calling them our “number one geopolitical foe” was a bad thing in the eyes of the media.   Oddly, I’m not seeing too much contrition over what they did to Romney (this is about it), even as they are now in an unjustified panic.

Then again, we’re talking about a party that has an 80-year history of claiming Republicans were exaggerating the threat of Russia.   In fact, “60 Minutes” ran a report about the effort to get Obama to pardon the Rosenbergs on October 16, three weeks before the election and 63 years after they were executed.   Since the fall of the Soviet Union, we have all manner of evidence conclusively proving the Rosenbergs were spies.   It’s not even a remotely controversial matter, unless, apparently, you’re a member of the media.

Now, there is one tangible precedent for the Russians intervening in our elections.   That’s because Ted Kennedy actually asked them to interfere in the 1984 election.   For some strange reason this revelation wasn’t the first thing that inexplicably failed to, uh, sink Ted Kennedy’s career.   Rather, it’s a story most Americans never even heard about.

It seems as if the media only cares about Russian threats insofar as they harm Democrats’ electoral chances.   To hear Democrats screaming about the threat of Russia now, after ignoring the problem for decades, isn’t something that ordinary Americans are going to pay much attention to—at least not without more evidence and some real contrition regarding their about-face on the Russian threat.

I don’t see that happening soon, because too many Democrats with a megaphone are convinced that something sinister is going on.   As filmmaker Joss Whedon noted,  “The crafty move was forcing the Dems to debunk voter fraud, so when the Trump/Putin cabal ACTUALLY COMMITTED it, we’d sound hypocritical.”   Whedon’s right about one thing—Democrats do sound hypocritical.   The obvious explanation isn’t  a Putin conspiracy, but that Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate with more corrupt baggage than the law would allow. 

Anyway, you may not want to believe I have good intentions here, but if you can’t accept this tough love, consider it tough snark.   I really do believe America needs a functional opposition party.   That, however, will require accepting some criticism as valid and, yes, probably some compromise in response to that criticism.   Recall that just eight years ago, Democrats had total control of Washington—assuming Republicans will be in power forever is folly.

However, a month after the election they’re still publishing op-eds in the Los Angeles Times headlined  “Why the Democrats don’t need an overhaul.”   The longer Democrats are in denial, the longer their road to political recovery is going to be.   They don’t have to like what happened, but for their own good, Democrats need to stop seriously entertaining arguments that Trump’s victory was invalid.






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Top Psychotherapist Releases Terrifying Diagnosis Of President Trump

Johns Hopkins’ Top Psychotherapist Releases Terrifying Diagnosis Of President Trump

If there’s one thing we can say about Donald Trump, it’s that he’s unlike any other world leader we’ve seen to date.   The problem, however, is that his differences fail to set him apart in a positive manner.

Almost daily, Trump tweets about the “biased media,”  or a world leader who has suddenly done something so terrible that he must take to Twitter to publicly berate them.   Notice, however, that it’s always someone else with the problem.   It’s never him.

However, John D. Gartner, a registered psychotherapist from the renowned Johns Hopkins University Medical School seems to think Trump may, in fact, be the one with the problem.   Gartner, who teaches psychiatric residents at Hopkins, decided to break the ethical code known as the “Goldwater Rule” in order to warn the American public about the dangerousness of our new commander-in-chief’s mental state.

The “Goldwater Rule” is defined as “the informal term for part of the ethics code of the American Psychiatric Association saying it is wrong to provide a professional opinion of a public figure without examining that person and gaining consent to discuss the evaluation.”

Trump’s Democratic challenger called it first.   She said Trump is “temperamentally unfit” to serve as president, following his numerous sexist remarks about women, mocking of a disabled reporter, and blatantly racist statements about basically every single human being who isn’t white.

Gartner says “Donald Trump is dangerously mentally ill and temperamentally incapable of being president.”

According to USNews, Gartner unofficially diagnosed Trump with “malignant narcissism.” Although he himself has not personally examined Trump, Gartner claims it’s obvious from watching even a little of his behavior that he meets the diagnostic criteria for the disorder.   Some of the characteristics include:

Anti-social behavior
Sadism
Aggressiveness
Paranoia
Grandiosity
Entitled
Regressed
Manipulative
Destructive
Egocentric
Use of projection
Lack of conscience
Narcissistic

Gartner says that individuals with malignant narcissism often lack impulse control and empathy.   He also says many who suffer from this disorder believe that others around them don’t recognize their greatness.

‘We’ve seen enough public behavior by Donald Trump now that we can make this diagnosis indisputably,’  Gartner claims.

As Psychology Today notes, “Malignant Narcissists will go to great lengths to achieve their aim.    They can be intelligent, high functioning, soft-spoken, charming, tearful/seemingly emotional, gracious, well-mannered, kind and have the ability to form relationships.   They may lie, falsely accuse, dramatize, smear, cheat, steal, manipulate, accuse, blame or twist to get what they want and feel justified in doing so.   Because they are entitled, egocentric and desperate, they do not experience it as wrong.”

Malignant narcissists are:

‘Determined to gratify their wishes and furious if thwarted.   Their desire can be so consuming that there is little comprehension of, respect for or ability to empathize with the other.   They lack guilt or remorse and tend to feel that it is they who have been mistreated.  They can be of any gender, race or social class.’

As if that weren’t enough, malignant narcissism is incurable.

So there you have it. The leader of the United States of America is more than likely a malignant narcissist who has the fate of the free world in his two tiny hands.   Not to mention, he now has access to the United States government’s nuclear codes.   If that’s not terrifying, we don’t know what is.



Are you understanding  that republicans have elected a mentally deranged person as President of the United States?


Or Has Partisan Politics Destroyed Your Ability to Think?    The republican party really put on over on you this time.





Narcissistic personality disorder is a destructive preoccupation with one’s own personal adequacy, power and prestige.   People with this disorder crave for admiration, have an unreasonably strong sense of entitlement and are often preoccupied with unrealistic fantasies of success, beauty and ideal love.   Unlike malignant narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder is defined as a mental illness in DSM-V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the Fifth Edition).

Malignant narcissism, while described somewhat differently by various authors, can be succinctly defined as “an extreme form of antisocial personality disorder that is manifested in a person who is pathologically grandiose, lacking in conscience and behavioral regulation, and with characteristic demonstrations of joyful cruelty and sadism“.

20 Traits of Malignant Narcissism

How Many Does Donald Trump Have?


1. THE PATHOLOGICAL LIAR is skillfully deceptive and very convincing.   Avoids accountability by diverting topics, dodging questions, and making up new lies, bluffs or threats when questioned.   His memory is self serving as he denies past statements.   Constant chaos and diverting from reality is their chosen environment.

Defense Strategy:  Verify his words.   Do not reveal anything about yourself - he'll use it against you.   Head for the door when things don't add up.   Don't ask him questions - you'll only be inviting more lies.


2. THE CONTRACT BREAKER agrees to anything then turns around and does the opposite.   Marriage, Legal, Custody agreements, normal social/personal protocol are meaningless.   This con artist will accuse you of being the contract breaker.   Enjoys orchestrating legal action and playing the role of the 'poor me' victim. 
Defense Strategy:  Expect him to disregard any agreement.   Have Plan B in place.   Protect yourself financially and emotionally.


3. THE HIGH ROLLER Successfully plows and backstabs his way to the top.   His family a disposable prop in his success facade.   Is charismatic, eloquent and intelligent in his field, but often fakes abilities and credentials.   Needs to have iron-fisted control, relying on his manipulation skills.   Will ruthlessly support, exploit or target others in pursuit of his ever-changing agenda.   Mercilessly abuses the power of his position.   Uses treachery or terrorism to rule or govern.   Potential problem or failure situations are delegated to others.   A vindictive bully in the office with no social or personal conscience.   Often suspicious and paranoid.   Others may support him to further their own Mephistophelian objectives, but this wheeler-dealer leaves them holding the bag.   Disappears quickly when consequences loom.
Defense Strategy:  Keep your references and resume up to date.   Don't get involved in anything illegal.   Document thoroughly to protect yourself.   Thwarting them may backlash with a cascade of retaliation.   Be on the lookout and spot them running for office and vote them out.   Educate yourself about corporate bullies


4. THE SEXUAL NARCISSIST is often hypersexual (male or female).   Pornography, masturbation, incest are reported by his targets.   Anything, anyone, young, old, male/female, are there for his gratification.   This predator takes what is available.   Can have a preference for 'sado-maso' sexuality.   Often easily bored, he demands increasingly deviant stimulation.   However, another behaviour exists, the one who withholds sex or emotional support.
Defense Strategy:  Expect this type to try to degrade you.   Get away from him.   Expect him to tell lies about your sexuality to evade exposure of his own.


5. THE BLAME-GAME NARCISSIST never accepts responsibility.   Blames others for his failures and circumstances.   A master at projection.
Defense Strategy:  Learn about projection.   Don't take the bait when he blames you.   He made the mess let him clean it up.


6. THE VIOLENT NARCISSIST is a wife-Beater, Murderer, Serial Killer, Stalker, Terrorist.   Has a 'chip-on-his-shoulder' attitude.   He lashes out and destroys or uses others (particularly women and children) as scapegoats for his aggression or revenge.   He has poor impulse control.   Fearless and guiltless, he shows bad judgement.   He anticipates betrayal, humiliation or punishment, imagines rejection and will reject first to 'get it over with'.   He will harass and push to make you pay attention to him and get a reaction.   He will try to make you look out of control.   Can become dangerous and unpredictable.   Has no remorse or regard for the rights of others.
Defense Strategy:  Don't antagonize or tip your hand you're leaving.   Ask for help from the police and shelters.


7. THE CONTROLLER/MANIPULATOR pits people against each other.   Keeps his allies and targets separated.   Is verbally skillful at twisting words and actions.   Is charismatic and usually gets his way.   Often undermines our support network and discourages us from seeing our family and friends.   Money is often his objective.   Other people's money is even better.   He is ruthless, demanding and cruel.   This control-freak bully wants you pregnant, isolated and financially dependent on him.   Appears pitiful, confused and in need of help.   We rush in to help him with our finances, assets, and talents.   We may be used as his proxy interacting with others on his behalf as he sets us up to take the fall or enjoys the performance he is directing.
Defense Strategy:   Know the 'nature of the beast'.   Facing his failure and consequences will be his best lesson.   Be suspicious of his motives, and avoid involvement.   Don't bail him out.


8. THE SUBSTANCE ABUSER Alcohol, drugs, you name it, this N does it.   We see his over-indulgence in food, exercise or sex and his need for instant gratification.   Will want you to do likewise.
Defense Strategy:  Don't sink to his level.   Say No.


9. OUR "SOUL MATE" is cunning and knows who to select and who to avoid.   He will come on strong, sweep us off our feet.   He seems to have the same values, interests, goals, philosophies, tastes, habits.   He admires our intellect, ambition, honesty and sincerity.   He wants to marry us quickly.   He fakes integrity, appears helpful, comforting, generous in his 'idealization' of us phase.   It never lasts.   Eventually Jekyll turns into Hyde.   His discarded victims suffer emotional and financial devastation.   He will very much enjoy the double-dipping attention he gets by cheating.   We end the relationship and salvage what we can, or we are discarded quickly as he attaches to a "new perfect soul mate".   He is an opportunistic parasite.   Our "Knight in Shining Armor" has become our nightmare.   Our healing is lengthy.
Defense Strategy:  Seek therapy.   Learn about this disorder.   Know the red flags of their behaviour, and "If he seems too good to be true..."  Hide the hurt you feel.   Never let him see it.   Be watchful for the internet predator.


10. THE QUIET NARCISSIST is socially withdrawn, often dirty, unkempt.   Odd thinking is observed.   Used as a disguise to appear pitiful to obtain whatever he can.


11. THE SADIST is now the fully-unmasked malignant narcissist.   His objective is watching us dangle as he inflicts emotional, financial, physical and verbal cruelty.   His enjoyment is all too obvious.   He'll be back for more.   His pleasure is in getting away with taking other people's assets.   His target:  women, children, the elderly, anyone vulnerabie.
Defense Strategy:  Accept the Jekyll/Hyde reality.   Make a "No Contact' rule.   Avoid him altogether.   End any avenue of vulnerability.   Don't allow thoughts of his past 'good guy' image to lessen the reality of his disorder.


12. THE RAGER flies off the handle for little or no provocation.   Has a severely disproportionate overreaction.   Childish tantrums.   His rage can be intimidating.   He wants control, attention and compliance.   In our hurt and confusion we struggle to make things right.   Any reaction is his payoff.   He seeks both good or bad attention.   Even our fear, crying, yelling, screaming, name calling, hatred are his objectives.   If he can get attention by cruelty he will do so.
Defense Strategy:  Manage your responses.   Be fully independent.   Don't take the bait of his verbal abuse.   Expect emotional hurt.   Volence is possible.


13. THE BRAINWASHER is very charismatic.  He is able to manipulate others to obtain status, control, compliance, money, attention.   Often found in religion and politics.   He masterfully targets the naive, vulnerable, uneducated or mentally weak.
Defense Strategy.   Learn about brainwashing techniques.   Listen to your gut instinct.   Avoid them.


14. THE RISK-TAKING THRILL-SEEKER never learns from his past follies and bad judgment.   Poor impulse control is a hallmark.   Defense Strategy:  Don't get involved.   Use your own good judgement.   Say No.


15. THE PARANOID NARCISSIST is suspicious of everything usually for no reason.   Terrified of exposure and may be dangerous if threatened.   Suddenly ends relationships if he anticipates exposure or abandonment.
Defense Strategy:  Give him no reason to be suspicious of you.   Let some things slide.   Protect yourself if you anticipate violence.


16. THE IMAGE MAKER will flaunt his 'toys', his children, his wife, his credentials and accomplishments.   Admiration, attention, even glances from others, our envy or our fear are his objective.   He is never satisfied.   We see his arrogance and haughty strut as he demands center stage.   He will alter his mask at will to appear pitiful, inept, solicitous, concerned, or haughty and superior.   Appears the the perfect father, husband, friend - to those outside his home.
Defense Strategy:  Ignore his childlike behaviors.   Know his payoff is getting attention, deceiving or abusing others.   Provide him with 'supply' to avert problems.


17. THE EMOTIONAL VACUUM is the cruelest blow of all.   We learn his lack of empathy.   He has deceived us by his cunning ability to mimic human emotions.   We are left numbed by the realization.   It is incomprehensible and painful.   We now remember times we saw his cold vacant eyes and when he showed odd reactions.   Those closest to him become objectified and expendable.   Defense Strategy:  Face the reality.   They can deceive trained professionals.


18. THE SAINTLY NARCISSIST proclaims high moral standing.   Accuses others of immorality.   "Hang 'em high" he says about the murderer on the 6:00 news.   This hypocrite lies, cheats, schemes, corrupts, abuses, deceives, controls, manipulates and torments while portraying himself of high morals.
Defense Strategy:  Learn the red flags of behavior.   Be suspicious of people claiming high morals.   Can be spotted at a church near you.


19. THE CALLING-CARD NARCISSIST forewarns his targets.   Early in the relationship he may 'slip up' revealing his nature saying  "You need to protect yourself around me"  or  "Watch out, you never know what I'm up to."   We laugh along with him and misinterpret his words.   Years later, coping with the devastation left behind, his victims recall the chilling warning.
Defense Strategy:  Know the red flags and be suspicious of the intentions of others.


20. THE PENITENT NARCISSIST says "I've behaved horribly, I'll change, I love you, I'll go for therapy."   Appears to 'come clean' admitting past abuse and asking forgiveness.   Claims we are at fault and need to change too.   The sincerity of his words and actions appear convincing.   We learn his words are verbal hooks.   He knows our vulnerabilities and what buttons to push.   We question our judgement about his disorder.   We can disregard  "Fool me once..."   We hope for change and minimize past abuse.   With a successful retargeting attempt, this N will enjoy his second reign of terror even more if we allow him back in our lives.   Defense Strategy:  Expect this.   Self-impose a "No Contact" rule.   Focus on the reality of his disorder.   Journal past abusive behavior to remind yourself.   Join a support group.


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Why Trump Supporters Like Him?

They like people who talk big.
 
They like people who tell us that our problems are simple and easy to solve, even when they aren't.

And they don't like people who don't look like us.

Most people share these characteristics to some degree, but they seem to be especially prevalent among Trump's base.   His appeal certainly has other sources, too, such as the nostalgia he so skillfully evokes, his financial independence from special interests, and the crucial fact that he had his own reality television show.   Some Republicans like Trump's anti-establishment approach.   And many support Trump because of his substantive positions -- his views on immigration, his antipathy toward other countries, his defense of Social Security, or his opposition to  (tax) deductions for wealthy bankers.

But given the gap between public support for Trump and elite opinion, it may be worth thinking about the ingrained predilections for confidence, simplicity and familiarity that are just a few of the reasons that psychologists gave when asked to explain exactly how Trump got huge.

"Really, we're not giving people their dues," argues John Hibbing, a psychologist at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.   "We have to take this seriously.   You can look down your nose if you want to, but these people aren't going away."

We like big talkers

"If you're running for president, you should not be allowed to use a teleprompter," Trump likes to say.   He doesn't on the stump.   As a result, his typical speech is a congeries of tangents and digressions.

Even if Trump showed any strong inclination to speak in complete and eloquent sentences, though, his wildly cheering crowds wouldn't let him finish one.

Trump doesn't give the kinds of speeches that political consultants are used to.   He certainly doesn't deliver lines that are carefully formulated for applause and for prime-time sound bites.   His style has been called a "word salad."

Still, he is an effective speaker, psychologists say.   In fact, decades of research show that charisma has more to do with a person's demeanor than what he or she is saying, says Stanford University's Jeffrey Pfeffer.

In one series of well-known experiments conducted by the psychologists Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal, subjects were able to forecast how students in a college classroom would evaluate their teachers at the end of the term, based on 30 seconds or less of soundless footage of the instructor.   The subjects in the study couldn't hear the words coming out of the instructor's mouth, but what mattered for the students was gesture and affect, not substance.  

 Voters listening to politicians on television are just like the students in those classrooms, says Pfeffer, a psychologist who studies leadership.

"Most of the electorate would not pass a test on what anybody's positions are on anything," he said.   "Nobody cares."   Conservative voters, for instance, seem not to mind Trump's favorable comments on national health insurance and eminent domain.

What can win over voters is what Pfeffer called "narcissism."
 
"They're responding to dynamism, to force, to movement, to smiling, to facial expressions that convey authority," he said.   Trump "does it with more force.   He does it with more energy.   Energy is contagious."

Arie Kruglanski, a psychologist at the University of Maryland, compares Trump's campaign to President Obama's in 2008.   The two men have different styles, but both have animated their supporters with confident claims about the future.

"It's the audacity of those promises in those circumstances that really carries a lot of weight," Kruglanski said, "and it's the emotional, as opposed to the kind of deliberative, rational appeal that carries the day."

Both conservative and liberal voters can be susceptible to this kind of thinking.   In other ways, though, psychologists believe that conservative and liberal minds work differently, which could help explain Trump's success with Republicans.

We want answers

The world can feel like a complicated place.   There may be no good answers to the problems we confront individually and as a society.   It is hard to know whom or what to believe.    Things are changing, and the future might be different in unpredictable ways.   For many people, this uncertainty is deeply unpleasant.

"People are just inclined to say, 'Okay, to hell with it.   I'm not going to figure it out,' " Kruglanski said.

That desire is especially strong among social conservatives, research shows.   They want answers, more so than other people.

One way that psychologists measure these preferences is by giving people a questionnaire that poses statements such as, "It's annoying to listen to someone who cannot seem to make up his or her mind,"  "I dislike it when a person's statement could mean many different things" and "In most social conflicts, I can easily see which side is right and which is wrong."

Conservative subjects are more likely to agree with these statements, whether psychologists give this test in the United States, Germany, Italy, Belgium or Poland.

Over the years, conservative commentators have objected to this characterization of their beliefs.   They argue that conservatism isn't a psychological condition, but a set of ideas with a rich intellectual history, developed across generations through rational deliberation.

For their part, psychologists have responded that they aren't dismissing conservativism as irrational.   After all, just because people are predisposed to believe something doesn't make them wrong.   Saying someone is more likely to find an argument persuasive because of their psychology doesn't invalidate the argument.   As psychologists see it, the desire for simplicity is just a fact about the way people think — one that several decades of research has now confirmed.

Hibbing of the University of Nebraska says this need for clarity is important to understanding Trump's support.

"People like the idea that deep down, the world is simple;  that they can grasp it and that politicians can't," Hibbing said.   "That's certainly a message that I think Trump is radiating."

Hibbing believes there may be a genetic reason for the differences between liberal and conservative minds, but the explanation is more of a hypothesis than a conclusion.

At Hibbing's laboratory, he and his colleagues study how conservative and liberal subjects react to unpleasant images, such as insects and injuries.   They use cameras to track the motion of their subjects' eyes and place electrodes on their skin.   Other researchers study the contractions of facial muscles and electrical activity in the brain.

These experiments show that conservative subjects react differently from liberal ones.   They sweat more heavily when shown a picture of a dangerous animal.   Their pupils focus on disgusting images, and they don't look away.

It's evidence that we don't develop political affiliations just by rationally evaluating competing philosophies and ideologies.   Our opinions also have origins beneath the level of conscious thought, in our bodies and our brains.

In that sense, the desire for simplicity could be physical.   And Trump has a way of responding to complicated questions as though the answers were so obvious, he is dumbfounded that no one else has figured them out yet.

A recent interview reveals this approach.

After nearly allowing himself to be drawn into a back and forth about whether women should be able to have abortions early in their pregnancies, he brushed the question aside.

"I'm pro-life, but with the caveats.   It's: Life of the mother (very important), incest and rape," Trump said.

"Say a woman is pregnant, and it's not in any of those exception categories and she chooses to have an abortion," Bloomberg's Mark Halperin said.

"It depends when," said Trump, interrupting him.

"Let's say, early in her pregnancy," Halperin said.

Trump did not answer the question about timing.   Perhaps he realized he was about to enmesh himself in nuance.

"Mark, it's very simple," he said.   "Pro-life."

And Trump just dismisses experts on security who say his plans to build a wall along remote stretches of the Mexican border would be extremely expensive, if not practically impossible.

The wall "is absolutely buildable and can be built for far less cost than people think," he said when asked about these criticisms.   "It's not even a difficult project if you know what you’re doing."

We put ourselves into groups

Following Obama's victory in his last election, the Republican National Committee produced a report calling on the party to do a better job of appealing to voters of color, especially Hispanic voters.   More specifically, the Republican Party has long argued that if the economy is larger, everyone will be better off.   Republican proponents of immigration reform often cite studies predicting substantial gains in economic performance.

Trump has done the reverse, appealing to people who could be especially averse to the presence of immigrants in their communities.   The notion that improving the lives of immigrants would also help people living here already is profoundly counterintuitive, experts say, and that could be one reason that so many people find Trump's anti-immigration rhetoric so persuasive.

"Humans have a kind of tribal psychology," said Joseph Henrich, a biologist at Harvard University who studies the species's evolution.

In particular, humans tend to assume that if one group is getting more, another group must be getting less.   We have a hard time understanding that two groups can both be getting more of something at the same time.   Call it a cognitive blindspot, or a psychological illusion.

Henrich believes this zero-sum outlook could be a result of millennia of competition among our ancestors for limited resources such as land and mating partners.   "You can find some degree of it in every human society," he said.   "It varies dramatically across societies and populations, but it does pop up everywhere."

There is also evidence that this possibly ancient predisposition is shaping American politics today.   Michael Norton, a psychologist at the Harvard Business School, has found that on average, whites now view discrimination against members of their own race as a larger problem than discrimination against blacks.

His explanation is that whites see competition between groups as zero sum.   Whites assume that they must be worse off, since the legal and economic situation for blacks has improved.   Research also suggests that white voters with stronger prejudices against African Americans are more likely to support the conservative GOP faction known as the tea party.

Norton speculates that antipathy toward Latino immigrants has the same psychological source.

"What Trump is tapping into is the mindset of a zero-sum game,"  Norton said, which he called an "intuitive" way of looking at the economy and society.

"It's hard to imagine that if we're eating a pizza, that adding more people would somehow give us more pizza.   It takes a much-longer-term perspective," Norton said.

The presence of immigrants could also compound other psychological responses, such as how conservatives deal with uncertainty.   Kruglanski of the University of Maryland and his colleagues found that in the Netherlands, residents were less comfortable with uncertainty the more Muslims lived in their neighborhoods.

While immigration is good for the economy on the whole, there is some evidence that it can reduce the wages of unskilled workers born in the country.   Trump draws heavily on less educated, blue-collar white voters for his support.   Some people in this group may be right to see immigration as a zero-sum game.

Economists fiercely debate this point, but in any case, their arguments probably have less influence over voters than do the facts of human psychology.

It's not just Trump, but human nature.

 
Trump has lost several percentage points in the polls recently.   Maybe the infatuation is wearing thin, or maybe not.   Either way, his candidacy has already revealed something important about this country, about the Republican Party and, above all, about who we are as people.

To get the nomination, he will have to win over some voters who now support his rivals, which he might not be able to do.   If Trump can't gain support, though, he may also not lose it, either.   He is, in part, the product and the image of our species's unconscious and its unchanging predispositions.

Human nature, though, is not destiny -- or so argues Hibbing of the University of Nebraska.   Our innate propensities can be overcome through persuasion and principled leadership in the long term, he said.

He compares the human mind to an ocean-going tanker.   Changing the ship's direction takes time, and a map with the new course clearly marked.   Instead of dismissing them as crazies, political leaders will have to acknowledge their constituents' biases against all that is complex, uncertain and unfamiliar.

"I don't think we can pretend that that's not who we are," Hibbing said.

There is a sucker born every minute and Donald Trump got all their votes.












Trump Fooled the GOP, He Won


    Republican politicians would like to get re-elected.   Also, they would like there to be a Republican Party around after the Trump campaign.

    Those goals might be better accomplished by opposing Trump.   But some Republican loyalists have decided not to risk splitting the party down the middle:  Their strategy is to offer lukewarm support to the Donald, hope he loses and try to rebuild the party for the midterms.

 Trump is a celebrity candidate, and celebrity candidates do not operate by the normal political rules.   They can bring out people who don’t normally vote.   But on the flip side, they do not necessarily have the normal effect that rising politicians have on their political parties.   Trump brings no organization with him, no political network that will survive when he exits stage left.   He has no ideological fellow-travelers who will thrive in his wake.   (he has no detectable ideology?)   He has done none of the work that might render the party beholden to him in future elections:  no get-out-the-vote operation, no crack team of political consultants, no mailing lists, donor networks or polling powerhouses.   It’s actually pretty reasonable to think that as long as he is denied the White House ( by no means inevitable )-- the storm will blow over with relatively little long-term change to the structure of the GOP.

    Given that, Republican politicians who want to disavow Trump may reasonably be more afraid of further alienating the folks who are mad at the establishment.   If you believe that the Republican Party is better for the country than the alternative, it’s pretty tempting to just suck it up and condemn his outrages while still refusing to say you won’t vote for him.   As Jean-Paul Sartre tells us, it is impossible to participate in politics without dirty hands.

The Supreme Court.   The left is getting positively giddy at the prospect of a Supreme Court with a solid block of five liberal justices who will reliably oppose conservatives on issues they consider vital, from gun rights to religious liberty to abortion.   Mark Tushnet, an influential figure on the legal left, is already essentially advocating a total judicial war on conservative policies, particularly those involving social conservatives.

    The regulatory disputes surrounding everything from birth control to transgender teens make a lot of religious groups feel -- not entirely unreasonably -- that they are facing an existential threat, as their rights of free association and conscience are trimmed back to  “You can say it in the privacy of your own home, or at church, but don’t you dare act upon what you believe.”   Many liberals seem to believe that this is more than enough religious freedom for anyone;  many religious people strenuously disagree.   For religious people who feel that the next Supreme Court justice may make you choose between following your conscience and doing basic things like earning a living or educating your child, that choice becomes so important as to dwarf nearly every other consideration.

 I think that over the last 50  years we have become far too fond of turning everything into a judicial question, rather than leaving things to legislatures and other elected officials.   However, that is the spot we are now in, and neither side looks interested in de-escalating.   So people are quite rightly concerned about who will be appointing the next round of judges.

   Why believe that Trump will appoint good judges?   Fair question.   However, conservatives may legitimately respond that they know, to a 100 percent certainty, that Hillary Clinton will appoint judges who are actively hostile to both their theory of constitutional jurisprudence and their personal policy preferences.   Trump might do the same, but at least there’s some chance that they won’t find abortion restrictions lifted, the Heller gun rights case overturned, Hobby Lobby religious protections gutted, and gay and transgender rights expanded to the point where it becomes difficult to operate a school that teaches conservative Christian morality.

    Clinton’s e-mails.   I’m sorry, Clinton supporters:   The e-mail server situation is bad.   It’s really bad.   You can wave your hands until the sonic booms start rattling nearby china, and it will still be fundamentally disturbing, not merely for its typically Clintonian “rules are for other people” grandeur, its airy disregard for security and its obvious commitment to an utter lack of transparency, but also for the sheer incompetence and stupidity of its execution at both the technical and political levels.   If you are going to set up your own e-mail server to keep your correspondence off of government systems, you should probably not let it go without an encryption certificate for months.   You should also not bother to set up your own e-mail server, since any moderately bright 14-year-old could tell you that your e-mails are going to show up in others' inboxes, and then your secret server is going to become an eminently FOIA-able political disaster.   The thing doesn’t just make me question Clinton’s character, but also her political acumen, and her ability to identify and hire competent staff.

    Of course, Clinton supporters can point out that Trump has some problems in the planning, staffing and truth-telling departments.   He really really does.   But the e-mail server makes it hard for the Clinton backers to hit him on those things as hard as they otherwise could have.

    Immigration.   Trump supporters are not wrong to say that elites of both parties have basically conspired to keep both immigration and trade off the agenda.   Nor are they wrong to be annoyed when any opposition to increased immigration, or to legalizing people who are here illegally, is immediately dismissed as racist.   No one who wrings their hands about gentrification can reasonably dismiss  “I like my community the way it is”  as an inherently racist and illegitimate sentiment.

    Moreover, in a country with birthright voters, immigration means importing your future electorate;  this, of course, sounds splendid to people on the left who think that this electorate will be more friendly to social democratic programs, but it is perfectly reasonable for people who prefer a more conservative government to oppose greater immigration for the same reason.   Opposition to immigration can be racist, but it isn’t necessarily so.   Trump's pledge to deport all immigrants who are illegally in the U.S. is ludicrous, but it's not ludicrous to think we should not reward people who have broken our immigration laws.   Tarring these arguments as racist has not made them go away;   rather, it appears to have made people less worried about being called racists.   And empowered Trump, the only politician who has refused to be cowed by the epithet.

    Practically, I think people who support Trump on these grounds are off base in many directions.   For one thing, they’re too late;  the demography of the country has probably already shifted too far to make restricting immigration, or winning elections on such a platform, possible.   I doubt that Trump would find either the money or the popular support for his wall readily forthcoming, or for the kind of massive police operation that would be required to deport the people already here illegally.   And I doubt that his commitment to restricting immigration is much more than skin deep, so I’d expect this issue to get dropped in the face of congressional opposition.

    Moreover, since nominating Trump has made it much more likely that Clinton will get elected with substantial congressional majorities in both houses, I’d say advocates of restricting immigration have scored a game-losing goal in their own net by nominating him.   After the debacle of 2012, Republicans were terrified to liberalize immigration, for fear of retaliation from their base; Democrats are salivating at the prospect.

    However, given that he’s the nominee, opponents of broader immigration are now faced with a choice between a guaranteed move toward wide-scale legalization, or whatever Trump might manage.   If this is the most important issue to you, it’s not crazy to prefer Trump.

    Elites need a rebuke.   For all my criticisms of Trump and his supporters -- and they have been many -- I find myself quite sympathetic with the folks who are angry at the establishment.   Elites are smug.   They are obnoxiously condescending.   They have colluded to keep legitimate issues off the table.

    This sort of elite collusion can certainly work, but if it becomes too disconnected from the electorate, a political reaction is inevitable.   We are in the middle of that reaction.   And I have to say that if I were out there in flyover country, I’d probably be pretty mad too.

Are there rebuttals to all these arguments?   There are.   The most fundamental one is that for all of Clinton’s many flaws, she does not have the sort of impulse-control issues, petty vindictiveness and cultivated ignorance that make it actively terrifying to contemplate what she might do with America’s military and nuclear arsenal, or provoke Russia or China into doing with theirs.   Most policy issues, no matter how vital, fade into insignificance compared with the possibility of a nuclear exchange between two major world powers.

The problem is that the media and the policy establishment have left themselves in a very poor place to make that argument.   The leftward bias of the media has grown more pronounced.    This means that conservative views can be excluded, or if they are included, conservative talking points can be rigorously interrogated, while dodgy left-wing statistics on things like campus rape continue to be repeated.

Having treated ordinary Republican politicians as if their views were beyond the pale, those institutions are now incapable of expressing why Trump really is scary and different -- why this time, when they say that a Republican politician is ignorant, racist, sexist and authoritarian, voters should actually listen, rather than dismissing this as the same old familiar rhetoric.

That reality is certainly no reason to vote for Trump.   But it does relate:  It drowns out many of the good reasons to vote against him.

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CONGRESSIONAL REFORM ACT of 2017 by WARREN BUFFET

A Billionaire ($63.5 Billion) with a sense of humor and also a plan to Reform Congress

 Warren Buffett is a very famous American Businessman, investor as well as philanthropist.   He is known the be the most successful investor in the world. Born August30, 1930 in Omaha, Nebraska US he has become a global personality.

He is the chairman, CEO and the largest shareholder of the Berkshire Hathaway.   He is consistently ranked in the list of World’s wealthiest people in fact he was the World’s wealthiest person in 2008.   In the year 2012 Time named him one of the most influential people globally.  

He is often referred to as the Wizard of Omaha and is noted for his knack of value investing and for being thrifty and economical despite his immense wealth.   Not only is he wealthy and influential but he is also a notable philanthropist and has pledged that he will give away 99 percent of his fortune to philanthropic causes via the Gates Foundation.   He is also active in contributing to political causes.
 
He was the second of three children and was the only son in the family.   His dad was elected to the first of four terms in United States Congress.   From a very young age he showed interest in business and investment.   He started his business by selling chewing gums, Coca Cola bottles or weekly magazines door to door.
   
His interest in stock market and investing started way back when he was in school.   He graduated with Bachelor in Science in Business administration from University of Nebraska.   He was rejected from Harvard but after he learned that Benjamin Graham taught in Columbia Business school he enrolled there and he got his Master of Science in Economics.


Here is His Plan, copy and pass on if You'd like.



CONGRESSIONAL REFORM ACT of 2017 by WARREN BUFFET

Salary of retired US Presidents .. . . . .. . . . . .. . $180,000 FOR LIFE.

Salary of House/Senate members .. . . . .. . . . $174,000 FOR LIFE. This is stupid

Salary of Speaker of the House .. . . . .. . . . . $223,500 FOR LIFE. This is really stupid

Salary of Majority / Minority Leaders . . .. . . . . $193,400 FOR LIFE. Stupid

Average Salary of a teacher . . .. . . . .. . . . . .. .$40,065

Average Salary of a deployed Soldier . . .. . . .. $38,000

Here’s where the cuts should be made!

Warren Buffett, in a recent interview with CNBC, talks about the debt ceiling:

"I could end the deficit in five minutes," Buffet told CNBC. "You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election".

The 26th Amendment ( granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds ) took only three months and eight days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971 - before computers, e-mail, cell phones, etc.

Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven (7) took one (1) year or less to become the law of the land - all because of public pressure.

WARREN BUFFET WOULD LIKE EVERYONE WHO READS THIS TO SHARE . LET IT GO VIRAL!!
In three days, most people in The United States of America will have the message. This is one idea that really should be passed around.

CONGRESSIONAL REFORM ACT of 2017

1. No Tenure / No Pension. A Congressman / woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they're out of office.

2. Congress (past, present, & future) participates in Social Security.

All Congressional (retirement) funds move to  Social Security immediately.  All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people.  It may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void effective 3/1/17. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen/women.

Congress made all these contracts for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and go back to work.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people, then it will only take three days for most people in the U.S. to receive the message. It's time!

THAT IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS! 





 Here are some of Buffett's best quips.

Why Does The Orange Con Man Lie So Much?

During the first 2016 (presidential) debate between Hillary (Clinton) and Donald (Trump), the Huffington Post kept a tally of the lies that each candidate told in their responses to Lester Holt's questions. The final tally? DJT, 16;  Hillary C, 0(Zero).   Since that point a large percentage of the assertions of DJT have been lies.

When we encounter someone who tells a blatant lie--and insists on it even in the face of clear evidence that it is a lie--many of us likely wonder what makes a person like that tick.

Everyday Health offers this MD-vetted explanation about pathological and compulsive lying, beginning with the observation that no one quite knows what drives the people who do it:   Experts don’t know for sure what drives the troublesome lying.   They know impulsivity and a need to impress could be linked to the habit.

Psychology Today explains that pathological lying isn't an official diagnosis. Instead:  Intentional dissimulation...is associated with a range of diagnoses, such as antisocial, borderline and narcissistic personality disorders.   When it comes to compulsive liars, says Charles Ford, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Alabama Birmingham, "words seem to flow out of their mouths without them thinking about it."   Ford, the author of Lies! Lies!! Lies!!!    The Psychology of Deceit, says that pathological liars may slide easily from the notion that something could have happened to the conviction that it did. When pressed, many will admit what they are saying isn't true.

According to Vox, Donald Trump has "buried America in lies."    Vox writer Dara Lind notes that this avalanche of falsehoods contains many unique inventions:   Even more alarming, while Trump often repeats some of his lies from one day to the next, most of the lies Dale recorded were just told once.   Over the nine days Dale’s recorded so far, Donald Trump has told a total of 64 unique lies.

That analysis concludes that we can't really understand why Trump lies like he does:   If you try to dive into the reasons Trump lies, you’ve already lost.   It grants his lies the dignity of a strategy.   The truth is that, by all appearances, Trump seems to lie whenever it suits him.

And Live Science's take on pathological lying is consonant with this conclusion:   "Pathological liars have a pattern of frequent, repeated and excessive lies or lying behavior for which there is no apparent benefit or gain for the liar," said Charles Dike, clinical professor of psychiatry at Yale University and medical director of the Whiting Forensic Division of Connecticut Valley Hospital.

Never before has anyone this sick made it to the white house.   How did this get by the republican voters who squeaked this con man thru the electorial college and into the role of commander and chief.   How did the Democratic candidate fail to take advantage of this sickness and win the election?

Every time you poke at his self esteem he'll take the bait and tell a huge lie.  He can't resist.   He falls in the trap every time.

To understand the mind of a fake, consider what lying does for the liar.   Deceit as a means to an end--like lying to get a job--is easy to comprehend.   Much harder to spot is lying for primary gains:  deceptions that create a different sense of self without any immediate benefit.   It has to do with self-esteem.  Trump wants to be like someone else because he isn't happy with himself.

Donald (Trump) lies like he tweets:  erratically, at all hours, sometimes in malice and sometimes in self-contradiction, and sometimes without any apparent purpose at all.   He lies even though he knows he is on video tape saying what he lies and denies saying.  He lies as if he thinks his tweets disappear, as if no one has the right to challenge him.   This is a sick man and electing him president was a huge mistake made by GOP voters.   A price for this must be paid if Trump lasts for the next 4 years.

The Trumpster will scream “wrong” when he hears his own quotes.   His own lawyers met him in pairs to counteract his lying, court documents show.  He has invented false statistics, fictional videos and sex tapes and a nonexistent man named “John Miller” to talk about his sex life.   Months of fact-checking, however, reveal methods of (Trump’s) guide to success through lying.

For decades, DonnieT has described America and its leaders in apocalyptic terms.   He thought Ronald Reagan weak and “a disaster”, he lambasted George HW Bush and Bill Clinton’s policies, and after supporting George W Bush’s Iraq invasion, quickly dismissed that war as “a mess” and said he was always against that war.

In (Trump’s) world, crime is always rising  (the national rate has fallen for decades),  and African Americans are “living in hell”  (they are not).   Migrants are flooding in (more Mexicans are leaving than arriving),  and they bring violence  (there is no evidence that they do).   Civilian and military leaders are always clueless  (Trump received five deferments from Vietnam),  except when they love him.   We have no idea who refugees or undocumented migrants are, and they take our jobs  (we know very well who they are; they include his wife).   Dimwitted GOP voters accepted all these Trump lies as truth and put the con man in office.

Trump’s vision of the US has been, for decades, one of dystopia – he even described the 1990s as a crisis worse than the Great Depression.   But amid all this desolation Trump gains three things.   He fuels doubt and fear, leaving people vulnerable;  he denigrates his opposition en masse, blaming the world on them;  and he raises himself up above the nonexistent wreckage.

Like a man who once took a joke about the size of his hands too hard, Trump spends a lot of time trying to look as large as possible, from his never-proven $10bn worth (Forbes estimates $3.7bn) to crowds at his rallies and his success in meaningless internet polls.

(Trump) valued a New York golf course at $50m in one document and at $1.4m in a court filing  (when he sued to pay lower taxes).

(Trump) has also falsely bragged of endorsements from federal agencies and claimed  “many environmental awards”,  and tried the ploy in reverse:  he has called the millions his father gave him as  “a small loan” and portrayed his $916m loss in 1995 as an example of  “smart”  tax avoidance.

This sort of exaggeration is a common sales technique:  overstate the value of a product to make it more attractive and assume it will be bargained downward.   In February (Trump) confessed “everything’s negotiable” about his statements, then quickly said building a wall on the southern border was “not negotiable” – the equivalent of a liar saying:  “Everything I say is false, but not that.”

Whenever in doubt, He attacks what he calls “the dishonest media”, accusing reporters (without evidence) of bias, inaccuracy and a failure to show the size of his rallies.   He ignores that reporters quote him extensively, call his campaign for comment and interview his supporters.

(Trump’s) most famous false conspiracy, about Barack Obama’s birthplace and who started birtherism, is only one of many.

There was Ted Cruz’s father and JFK’s assassin, drawn from a tabloid with ties to Trump;  the climate change “hoax” that was “invented by the Chinese”;  the Muslims who cheered September 11;   the vaccines that cause autism;   the Miss Universe “sex tape”;  the political correctness of San Bernardino;  the secret Muslim president and his secret terror agenda;  and the antisemitism-tinged plot of bankers and the media.   There is no lie too big for Him to tell and no shortage of dim witted voters to buy it all, hook, line and sinker.

When cornered by his own recorded words or something he doesn’t know, (Trump) often lies with blunt denials – “wrong!” – or variations of the phrases  “that’s very important”  or “we’ll look into it”.

He also tries to wriggle out of uncomfortable situations with this tactic, most notably when he claimed ignorance of David Duke, the former Ku Klux Klan leader who has professed approval for his policies, and white supremacists.   (Trump) had disavowed Duke a few days earlier and denounced him in 2000, but in February he refused to condemn like-minded supporters, saying:  “I don’t know anything about what you’re even talking about with white supremacy or white supremacists.”

On the edge of pointless self-inflation and denial is His fixation with Vladimir Putin, whom he has claimed to know  “very well”,  to have spoken with  “indirectly and directly”, and to have never met and  “know nothing” about.   (Trump) also falsely insists that Putin called him “a genius”  (Putin called him “flamboyant”).

(Trump) sprinkles misleading statistics into speeches, including on the murder rate, African American unemployment, poverty among Hispanic Americans, the deficit and taxes.   He claimed that Obama “founded” Isis and that Clinton supports immigration reform became “open borders” .

Just like always, he had an R after his name and the sheep elected him.



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