Among the criticisms most often leveled at Donald Trump is that he has been a negligent president who spends the bulk of his time on self-serving trivialities like golf, Twitter, and watching Fox News. As it turns out, that may be an unfair analysis. Trump isn’t nearly as lazy as the past three and half years of his slothful lethargy and dereliction of duty would indicate (and he calls Joe Biden “Sleepy”?).
There are certain activities that Trump engages in with a surprising vigor. The aforementioned tweeting and his ego-stroking cult rallies are both good examples. But now there is another undertaking that puts a real bounce in his step, bone spurs and all. As reported by Politico…
“The Trump administration has opened an internal investigation to try to uncover who leaked intelligence about Russians paying the Taliban bounties to kill American soldiers. The administration maintains the story is overcooked and the leaks cherry-picked despite a steady stream of follow-ups from media outlets across the globe. The administration has interviewed people with access to the intelligence, and believes it has narrowed down the universe of suspects to fewer than 10 people.”
Really? So Trump learns that Russia is paying bounties to kill American troops and, after repeatedly denying that he was ever briefed on the matter (a flagrant lie), he decides that he’s going to do something about it after all. But what he’s going to do is not to repudiate or punish Russia for its assault on U.S. soldiers. He is too beholden to Vladimir Putin for that. Nope. It’s to initiate a search within his own White House to find anyone who might have played a part in the story being made available to the American people. Because betraying the armies for which you are Commander-in-Chief is okay, but informing the public of the truth is something that Trump simply cannot abide.
Trump’s latest obsession with ferreting out traitors on his staff is troubling for another reason. Since the Russian bounty story was published, Trump has insisted that it was made up by the “fake news” media in order to hurt him and his reelection prospects. He tweeted that…
The Russia Bounty story is just another made up by Fake News tale that is told only to damage me and the Republican Party. The secret source probably does not even exist, just like the story itself. If the discredited @nytimes has a source, reveal it. Just another HOAX!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 1, 2020
If Trump actually believes that, then how could he have found ten suspects who he now thinks might have leaked a made up story to the press? Surely the press wouldn’t need a source at all if they invented the whole thing, as Trump alleges. But in Trump’s diseased brain everything his is a hoax if it casts him in a bad light (impeachment, climate change, racism, the coronavirus, etc.). Yet he still demands that the perpetrators of the thing that never happened be punished.
This is further evidence that Trump is suffering from severe psychological impairments. His malignant narcissism and paranoia are devouring what remains of his cognitive faculties. Trump has been exhibiting these symptoms for quite a while. In March News Corpse reported on his tweet that whined that “all I see is hatred of me.”
There’s a shipload of derp in that twantrum. First of all, he’s confessing that he compulsively consumes news on six television networks and two newspapers that he feverishly disparages as “enemies of the people.” However, the most unambiguous sign of a psychotic breakdown in Trump’s paranoid assertion is that, if hatred is all he sees, then he doesn’t see any of the facts about the crises in the U.S. and internationally. He doesn’t see any of the people’s economic distress. He doesn’t see any of the consequences of a surging pandemic. He doesn’t see the crushing anguish of victims or the inspirational acts of heroes or any of the human stories that define us as a people. He sees only what he perceives as hatred directed solely at him.
It’s a painfully narrow tunnel through which Trump’s vision is constricted to only what impacts his own welfare. And he has a debilitating fear that his welfare is threatened by everything and everyone around him. Trump is plainly unwell, as many of his close associates have attested to. And his paranoid delusions are accelerating.
Trump has SANITY problem! https://t.co/5KZvh9O5PC
— News Corpse (@NewsCorpse) July 7, 2020
How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.