It’s beginning to make sense now. Even Donald Trump’s supporters must recognize by now that he really doesn’t care about anything except himself.
My headline for this week’s column was going to be, “Does Anyone Not See by Now That Trump Is a Self-Obsessed Criminal and Con Man?” But then I remembered the jacket Melania wore on her visit to the border. As a former model, it was so out of character for her to wear an ill-fitting jacket, much less one with a scrawled message on it. The only explanation can be that it was really Trump’s jacket, not hers. Of course, he would never wear it, but how could he resist buying it? Borrowing it for her trip to the border fit Melania’s passive aggressive nature, which has been to give the middle digit to her husband — much like how she adopted the issue of cyber bullying.
If you Google it, you’ll see that the jacket is for sale by multiple vendors. I wonder how well it is selling among the MAGA crowd, since there are a lot of things they must not care about to continue supporting a man, much less a president, like Donald Trump.
“The President Is Missing” is a phrase we heard starting in mid-November as it became clear there was nothing on the president’s mind except overturning the election of Joe Biden. There has been no comment by the president about anything else, including the pandemic and, more recently, the Nashville bombing.
When he said before the election that the only way he could lose the election was if it were stolen, I suspect he believed it — and still does. The fact that he can’t produce any evidence must surely be frustrating for him, but he is mentally incapable of not believing that he really won. This is how mentally disturbed the man is. We can only hope that he won’t take his psychosis to its logical conclusion, which would be to declare martial law and then resist eviction from the White House, kicking and screaming like the child his niece, Mary Trump, has described him as.
Her description of the president is summarized as follows in an article by the CBC: “The president of the United States, in her opinion, struggles to control his impulses; tell the truth; learn new facts; apologize for mistakes; and lives in constant terror of having people perceive his flaws.”
This is the description of a profoundly disturbed individual — someone that his die-hard fans would likely ban from their personal circle, but whom they support because, despite such flaws, he expresses racial and other prejudices which they endorse privately — and, for some, way too publicly.
Those of us who see the man for what he truly is are holding our breath, hoping he doesn’t do more damage to the country between now and January 20th, worried that his personality disorder might compel him to do some pretty destructive things. As the jacket says, he really doesn’t care about what his actions do to the country. It’s all about him.
It’s easy to foresee a 2021 in which Donald Trump faces the music regarding the illegalities committed by himself and his enterprises. The Trump Foundation was already shut down for its illegal activities.
We can expect that the former president will continue to hold rallies on the pretext of being a candidate in 2024, but the funds raised will be used to pay the $400 million-plus in debts that the New York Times has already reported are facing him in the next four years. He has already raised half that amount through his fundraising ostensibly to fund his challenge of the 2020 election.
At his rallies he will label any indictments and convictions and bad press as politically motivated fake news, which will fly long enough for him to collect more funds from his remaining supporters. His political support by other Republicans will slowly go away, as it already started to do during December, when he was unable to get members of Congress to sustain his veto of the National Defense Authorization Act and to change the Covid-19 relief payments to $2,000 per adult.
The defense bill contained one provision that has really bad ramifications for Trump and his family. It contains the provisions of the Corporate Transparency Act which bans shell corporations from hiding their owners, thus laundering money. Trump himself used a shell corporation created for him by Michael Cohen to disguise the hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, and he has used shell corporations in his businesses too. The technique is also used by foreign actors to launder money.
Please see my blog post from this past Monday at www.JimSmithBlog.com for a longer explanation about this law, excerpted from Heather Cox Richardson’s email newsletter.
Above I mentioned the Nashville bombing. You probably heard on the news that a girlfriend of the bomber had warned police in 2019 that he was making bombs in his RV. The police went to his house but were refused permission to inspect his home and RV. Because he had no history of criminality, they were also unable to obtain (or perhaps didn’t seek) a warrant to do so.
This story reflects something that has always bothered me in the discussion about background checks for gun purchases. So often, the people who commit heinous crimes such as in Nashville, or the bombing in Oklahoma City, or the killing of school children in Newtown, Connecticut, are people with no prior criminal record.
Of the 300 million firearms in civilian hands in America, between 5 and 10 million are AR-15s, the kind used to kill the children at Sandy Hook elementary school. Presumably those owners passed background checks, but let’s say that a mere 1% of them are mentally unstable and could be triggered (excuse the word) by some personal or other event to commiet a heinous mass casualty event with their firearm. That computes to between 50,000 and 100,000 AR-15s in the hands of future mass murderers.
Too extreme a thought? Okay, let’s say that one-tenth of 1% of those AR15s are in the hands of potential domestic terrorists or mass murderers. That’s still 5 to 10 thousand AR15s that someday will make their owner “famous.”
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