What does the world see when they look at the USA now?

> What does the world see when they look at the USA now? Here's what Ireland's most respected mainstream political writer says. Brace yourself! 🇮🇪 ☘️ 🇮🇪
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> Irish Times
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> April 25, 2020
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> By Fintan O'Toole
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> THE WORLD HAS LOVED, HATED AND ENVIED THE U.S. NOW, FOR THE FIRST TIME, WE PITY IT
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> Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.
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> However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.
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> Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world's best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world's leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.
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> As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, "The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering."
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> It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch's Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.
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> The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.
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> If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world's leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.
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> Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?
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> It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.
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> Abject surrender
> What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.
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> Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.
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> In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and "recreational activities".
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> Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: "We didn't know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours."
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> This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.
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> It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the "deep state" and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.
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> Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.
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> The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump's statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has "total authority", and on the other that "I don't take responsibility at all". Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.
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> Fertile ground
> But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump's presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.
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> There are very powerful interests who demand "freedom" in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that "freedom" is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber ("I Need a Haircut" read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.
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> Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.
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> And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.
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> That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.
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> And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked "American carnage" and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.
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> As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.
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> Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.
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Trump’s dangerous pathology

Joining up the dots shows the

 true depths of Trump's dangerous narcissistic pathology

https://www.euronews.com/2020/04/22/joining-up-the-dots-shows-the-true-depths-of-trump-s-dangerous-narcissistic-pathology-view

Opinions expressed in View articles are solely those of the authors.

There has only been one headline worth printing since Donald Trump was elected president. That headline is "Donald Trump suffers from a dangerous incurable narcissistic disorder which makes him incapable of empathy and reason. 

He is a grave danger to the US and the world."

Instead of stating this disturbing fact, the evidence for which is voluminous, the mainstream media have over the last three years led America down the rabbit holes of normalising him and trying to understand him as you would a psychologically healthy human being. But Donald Trump is not a psychologically healthy human being and reporting on him as if he were, empowers him and disempowers people of reason. Acknowledging his pathology is fundamental to reversing this imbalance.

Although the mainstream media have largely refused to name Trump's disordered mind, a cohort of mental health professionals have been consistently sounding the alarm. During the 2016 presidential election campaign, three psychiatrists wrote to then-President Barack Obama warning that Trump's widely-reported symptoms of mental instability led them to question his fitness for office. Since Trump was sworn in as president, Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee has been leading a group of mental health professionals in a concerted campaign to raise awareness of the dangers posed by Trump's pathological mental state.

While individual characteristics of Trump's behaviour are routinely covered in mainstream media, there has been no concerted effort to connect these disparate symptoms to this underlying pathological condition that unites and explains them all.

Ian Hughes

Author and Senior Research Fellow at MaREI Centre, University College Cork

The condition that these mental health professionals converge upon to explain Trump's wide range of abnormal behaviours is a disorder known as malignant narcissism. While individual characteristics of Trump's behaviour are routinely covered in mainstream media, there has been no concerted effort to connect these disparate symptoms to this underlying pathological condition that unites and explains them all. An understanding of Trump's dangerously disordered mind, however, demands that we join the dots between the various aspects of his extreme behaviours; particularly his narcissism, his paranoia and his incapacity to accept reality.

Extreme narcissistic behaviour

Individuals with pathological narcissism see others as "lesser beings" who deserve to be treated with contempt, a contempt that is ameliorated only to the degree that they can be of instrumental use to the narcissist.

One set of "dots" that illustrates Trump's contempt for others as "lesser beings" is his disdain towards women, migrants and foreigners, the disabled and non-white Americans. To take just one example, Trump's attacks on women reporters are long-standing and well-documented. This behaviour makes sense given that his narcissistic pathology compels him to see women as inferior. Any woman (particularly a non-white woman) asking an "impertinent" question is an affront to this superiority. His conditioned response to this violation of the natural order is fury and contempt.

Pathological narcissism also explains two other set of "dots" in Trump's behaviour, namely his cruelty and his criminality. Cruelty is one of Trump's core character traits, it is a central theme of Trump's rallies and, as Adam Sewer has written, is arguably Trump's only real, authentic pleasure. Trump's immigration policies are explicit examples of this cruelty, including his policy on separating migrant children from their families at the border, his call to deport 800,000 'Dreamers' brought to the US as children, and his plan to end a program that deferred deportation for migrants suffering from debilitating illness to countries where the treatments keeping them alive are not available.

Trump's "criminality," too, reflects his narcissistic assessment of himself as a "special being." As Sewer again points out, Trump's attitude towards the law is based upon a clear principle: "Only the President and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim."

Acute paranoia

Individuals with acute paranoia are characterised by a worldview that sees other people as inherently untrustworthy, along with an unshakable conviction that these others are out to harm them.

Paranoid conspiracy theories are a prominent feature of Trump's mindset. As US president, he has available to him the intelligence and knowledge systems of the most world's powerful country, but time and again, he has proven himself to be psychologically incapable of accepting what they are telling him. Trump's psychopathology means that intelligence information that does not comport to his worldview simply cannot be processed. Divorced from the ability to fact-check the reality around him, his internal world is populated with fact-free conspiracies that fit with his emotional needs.

Trump's distorted, paranoid view of reality shapes his policies, most notably foreign policy. A pathologically paranoid leader would be expected to recoil from alliances as inherently untrustworthy and seek to fortify their territory against internal and external threats. Trump's major foreign policy stances are consistent with such extreme paranoia. Trump's attacks on membership organisations, such as NATO and the European Union, reflect a paranoid conviction that such alliances cannot be trusted and will serve only to rip off the United States, a view he has expressed repeatedly. Trump's affinity for violent authoritarian leaders is also consistent with the interpretation that they are more in tune with Trump's own narcissistic and paranoid worldview, than the "weak" leaders of America's major democratic allies.

Narcissistic fantasy

A third feature of malignant narcissism is perhaps the most dangerous - and the least commented on - aspect of the condition. History suggests that leaders with this condition tend to view themselves as world figures capable of bending history to their will, and that they harbour simplistic pathological fantasies for reshaping the world in their own disordered image.

This was certainly the case, for example, with Hitler, who's pathological narcissism fuelled his vision of Germany as a "master race" that needed to be "cleansed" of the "germs" of the disabled, foreigners and Jews. Mao, too, was a malignant narcissist, who breezily declared that half of China may have to die for him to realise his vison of China as a new society and a leading world power. "Of course, there are people and objects in the world," Mao wrote, "but they are all there only for me."

Given the voluminous evidence of Trump's malignant narcissism, the debate on his mental health must consider the possibility that he, too, harbours a pathologically narcissistic fantasy.

Trump clearly believes that the world is a dangerous and threatening place, that alliances are treacherous, and that only strong nations standing alone can survive.

Ian Hughes

Author and Senior Research Fellow at MaREI Centre, University College Cork

The outline of such a possible fantasy can be discerned thus: Trump clearly believes that the world is a dangerous and threatening place, that alliances are treacherous, and that only strong nations standing alone can survive. He appears to believe that in this dangerous world the "superior" white, Christian civilisation is existentially threatened by "invasion" of "inferior" civilisations, chiefly non-white people, Islam and China. His policies are consistent with a vision that, under these circumstances, the US must 'purify' itself of immigrants, build up its military strength and seek new alliances with "strong" powers in place of the "weak" nations with which it is currently aligned.

His policies are consistent with a conviction that America must therefore seek the dissolution of its alliances with NATO and its small East Asian allies, along with the breakup of the European Union, and form a new and stronger alliance with white, Christian Russia. An alliance of the US and Russia, which would command 92% of the world's nuclear weapons, would be unassailable in any coming confrontation with Islam and China, North Korea or Iran. In this pathological narcissistic fantasy, Donald Trump would become "King of the World."

Breaking the taboo – naming Trump's pathology

Donald Trump is in a life or death struggle to assert his pathological values and views on the US and on the world. He has gathered around him many who share his pathology and his worldview.

As Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarianism, has written, Trump has already accomplished some of the most important things an authoritarian leader must do in order to consolidate their power for the longer term. He has cultivated ties within the structures of government that are based primarily on loyalty to his person rather than to the rule of law or democratic norms. He has ignited the flames of a cultural civil war within the US that continue to benefit him by polarising the country and mobilising his base. And he has succeeded in discrediting institutions and individuals who might hold him accountable in the eyes of a substantial proportion of the American population.

It is long past time to acknowledge the truth that has been staring us in the face all along – Donald Trump is clearly mentally disordered and poses a grave danger to us all.

Ian Hughes

Author and Senior Research Fellow at MaREI Centre, University College Cork

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the danger that Trump poses is twofold. First, his mishandling of the crisis has already cost countless lives. His paranoid, narcissistic and psychopathic characteristics are certain to mean that many more lives will be lost due to his handling of the crisis than would be the case if a president of sound character and mental health were in office. Second, there is a danger (whose probability is simply unknown), that Trump might trigger an even more catastrophic event, such as a war or the collapse of relations between nations upon whom essential global supply chains depend.

For those looking to November's election as the safety stop that will secure all our futures, Irish journalist and author Fintan O'Tooles has issued a prescient warning: "As the cost of [Trump's] terrible failures of public duty and common decency becomes ever more starkly evident, he will revert in his re-election campaign to an explanation of the [COVID-19] disaster, not as a consequence of his own incompetence and contempt but as a punishment inflicted on the United States for its failure to build his wall, keep out foreigners, and crush the enemy within. Like a medieval quack making a profit in times of plague, he will offer a stricken people an ever-higher dose of a toxic cure."

It is long past time to acknowledge the truth that has been staring us in the face all along – Donald Trump is clearly mentally disordered and poses a grave danger to us all

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Our president

Not my president, thank you God.

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

   

 

   

 

 

Thought you’d like the Brit view;

BRITISH WRITER PENS THE BEST DESCRIPTION OF TRUMP

Someone asked "Why do some British people not like Donald Trump?" Nate White, an articulate and witty writer from England wrote the following response:

A few things spring to mind. Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed.
So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump's limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Plus, we like a laugh. And while Trump may be laughable, he has never once said anything wry, witty or even faintly amusing – not once, ever.
I don't say that rhetorically, I mean it quite literally: not once, not ever. And that fact is particularly disturbing to the British sensibility – for us, to lack humour is almost inhuman.

But with Trump, it's a fact. He doesn't even seem to understand what a joke is – his idea of a joke is a crass comment, an illiterate insult, a casual act of cruelty. Trump is a troll. And like all trolls, he is never funny and he never laughs; he only crows or jeers.

And scarily, he doesn't just talk in crude, witless insults – he actually thinks in them. His mind is a simple bot-like algorithm of petty prejudices and knee-jerk nastiness. There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It's all surface.

Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don't. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He's not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He's more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

And worse, he is that most unforgivable of all things to the British: a bully. That is, except when he is among bullies; then he suddenly transforms into a snivelling sidekick instead.

There are unspoken rules to this stuff – the Queensberry rules of basic decency – and he breaks them all. He punches downwards – which a gentleman should, would, could never do – and every blow he aims is below the belt. He particularly likes to kick the vulnerable or voiceless or female – and he kicks them when they are down. So the fact that a significant minority – perhaps a third – of Americans look at what he does, listen to what he says, and then think 'Yeah, he seems like my kind of guy' is a matter of some confusion and no little distress to British people, given that:
• Americans are supposed to be nicer than us, and most are.
• You don't need a particularly keen eye for detail to spot a few flaws in the man.

This last point is what especially confuses and dismays British people, and many other people too; his faults seem pretty bloody hard to miss.
After all, it's impossible to read a single tweet, or hear him speak a sentence or two, without staring deep into the abyss. He turns being artless into an art form; he is a Picasso of pettiness; a Shakespeare of shit. His faults are fractal: even his flaws have flaws, and so on ad infinitum. God knows there have always been stupid people in the world, and plenty of nasty people too. But rarely has stupidity been so nasty, or nastiness so stupid. He makes Nixon look trustworthy and George W look smart. In fact, if Frankenstein decided to make a monster assembled entirely from human flaws – he would make a Trump.
And a remorseful Doctor Frankenstein would clutch out big clumpfuls of hair and scream in anguish: 'My God... what... have... I... created? If being a twat was a TV show, Trump would be the boxed set.

Letter To Humanity

In an ode, Letter To Humanity, that has been widely circulated on social media, Vivienne R Reich eloquently scolds humanity for its “non-stop wars, non-stop greed” and for stubbornly refusing to be humble enough to listen to the earth’s whispers, speeches and screams.

Powerfully capturing the profound dilemma and the existential danger in which humanity is stuck today Vivienne warns that Coronavirus wants humanity to wake up from its sordid materialism and vile egoism and “to reflect on what is important in life.”

Failure to seize the chance to reconsider the true meaning of life has an ominously chill reminder: “Next time I may come back even stronger>”

Letter To Humanity
by: Vivienne R Reich

The earth whispered but you did not hear.

The earth spoke but you did not listen

The earth screamed but you turned her off.

And so, I was born…

I was not born to punish you …

I was born to awaken you …

The earth cried out for help…

Massive flooding – But you didn’t listen.

Burning fires – But you didn’t listen.

Strong hurricanes – But you didn’t listen.

Terrifying Tornadoes – But you didn’t listen.

You still don’t listen to the earth when.

Ocean animals are dying due to pollutants in the waters.

Glaciers melting at an alarming rate

Severe drought

You didn’t listen to how much negativity the earth is receiving.

Non-stop wars

Non-stop greed

You just kept going on with your life …

No matter how much hate there was …

No matter how many killings daily

It was more important to get that latest iPhone than worry about what the earth was trying to tell you …

But now I am here.

And I’ve made the world stop on its tracks.

I’ve made YOU finally listen.

I’ve made you take refuge.

I’ve made you stop thinking about materialistic things …

Now you are like the earth…

You are only worried about YOUR survival.

How does that feel?

I give you fever … as the fires burn on earth.

I give you respiratory issues -has pollution fill the earth air.

I give you weakness as the earth weakens every day.

I took away your comforts …

Your outings

The things you would use to forget about the planet and its pain.

And I made the world stop…

And now

China has better air quality … Skies are clear blue because factories are not spewing pollution unto the earth’s air.

The water in Venice is clean and dolphins are being seen.  Because the gondola boats that pollute the water are not being used.

YOU have to take time to reflect on what is important in your life

Again, I am not here to punish you … I am here to Awaken you…

When all this is over and I am gone… Please remember these moments …

Listen to the earth.

Listen to your soul.

Stop polluting the earth.

Stop Fighting among each other.

Stop caring about materialistic things.

And start loving your neighbors.

Start caring about the earth and all its creatures.

Start believing in a Creator.

Because next time I may come back even stronger

Signed,

Coronavirus