That’s what Joe Biden asks about Trump:
Joe’s impassioned speech was prompted by Trump’s answer to a question about mental health services for veterans suffering from PTSD at a rally in Virginia yesterday:
At a town hall style meeting hosted by the Retired American Warriors PAC, Marine Staff Sgt. Chad Robichaux, president and founder of Mighty Oaks Warrior Programs, asked Mr. Trump whether he would advocate for religious programs as an optional part of helping military members suffering from PTSD, traumatic brain injury and other health problems.
Trump’s response included the following astute assessment:
“When you talk about the mental health problems, when people come back from war and combat and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over and you’re strong and you can handle it. But a lot of people can’t handle it.”
Now, Trump is not being sadistic here for a change — he’s playing a caring person by faking empathy and pretending to know what he’s talking about, which of course backfires. Psychopaths, primitively integrated and lacking conscience with its capacity for empathy and guilt, are usually the traumatizers, and not trauma sufferers, so it is no surprise that Trump believes PTSD, like neurosis and mental illness, is a sign of weakness.
It is painful to watch Sgt. Robichaux — a good man by all accounts — to put his misplaced hope and trust in a man who deserves neither, and then defend him from criticism. Too bad no one at that rally bothered to ask Trump some follow up questions to probe his understanding of mental health and the services he’s promising. They would expose his cluelessness in a jiff.
And today, NPR Morning Edition aired interviews with Clinton and Trump’s supporters, notable for the presence of genuinely caring and decent folks (Catholics, no less, for whom the matters of conscience should matter) among the latter.
There are still too many people out there who believe Trump is a normal individual, and what’s worse, one with any solutions for — of even basic understanding of — human problems. His psychological insight and spiritual life are like his business acumen: Nonexistent. Unfortunately, he has been able to fool too many for too long.
This drives home the point on the urgency of educating people about conscience-impairing character defects like psychopathy and narcissism and their dangerous ramifications for the world.
But going back to Joe Biden’s opening question, about where the hell Trump is from: Some people are saying that he is not human. Really.
Hard to tell whether it is true or not, but if it weren’t, then people wouldn’t be saying it, right? Well, they are:
The question that has never been asked is this: Why has Trump never shown his belly-button? Does he have an umbilicus or not? Why the secrecy? Could it be that he was one of those early test-tube humanoid babies bred in a Monsanto laboratory in Las Cruces in 1946 under contract to the Pentagon, which hoped to create a cadre of bogeymen who would walk straight into heavy gunfire, grinning, thumbs-up, and thereby dishearten the enemy? They had realistic skin and hair but their eyes were small and piggish and their fingers short. Mr. Trump has taken heavy fire for the past year and there isn’t a scratch on him. Lift up your shirt, sir, and let us see it.
good marriage central* 
Bwwwwaaaahhhhaaaa!
(I wouldn’t be a bit surprised!)
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It’d surely explain why he thinks PTSD is a weakness — and, oh, so much more.
We should start a petition for Trump to show his belly button. Like, now. Forget his taxes — this is far more important and American voters deserve to know the truth.
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The trauma Trump’s inflicting on America will cause many to suffer from PTSD. I effing HATE this idjit!
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Yes, he’s traumatizing America and the world by his sheer presence. The mark of a narcissistic psychopath.
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I love your insights. I’ve learned a great deal from you and what you have to say about narcissism and conscience, for instance. I do wish those with some power would utilize it to inform the general public about the dangers of electing someone with such a severe personality disorder. I do think far too many people aren’t even aware that he has one. Please continue to write and educate people on these subjects of yours. I always look forward to a new update from you!
On another, different note, I also hope that someone with your insight, and capacity to think critically as well as objectively, doesn’t blindly believe that spirituality has a thing one to do with conscience, or lack thereof, or with morality. It concerned me seeing you mention it in what looked like a way that was meant to denounce Trump. As an atheist, I find the way that morality is often linked together with spirituality/belief/faith/religion (And yes, they are one and the same, terms like ‘spiritual’ are complicit to religion/faith/belief) to be very detrimental to society and to people like myself. Particularly considering that you, yourself, are well aware of the idea that someone who is deprived of a conscience will not have the same morality as someone with one, it hopefully is very clear to you that it has nothing to do with spirituality/belief/faith/religion and that anything linked to that realm of feeling has nothing whatsoever to do with how good a person is, how genuine they are, or moral or ethical or anything else like that. In fact, I would argue that a good portion of the reason why Trump has gotten as far as he has, is the way we tend to rob children of their rights to critical thinking skills and objectivity by ingraining in them blind obedience to indoctrination by parents, grandparents, and in the general population even if they don’t have ‘spiritual’ parents in the form of national religions holidays, pledges, and general society’s beliefs and conversations they are exposed to that tell them believing in things without evidence is not only acceptable, but preferred in one specific area in life, not in any others though, oddly enough. Go figure. But because of this, we now have generations of people who not only lack education thanks to the erosion of it by belief and the way it helps people not prioritize education, but generations of people who fail to think critically about beliefs in general, much less their own personal beliefs. Things like ‘spirituality’ impede progress, more than anything else they ever do.
(Being complicit to religious beliefs even via the supposedly benign statement of ‘I’m not religious, I’m just spiritual’ equals giving people this right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJrqLV4yeiw)
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Dear Sarah, thank you for your thoughtful comment and kind words.
My remark about Trump’s ignorance of spirituality was meant to underscore just that, and not to imply that religiosity and/or spirituality are the path to morality. The man knows nothing about nothing (if that makes sense), and it bears repeating.
By spirituality I mean, among other things, the awareness of things greater and more important than ourselves — a.k.a. higher values, embedded in our conscience. One does not have to believe in deities to be so aware, as you know; I’m thinking, for example, of this quote from Einstein* that illustrates one aspect of it:
“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal decisions and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole nature in its beauty.”
Thanks for the video, too. It is excellent and thought-provoking. It’s a powerful indictment of religious (and any, really) indoctrination; but also a reminder of the universality of our deep, often unconscious emotions and needs that bond us to each other and rule our lives, for better and for worse.
*A toxic narcissist in his private, intimate life, BTW.
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What did you think of the VP debate?
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Oy vey, Clare. Cringy, it was. On the one hand we had Kaine, who was right, but unable to control his overexcitability (I sympathize and understand all too well); and on the other, brazenly lying, conscience-deficient Pence looking like everyone’s caring, compassionate grandfather, what with his fake concern head shaking employed every time Kaine threw (and, boy, he did) more evidence of Trump’s mendacity at him.
Sad!
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