So this happened after today’s meeting between this cool, classy and composed adult woman who is one of the few non-psychopathic leaders of the world left, and our so-called president:
Trump, totally in line with his character pathology, pretends not to see, hear, or understand Merkel’s and journalists’ requests; his sheepish facial expression, however, tells us that he is ignoring them on purpose. Because of course.
The man is so grandiosely arrogant that he believes he can bend reality to fit his perceptions and pathological needs — and, sadly, this dangerous delusion has worked for him so far. Mainly because people are too stunned and/or afraid to confront him about it.
Our preposterously obliging press is part of that cowed crowd. When reporting this incident, Time captured the video with a caption:
Angela Merkel Asked President Trump to Shake Hands. He Appeared to Ignore Her
They know — or one hopes they still do — that he did not “appear” to ignore her, but did ignore her in the most breathtakingly rude manner. It’s too bad the writers cannot bring themselves to state the obvious. Being too afraid, or maybe confused, to trust one’s eyes and speak the truth is what plays directly into the ethos of post-factual unreality purposely propagated by Trump/ism.
In the classical for any narcissist, and particularly a malignant one, fashion, Trump can “disappear” inconvenient facts and people from his own and everyone’s field of vision — or at least awareness. It’s a feat of magical thinking, typical for toddlers — and while it can be charming and amusing in toddlers, in adults not so much. In adults who run the world, it is downright dangerous.
This is not the first time we’ve witnessed this behavior in public in recent weeks: on multiple occasions, Trump has simply ignored questions posed to him, pretending he did not hear them. If there is anyone left who believes this behavior is normal or harmless, especially in a president, this person should take a long vacation somewhere warm and safe, to recover their senses and sensibility.
Watching the Merkel-antisocial toddler press conference shows so well the difference between a mature, psychologically intact adult, and a developmentally arrested, dangerous, and petulant toddler-man. His body language and facial expressions speak volumes of his fear and contempt — for Merkel, for the press, and for the entire world which dares to still insufficiently champion his greatness. But that’s going to change soon, if he can help it, as he always has. It’s up to us to make sure that this time he does not succeed. For the world’s and everyone’s sake.
good marriage central* 
Can we just remind everyone what a misogynist shithead he is? While we are at it.
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By all means, RS. Thank you for doing this unpleasant, but important job (so I don’t have to — though I’d gladly). 🙂
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Oh, have I mentioned that I f**kin’ HATE this motherf**ker? If not, I have now. $A-f**kin’-men$
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You may have, if I’m not mistaken, once or twice, here and there. 🙂
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🙂
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He has no manners and what ever his upbringing they certainly did not spend money on it, he is rude and as far as I am concerned he is an ugly old man and I hope he does not last impeachment is something I hope but as he has got rid of the media in the sense he calls them fake, he also lies about hacking and pours oil and lights fire on truth and decency. Billionaires helping the poor is like pissing in the wind he lies.
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Amen and amen. Preach, bro (or sista).
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A real leader sitting next to a 7 year old who can only think about how long it is until playtime.
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I was listening to a summary of the press conference on NPR. Well if you are familiar with the even, “can I get you a hot cup a cocoa with marshmallows” tone of voice that NPR has, which they seem required by their contracts to never break, you would have easily caught an undertone of incredulity in the woman’s voice who was reporting. They also reported that Trump did his classic, answering a question that wasn’t addressed to him. That seems to be a first when it comes to these types of press conference. They also played a clip of him responding to a question. It was clearly pre-written remarks. I noticed that whenever he isn’t talking off the cuff and reading something prepared he uses a much wider range of vocabulary. And when he says the words he normally would never utter himself, he says them in a way that makes it seem like he’s trying very hard to pronounce them correctly and there is also a touch of questioning in his voice like he’s trying to passive inquire from the audience whether or not he’s saying/using these words correctly. lol I mean it’s a nightmare. It still feels unfathomable to me that people can’t see how mentally unfit he is for this position and what a dangerous individual he is to have as President. The fact that he’s pushing conservative agenda to me isn’t even the problem. I wrote a blog post about this a few weeks ago based on a transcript from Sam Harris’ podcast. I’ll leave it here, because I think these are well spoken words:
“There is a difference between truth and lies. There is a difference between real news and fake news. There is a difference between actual conspiracies and imagined ones. And we cannot afford to have 100’s of millions of people, in our own society, on the wrong side of those epistemological chasms. And we certainly can’t afford to have members of our own government on the wrong side of it. As I’ve said many times before, all we have is conversation…you have conversation and violence. That’s how we can influence one another. When things really matter and words are insufficient, people show up with guns. That’s the way things are. So we have to create the conditions where conversations work. And now we’re living in an environment where words have become totally ineffectual. This is what has been so harmful about Trump’s candidacy and his first few weeks as president. The degree to which the man lies, and the degree to which his supporters do not care, that is one of the most dangerous things to happen in my lifetime, politically. There simply has to be a consequence for lying on this level. And the retort from a Trump fan is “Well all politicians lie.” No. All politicians don’t lie like this. What we are witnessing with Trump and the people around him is something quite new. Even if I grant that all politicians lie a lot. I don’t know if I should grant that. All politicians lie sometimes, say…but…even in their lying they have to endorse the norm of truth telling. That’s what it means to lie successfully in politics (in a former age of the Earth). You can’t obviously be lying. You can’t be repudiating the very norm of honest communication. But what Trump has done, and the people around him get caught in the same vortex, it’s almost like a giddy nihilism in politics, you just say whatever you want. And it doesn’t matter if it’s true. “Just try to stop me”, is the attitude. It’s unbelievable.
Finding ways to span this chasm between people, finding ways where we can reliably influence one another, through conversation, based on shared norms of argumentation and self-criticism, that is the operating systems we need. That is the only thing that stands between us and chaos. And there are the people who are trying to build that, and there are the people who are trying to take it down. Now one of those people is people is president. And I really don’t think this is too strong. Trump is, by all appearances, consciously destroying the fabric of civil conversation, and his supporters really don’t seem to care. I’m sure those of you who support him will think I’m just winging now in the spirit of partisanship; that I’m a democrat, or that I’m a liberal, but that’s just not the case. Most normal Republican candidates, who I might dislike for a variety of reasons like Marco Rubio, or Jeb Bush, or even a quasi-theocrat like Ted Cruz, would still function within the normal channels of attempting a fact based conversation about the world. Their lies would be normal lies, and when caught there would be a penalty to pay. They would lose face. Trump has no face to lose. This is an epistemological pot latch.” (Sam Harris then describes what a pot latch is: a Native American practice of burning up your prized possessions as a way of showing how wealthy you are). “This is a pot latch of civil discourse. Every time Trump speaks he’s saying, “I don’t have to make sense. I’m too powerful to even have to make sense.” That is his message. And half the country, or nearly half, seems to love it. So when he’s caught in a lie, he has no face to lose. Trump is chaos. And one of the measures of how bad he seems to me is that I don’t even care about the theocrats he has brought to power with him, and there are many of them. He has brought in Christian fundamentalists to a degree that would have been unthinkable 10 years ago, and 10 years ago I was spending a lot of time worrying about the rise of the Christian right in this country. Well it has risen under Trump, but honestly it seems like the least of our problems at this moment. And it’s amazing for me to say that, given what it means and what it might mean to have people like Pence and Jeff Sessions and the other Christian fundamentalists in his orbit, empowered in this way. ”
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Thanks for that, Swarn.
What Harris is describing is the kind of pathocracy we get when we elect a malignant narcissist to the highest position of power. Chaos and mayhem follow. There is no “if” about it and no alternative paths or scenarios — this is one of the few certain things in life, apart from death and taxes.
A majority of people in any human society are closer in developmental level to psychopaths than to moral exemplars. It means that, among other things, they are influenced almost exclusively by biological and societal factors and do not possess particularly well developed awareness and conscience. That makes them highly susceptible to influences of Big Psychopaths of the malignantly narcissistic kind, like Trump, Hitler, Idi Amin, etc., whose programs and orders they are ready and willing to follow.
This is what we are seeing now. We have seen it before, though not in America.
Conversation is good and nice, but it tends not to work so well with people who have loaded weapons and are driven by narcissistic rage, the fuel of any and all movements led by such leaders. Recent Gallup poll shows that 67% of white men without college education approve of Trump’s performance as president. Clearly, influences other than fact-based reality are at play in their assessment. My bet is on narcissistic identification with The Leader who “finally” is just like them and will help them fulfill their long-buried desires (mostly for domination, control, and revenge).
Trump should have never been allowed near presidency. Yeah, I sound like a broken record, I know.
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Well said Emma. I felt Harris’ words really pinpointed exactly why I found it so unfathomable that Trump was elected. Perhaps I shouldn’t, as you say, people like him have risen to the top before. But I couldn’t quite form the words about why I felt he was so dangerous. It’s not just a person with harmful ideas for policy, this is someone who changes our ability to point out harmful ideas by really redefining “truth”. By changing the rules so completely, that truth no longer carries any weight. This has been what it is so frightening. I continue to wonder what reality would a Trump supporter have to face to be convinced of the danger he poses? It would almost seem that he could stand there and whip them personally, and they’d still love him. And that’s a dangerous world, where millions of people feel like that. The fact that they feel a connection to him is chilling and makes me worry that there is no peaceful way out of this.
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There were thousands of good Nazis happily hounding, maiming and killing Poles, Jews, Russians and others “not like us” without much encouragement from their Fuhrer. So-called normal men, and likely some women, eagerly tortured, raped, maimed, and killed their neighbors in the heart of civilized Europe less than 30 years ago. These people are my neighbors, ethnically and geographically speaking.
The same mayhem is going on as we speak in Syria, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, and so many places in the world. Hate and bloodlust are always alive in too many human hearts. And our narcissism is the reason, this belief that we are somehow different, better, more deserving than “they” are, and that “they” are thus our enemies.
Trump/ism is a warning and a sign that we need to make a better world, with better people in it, starting with ourselves.
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True…but I wouldn’t totally let the fuhrer off the hook. Encouraging divisiveness, dehumanizing others, it may not be all a dictators fault, but certainly such people help create an environment in which darker human traits can thrive. It takes constant vigilance by all to make sure this doesn’t happen, and so it is up to each of individually as well, but in an age where voices can reach so many people, hate and divisiveness can spread just as easily, and many Trump supporters are part of years and years of fear mongering by many politicians and presidents. Violent crime is down, but most people don’t believe that. Terrorism is less than a threat than domestic terrorism. Most people don’t realize that. Most people are wrong about the level of income inequality in this nation as well. So very obvious things have been not advertised, but rather fear has been used as a motivator to obtain votes. And those that get the votes make incredible amounts of money while people become impoverished. So I’m not willing to completely blame the average person, because people with money and power have exploited human weakness.
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It IS the dictator’s fault! If there’s one thing my blog is about, Swarn, it’s keeping Trump on that hook, now and forever after. 🙂
Good points, yes.
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… fear has been used as a motivator to obtain votes.
FEAR is the primary motive for EVERYTHING that’s going on right now. The border wall, the increase in military spending, the immigration shutdown. Plus the FEAR that’s being generated by the proposed cutbacks on healthcare. What a terrible, terrible way to live! And yet, with this unraveled, narcissistic ruler, we are caught up in the midst of it. And it’s getting more prevalent every time he opens his mouth.
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Case in point (to my last comment) — from Bloomberg:
President Donald Trump is a reckless bully with authoritarian leanings and a craving for attention. Kim Jong-un is a reckless bully with dictatorial powers and a craving for attention. Oh yes, and both have fingers on nuclear triggers. That’s why so many national security experts of both political parties struggle to think of a scarier pair.
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And we — ie. Trump/ists — send Tillerson, who’s as clueless as a tree stump when it comes to diplomacy and who intentionally isolates himself from the press, to “negotiate” with these tyrants. Within hours, a crisis threatening nuclear war arises, as we saw this weekend.
Let me repeat the obvious: Trump/ists must be removed — legally — before they destroy the world.
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Swarn, you’ve summed it up well. However, you’ve also depressed me even more than I already was. 😦
I’m at a loss to understand how tRump’s supporters are so totally blind and deaf to his antics. Yet they are. And those of us who see through all the smoke and mirrors are labeled “snowflakes” and are accused of being taken in by “fake news.” Arggghhhh!
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Trump has opened a chasm between two (at least) Americas. The chasm was always there, but not so apparent, for better and for worse. His supporters love his antics because they represent their own behaviors, real and/or desired. Trump/ism is as much a social movement as it is a state of mind.
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