Putin and Trump
Credit: Reuters/Leonhard Foeger
There are exactly two possible explanations for the shameful performance the world witnessed on Monday, from a serving American president.
Either Donald Trump is flat-out an agent of Russian interests—maybe witting, maybe unwitting, from fear of blackmail, in hope of future deals, out of manly respect for Vladimir Putin, out of gratitude for Russia’s help during the election, out of pathetic inability to see beyond his 306 electoral votes. Whatever the exact mixture of motives might be, it doesn’t really matter.
Or he is so profoundly ignorant, insecure, and narcissistic that he did not realize that, at every step, he was advancing the line that Putin hoped he would advance, and the line that the American intelligence, defense, and law-enforcement agencies most dreaded.
Conscious tool. Useful idiot. Those are the choices, though both are possibly true, so that the main question is the proportions.
Whatever the balance of motivations, what mattered was that Trump’s answers were indistinguishable from Putin’s, starting with the fundamental claim that Putin’s assurances about interference in U.S. democracy […]
I don’t think we should mistake the psychopathology of Trump, Putin, etc. for lack of intelligence or having traits we mistakenly attribute to children. I find this Scientific American article enlightening and disheartening. Note the psychopath rating list for world “leaders at the end of the article. The ratings for the 2016 candidates is located at the bottom of the list, out of order with the rest.. Trump beats Hitler out by two points.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/of-psychopaths-and-presidential-candidates/
If one views Trump and the Republican leaders through the lens their psychopathology, then one can see they are successfully achieving the goal of hurting as many people as possible, sowing as much chaos as possible, acting for the public harm rather than the public good. They enjoy that, and like Hitler, are quite willing to go down in flames doing it.
Perhaps the best way to characterize our current form of government is as a psychopathocracy.