Donald trrump

The Executive Order is political weakness at its most powerful. The spectacle of Donald Trump adding his Sharpie-stroke to the catalogue of puissant signatures confirms the United States’ slow but steady drift from a Romanesque republic to Roman-lite empire. Trump was supposed to be better, or at least different.The wisdom of the day has it that the business of America is business, even when, as in healthcare, that business is thoroughly corporatized. Who better to negotiate through the paralysis of Congress than a commercial deal-maker, a splitter of the difference, a washer of one hand with the other?

It is alarming how psychiatric diagnoses have crept into the political commentary. Donald Trump, we’ve been told, has narcissistic personality disorder, malignant narcissism, narcissistic alexithymia, bipolar disorder, hypomanic temperament, delusional disorder, paranoia, senile dementia, extreme hedonism, histrionic personality disorder, impulse disorder, attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and dyslexia. He’s also been called a sociopath and psychopath. Even normality has, in Trump’s hands, been transmogrified — pathologized — as ‘malignant normality’. Many psychiatric professionals have attempted to make such diagnoses, but they are wrong. President Trump does not demonstrate any diagnosable mental illness.

Donald Trump’s tweet mooting an election delay isn’t a sign of strength but weakness. Maybe he’ll say it was just a joke. Maybe it was intended to distract from the bad economic news. Maybe he’s trying to inure the public to the idea of a postponement. Maybe he’s preparing for his post-presidency with a farrago of excuses and complaints and lies. Or maybe Trump is simply flailing, a prospective loser who is already losing it.His erstwhile champion Herman Cain, who denounced the idea of wearing a mask, has just died at 74 from coronavirus complications. His national security adviser has the virus. So does Rep. Louie Gohmert, who refused to wear a mask. Trump’s incessant attempts to depict the pandemic as a hoax have turned out be the palpable fraud.

Why should the United States prop up the defense of Germany, the richest country in Europe — and against Russia, Germany’s closest energy partner?Two reasons. One is what the sociologists call ‘path dependency’. The US has had troops in Germany since the winter of 1944, and the Cold War and Nato turned military occupation into strategic alliance. Since 1990, a vast machinery of budgets and employments, civilian and military, has perpetuated a strategy for a conflict that no longer exists. As British soldiers used to sing, ‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here.’ This is not a good reason for risking American lives.The other reason that American forces are there is because they have to be somewhere near there.

What do you do when you need the Catholic vote, but mainstream Catholic leadership wants nothing to do with you? Easy: you make friends with the Catholic Deplorables. Recently, the presidential Twitter account has tweeted out support for two figures that might be considered Catholic Deplorables: Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, an ex-papal nuncio to the USA, currently in hiding, who famously accused Pope Francis and other senior Vatican officials of helping to conceal the crimes of then-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, and Dr Taylor Marshall, a popular blogger and Catholic author. The term 'basket of deplorables' backfired spectacularly on Hillary Clinton last election season, when Trump supporters seized upon it as a badge of honor.

Donald Trump is trying to break through a 2020 wall. By January 2019, after over three years of failed efforts to impeach him, sue him, indict him, impoverish him, and destroy him, the left had failed. The economy was booming. Trump’s tweets were mostly bragging about his accomplishments. And the left was dumbfounded that both impeachment and Mueller, in Nietzschean fashion, had only made Trump stronger. Then came an unexpected trifecta catastrophe — plague, a quarantine-induced recession, and a leftist cultural revolution in the streets. Suddenly, the left saw all of that as a gift that might succeed where its own self-constructed melodramas had failed. By late May, Trump’s polls had dived.