Trump’s Just Bad News

In an earlier post I mentioned that many of the world’s religions have warnings against evil people.  Through history, wise folks have noted how the greedy and selfish tend to rise to power seeking nothing but their own enrichment.

A certain religion even has a category for malicious people, calling them “Anti-Social Personalities,” aka “Suppressive Persons,” and provides many characteristics of such evil people, so they can be identified and rooted out.  Here are a few, along with my remarks vis-a-vis DonaldTrump

He or she speaks only in very broad generalities. Note how often Trump begins a sentence, “A lot of people are saying….” in order to spread rumors that favor himself and/or denigrate his critics. Of course, this causes any sane person to ask in response, “What people? Can you be specific?” Of course he can’t, because any attempt to do so would be to expose this as the lie it is.

Such a person deals mainly in critical or hostile remarks. Have you ever listened to Trump talk about his critics and political opponents?  See below for a list of a few choice epithets. (Confirmation footnotes are from this article.)

Surrounding such a personality we find cowed or ill associates.  If you’re looking for a bunch of cowed people, note that, with few exceptions like Jeff Flake, the Republican senators are fawning sycophants, most of whom publicly despised Trump until they realized their careers would come to an end unless they reversed course and toed the line.  If you want to find sick people, check out the members of the COVID-ridden presidential administration that have been stricken with the pandemic.

Many antisocial persons will freely confess to the most alarming crimes. Trump admitted that he fired Comey to stop the investigation into Russia, that he extorted Ukraine, that he withheld evidence from the impeachment inquiry, and hid what he knew about the lethality of the coronavirus, causing the U.S., with 4.25% of the world’s population, to have 21% of its deaths.

The antisocial personality has a bad sense of property.  Note that Trump has built a life around fraud and an amazing array of deceptive business practices, including ripping off students at his sham university, stiffing contractors at his (now bankrupt) casinos, using his charity as his own personal slush fund, and looting the U.S. Treasury to send his billionaire buddies enormous tax breaks.

The antisocial personality supports only destructive groups and rages against and attacks any constructive group.  While I could go on for hours here, I might point out Trump’s thirst to torture children on the southern border, to destroy the environment for profit, to incite racial hatred and violence, to eliminate school lunch programs.  Yes, there are “constructive” groups working feverishly to prevent as much damage from taking place as possible, groups like the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Amnesty International, and literally thousands of environmental groups, but they’ve never faced headwinds like this before.

Ironically, the vast majority of adherents to this religion support Trump.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Epithets