From Wallwritings
To make any sense of the presidential election which concludes Tuesday, we must acknowledge that Donald J. Trump seized upon the fears and anger of voters and exploited them like the television con-man he is.
Trump voters, not Trump himself, have understandable fears and angers. Trump preys upon those emotions by promising to be their savior.
Trump is no savior. He is a documented narcissistic abuser of women, minorities, and, lets face it, all of us within the sound of his voice and the vision of his hand-clapping cheer leader.
In an August 2014 issue in Psychology Today, Carrie Barron, a medical doctor, wrote an essay entitled If You Are the Target of Narcissistic Abuse. Troubled about Trump two years later, that title caught my attention.
We are all targets of Donald Trump's "narcissistic abuse." He and his gang of enablers, those Trump-backing Republican politicos and media conservatives who are even now counting their pieces of silver from a future Trump administrations.
This democracy and all its inhabitants are targets of Trump's abuse.
Dr. Barron's thoughts are pertinent to understanding what we are experiencing. She writes:
"Mental Health professionals used to harbor the notion that narcissists were insecure and frail deep down. Their trumped up attitude was viewed as off-putting and the job was to help them tone it down so others would like them more. And life would be easier for them. Strangely, narcissists were frequently people who at first glance, did not convey the compelling qualities that might explain extreme self-love.
"Things have changed. Current thought challenges the notion that narcissists secretly suffer from low self-esteem or insecurity. Or that they suffer as much as we thought in the ways that we thought. Recent findings indicate they take pleasure in successful manipulations.
"Putting down unsuspecting, soft-hearted souls in their midst is a sport. They truly believe in their superiority even if objective evidence does not back it up. One psychiatry professor of mine did say, 'They make everyone around them feel badly but they don't feel badly themselves.'"
We now have Trump and his enablers dangerously close to the nuclear button and the naming of Supreme Court justices.
We are having to accept the gift of Trump from a Tea-Party-weakened Republican Party and a main stream media which first laughed at him as a usurper.
Out of the glare of the media madness and shallow campaigns, we have experienced leaders like Richard Falk, one of the wisest among us, who continues to call for thoughtful public understanding of global problems.
Professor Emeritus at Princeton University, Falk says in a short film, Re-imagining the Future, "[T]he unregulated way the world economy has been operating has contributed to global inequality of a dangerous sort...creating a lack of confidence in the fairness of the way in which politics are organized."
Trump's racist credentials have been well-established since he stepped from that escalator and announced he was running for president.
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