This is part two of my review of Mary Trump's book. Its focus is on substantiating Ms. Trump's observation of uncle Donald's learning disability, as well as his refusal to learn whenever the presentation of new information threatens to humiliate him.

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Destroying Our Country From Within: Trump's Assault on America (Part Two)

Part one of this article dealt with three aspects of Donald Trump's sociopathy that were identified by clinical psychologist and niece Mary Trump -- chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others. Part one attempted to substantiate them with concrete examples of Trump's aberrant behavior.

But Ms. Trump made two additional observations about Donald's mental state that deserve consideration and substantiation. First, she claims that her uncle "may have a long undiagnosed learning disability that for decades has interfered with his ability to process information."

That learning disability was on display before the entire world on April 24, 2020, when Trump took to the podium during a nationally televised Coronavirus Task Force briefing and proceeded to speculate nonsensically about potential scientific research into injecting strong light or certain disinfectants into the body in order to kill the virus. That's right, inject disinfectants!

One needs to read Trump's nonsensical speculations to believe that even he was stupid enough to utter them: Addressing Task Force member, Dr. Deborah Birx, Trump said: "So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous - whether it's ultraviolet or just very powerful light - and I think you said that that hasn't been checked, but you're going to test it. And then I said, supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way, and I think you said you're going to test that too. Sounds interesting."

But, before Americans across the country could begin cringing or guffawing in amazement, Trump turned to disinfectant: "And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute."

"And is there a way we can do something like that," he went on, as Birx stiffened back into her chair, "by injection inside or almost a cleaning." Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. So, that, you're going to have to use medical doctors. But it sounds - it sounds interesting to me." (Dareh Gregorian, "Dr. Birx goes viral for reaction to Trump's 'injection' comments, NBC News, April 24, 2020).

But, it was Dr. Birx's explanation of Trump's bizarre speculation that appeared to confirm Mary Trump's suspicions about her uncle's "long undiagnosed learning disability that for decades has interfered with his ability to process information."

"Birx said Trump was given new information shortly before the briefing, and he likes to 'talk that through out loud and really have that dialogue.' 'He was still digesting' the information, Birx said" (Ibid.). She could not possibly say about her boss what everyone knew: "Any normal person, possessing merely a normal capability to process information, would have spent less than one second "digesting" the same information about light and disinfectants on surfaces before dismissing the possibility of injecting them as totally ludicrous."

Trump's specific learning disability contributes to a much larger problem, his refusal to process new information, especially when its presentation threatens to publicly humiliate him by exposing his ignorance. As Mary Trump concludes: "Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information."

Recall that Trump could not rage against his public humiliation by President Obama, nor could he rage when the delegates to the United Nations laughed at his claim that his administration "had accomplished more than almost any in U.S. history." Similarly, he could not rage publicly about his humiliating Coronavirus Task Force performance. He was compelled to accept public humiliation all three times. Nevertheless, Trump frequently flies into a rage during closed briefings, whenever somebody says something that threatens to expose his prodigious ignorance, which immediately triggers his fear of humiliation.

According to Mary Trump, Donald learned a painful lesson about humiliation when brother Freddy, age fourteen, dumped a bowl of mashed potatoes on seven-year-old Donald's head. "It wounded Donald's pride so deeply that he'd still be bothered by it when [sister] Maryann brought it up in her toast at the White House birthday dinner in 2017." From the age of seven, then, Donald "would never allow himself to feel that feeling again. From then on, he would wield the weapon, never be at the sharp end of it."

For example, whenever Chief of Staff John Kelly suggested a briefing of Trump on virtually any topic, Trump, "immediately threatened by the notion that his knowledge wasn't sufficient if he needed experts," would assert: "I don't want to talk to anyone. I know more than they do. I know better than anybody else." (Philip Drucker and Carol Leonnig, A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump's Testing of America, (p. 165)

Such obdurate defensiveness explains why Trump's wide-ranging ignorance remains extremely formidable. How formidable? Try to imagine Chief of Staff John Kelly finding himself compelled to brief Trump about something as simple as the meaning of Pearl Harbor. Yet, after Trump asked: "Hey John, what's this tour all about? What's this a tour of?" Kelly was required to do precisely that (Ibid, p 169).

Try to imagine a president so stupid as to assert that his supposedly favorite President, Andrew Jackson, "was really angry that he saw what was happening in regard to the Civil War," when actually "Old Hickory" died sixteen years before the war began. Try to imagine a president so stupid as to suggest in 2017 the Frederick Douglass was still alive. Or a president so stupid as to give a 2019 Fourth of July speech in which he lauded our Revolutionary War army by claiming that it "manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports." Took over airports? The first airplane would not be invented until 1903.

Try to imagine a president so stupid as to ask Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau, "Didn't you guys burn down the White House?" Actually, the British burned the White House during the War of 1812. Try to imagine a President so stupid as to congratulate Poland for being invaded on the 80^th anniversary of its invasion by Nazi German. Or a President so stupid as to vow, in 2016, that Russia would not invade Ukraine, when in fact Russia had invaded Ukraine just two years earlier.

Finally, imagine a President so ignorant of the U. S. Constitution as to ask his Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, to "get rid of" the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a law passed by Congress. It was such formidable ignorance of the Constitution that subsequently allowed Trump to assert, "When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total and that's the way it's got to be. " It's total," (Meagan Flynn and Allyson Chiu, Washington Post, April 14, 2020)

Fortunately, most of the examples mentioned above of Trump's formidable ignorance have been harmless, except for notifying the world and the non-knuckle dragging majority of Americans that the so-called "City on the Hill" was now being led by a buffoon. Unfortunately, America and the world have also witnessed the dire consequences of Trump's attempt to foist his ignorance on the world.

Consider the existential threat posed by climate change. On January 25, 2014, ignoramus Trump called global warming a "hoax." Since becoming President, Trump has withdrawn the United States for the Paris Agreement, a far too loose world accord on combating climate change. The Agreement aims at keeping the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. Yet, a 26 November 2019 report from the United Nations suggests that even if the member states achieve their specific goals, "the world is heading for a 3.2 degrees Celsius global temperature rise over pre-industrial levels."

What does that mean? According to David Wallace-Wells, writing in his recent book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, "Warming of 2 or 2.5 degrees would probably unleash suffering beyond anything that humans have ever experienced through many millennia of strain and strife and all-out war."

The actual notification of U. S. withdrawal was symbolic, because it does not take effect until November 4, 2020, the day after our presidential election. Yet, "The US government in practice abandoned any concern over the climate crisis some time ago, with the Trump administration so far rolling back more than 100 environmental protections, including an Obama-era plan to curb emissions from coal-fired power plants, limits on pollution emitted from cars and trucks and even energy efficiency standards for lightbulbs" (Oliver Milman, "How the global climate fight could be lost if Trump is re-elected," The Guardian, 27 July 2020).

Is there a single American out there who believes that Trump is even vaguely aware of the five major extinctions in Earth's history that, as David Wallace-Wells puts it, rendered "86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, 75 percent; 125 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 135 million years after that, 75 percent again?" (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, Chapter One, "Cascades,) Is there a single American out there who believes that Trump recognizes that four of those five extinctions "involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas" (Ibid.).

Do you think he's educated enough to realize that the world has been adding carbon to the atmosphere at such a rapid rate that we now have "fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 thousand years - perhaps as long as 15 million years" (Ibid.).

Do you think that ignoramus Trump realizes, as Mr. Wallace-Wells states, "A warming planet leads to melting Arctic ice, which means less sunlight reflected back to the sun and more absorbed by a planet warming faster still, which means an ocean less able to absorb atmospheric carbon and so a planet warming faster still. A warming planet will also melt the Arctic permafrost, which contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the earth's atmosphere, and some of which, when it thaws and is released, may evaporate as methane, which is thirty-four times as powerful a greenhouse gas warming blanket as carbon dioxide when judged on the time scale of a century" (Ibid.).

No, he doesn't. But sensible Americans can secure the end of the four years marked by Trump's environmental neglect and buffoonery by turning him and his ilk out of office this November.

Unfortunately, that task has been made more difficult by Trump's ongoing attempt to undermine America's democracy by ignorantly (or dishonestly) claiming that the "mail-in ballots" -- which states are increasingly turning to during the pandemic -- guarantee a "rigged" election, while "absentee ballots" (like the one he has used in the past) are an acceptable substitute for in-person voting.

On July 30^th, Trump falsely asserted, "Absentee voting is different from mail-in voting and has more protections against fraud." Putting aside the suspicion that Trump's preemptive assault on the election process suggests that he knows he is going to lose, in fact, there is no difference between "mail-in" and "absentee" ballots.

"There's really no distinction," said Darren Hutchinson, a law professor at the University of Florida and an elections expert. "So, it's basically a falsehood that's been repeated over and over and over again" (Politifact, July 31, 2020).

Trump has asserted that the absentee voter needs to make an effort to obtain a ballot, while mail-in ballots are issued to potential voters without their effort. Not so, says Hutchinson. "There is no special process that absentee out-of-town voters go through that other mail-in voters do not" (Ibid.).

In an article titled "The False Narrative of Vote-by-Mail Fraud." Wendy R. Weiser and Harold Ekeh noted, "In the last two federal elections, roughly one out of every four Americans cast a mail ballot. In five states - Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington - mail balloting has been the primary method of voting. In 28 additional states, all voters have had the right to vote by mail ballot if they choose, without having to provide any reason or excuse. Over time, a growing number of voters have chosen that option. Since 2000 more than 250 million votes have been cast via mailed-out ballots, in all 50 states, according to the Vote at Home Institute. In 2018, more than 31 million American cast their ballots by mail, about 25.8 percent of election participants."

The authors emphasize that, of the billions of votes cast during the period from 2000 to 2012 only 491 cases of absentee ballot fraud were found. (Wendy R. Weiser and Harold Ekeh, "The False Narrative of Vote-by-Mail Fraud." Brennan Center, April 10, 2020)

It is common knowledge that allowing people to vote by mail makes voting easier and, consequently, increases the number of votes cast. Trump knows it, and has admitted that making it easier to vote in America would hurt the Republican Party. That's the obvious reason behind Trump's ignorant (or dishonest) warnings about 'mail-in ballots" and rigged elections. He's blatantly attempting to suppress the vote.

Although there are many other areas where Trump's profound ignorance is harming our country, one relatively obscure one deserves our attention - the deterioration of civil-military relations.

Many Americans are aware of news reports of a Presidential Daily Brief to Trump, which contained intelligence agency evidence of Russia paying bounties to Taliban fighters to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. Although it is probable that our military has taken steps to minimize the danger resulting from such bounties - assuming they actually exist - Trump has pointedly denied knowing about the intelligence, taken no obvious steps to inquire further, and has lately called news reports of such evidence a "hoax."

He's even admitted that he has not raised the issue with Russia's President, Vladimir Putin, whose ass Trump repeatedly kisses. Trump's behavior must raise questions in the minds of America's military leaders, as well as, the average soldier, sailor and airman, about the Commander-in-Chief's genuine concern for the welfare of his men and women in uniform.

Trump's misuse and abuse of the military to pull off his grotesque upside down Bible-toting stunt at St. John's Church near Washington's Lafayette Park is another case that threatens to alienate our military from him. Indeed, America's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley felt compelled to apologize to both his troops and to America for his participation in Trump's stunt. "I should not have been there," Gen. Mark A. Milley "said in a prerecorded video commencement address to National Defense University. "My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics."(Helene Cooper, New York Times, June 11, 2020)

But Trump's worst abuse and perhaps his most serious alienation of the U. S. military from him has received insufficient attention. It occurred on July 20, 2017 in the Pentagon's hallowed room known as "the Tank."

It was on that date that President Trump's advisers "staged an intervention." It did not end well. "Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn, and the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had grown alarmed over the first six months of the Trump administration by gaping holes in the president's knowledge of history and of the alliances forged in the wake of World War II that served as the foundation of American strength in the world."

Soon into their briefing, however, the lectures triggered Trump's fear of humiliation from the exposure of his ignorance. Thus, he began disputing his advisers on virtually every subject: NATO, free trade agreements, the nuclear deal with Iran, and the war in Afghanistan. Things really started going off the rails when Trump went beyond simply calling the war in Afghanistan a "loser war." The increasingly enraged draft dodger had the gall to tell the assembled military leaders, "You're all losers."

Now pulsing with rage, described as "so angry that he wasn't taking many breaths," draft dodger Trump bellowed: "I wouldn't go to war with you people." Then, in a classic case of psychological projection, Trump blurted: "You're a bunch of dopes and babies."

Simply imagine it: The leaders of America's most respected institution being called "dopes and babies" by a draft dodger.

Vice President Pence sat "frozen like a statue," but Secretary Tillerson was seething. "Others at the table noticed Trump's steam of venom had taken an emotional toll. So many people in that room had gone to war and risked their lives for their country, and now they were being dressed down by a president who had not. They felt sick to their stomachs." One woman was crying silently.

Tillerson could not take it any longer and he broke into Trump's tirade. "No, that's just wrong. Mr. President you are totally wrong. None of that is true."

"The men and women who put on a uniform don't do it to become soldiers of fortune. That's not why they put on the uniform and go out and die"They do it to protect our freedom."

Moments of silence followed Tillerson's interruption. Then Trump departed. Soon thereafter Tillerson said, "He's a fucking moron" (A Very Stable Genius, pp. 129-139).

He might have added: "And a sociopath."

Part three of this review will consider the last psychological disorder that Mary Trump sees afflicting her uncle - what she calls his "dependent personality disorder." We will see how it explains his disastrous inability to exert the leadership necessary to confront the three-pronged catastrophe currently threatening to destroy our country.

Authors Bio:
Walter C. Uhler is an independent scholar and freelance writer whose work has been published in numerous publications, including The Nation, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the Journal of Military History, the Moscow Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He also is President of the Russian-American International Studies Association (RAISA).