So the President is a sociopath. The Emperor had no clothes. Power corrupts completely, remember? One of the more predictable things about our current President is that he projects. Not the sound of his voice, the psychological defense mechanism of projection. Remember learning about that? If not, it's the one defined as attributing one's own unacceptable thoughts, feelings, or impulses to others, as if to avoid confronting those own impulses or behaviors within their own psyche.
So, when the President says that the beliefs of his opponents are radical, or "crazy" or dangerous, or even false, he's really describing himself. We all do this to a degree, but not to the extent that our President does. If you can stomach him, or afford to spend the time, check this out. It's remarkably consistent.
A well-known case in point:. In 2016, Trump criticized opponent Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecured personal email server while secretary of state as “extreme carelessness with classified material.” But once he was elected, Trump continued to use his unsecured personal cellphone while in office. And he has been criminally charged with illegally keeping classified government documents after he left office and storing them in his bedroom, bathroom and other places at his Mar-a-Lago estate.
Certainly not all sociopaths are as predictable. But our President is remarkably consistent in this regard. Perhaps his conception of the political spectrum is so deficient that it makes for simplistic statements. No matter. What confounds me almost as much is how someone with so little understanding of history can wield so much power. His ignorance of the history of the country he purports to lead is so lacking that it regularly gives rise to astonishing statements. For example, remember when he wasn't sure if Frederick Douglass was alive or dead.
"We're hearing good things about Frederick Douglass," he ignorantly said once at a press conference. I doubt he could spell the name or understand why the name ends with a double s.
I think it was Maya Angelou who once said that people will tell you who they are. So true. If they project their own shortcomings and descriptions onto others with the frequency of our President, he's telling us all the time.
I wonder, often, how history will handle all this.
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