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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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Many persons have noted the significant difference in the quality of Trump’s physical, cognitive, and language/linguistic presentation in public both recently and over the last few decades. Similarly, many persons have noted that Trump presents very differently depending upon whether he is “talking off the cuff”, such as at his rallies, “going off script,” or (apparently) reading from a teleprompter.
Differences can easily be observed in Trump’s emotional state: at times “high-energy”, activated; at times flat, blunted, seeming uninvolved or uninterested; in Trump’s sophistication of use of language and choice of words; in Trump’s ability to stay on topic; and in Trump’s ability to answer questions with direct, cogent, or meaningful responses.
We doubt that few would disagree that, overall, Trump’s presentation and the level of Trump’s communicative abilities appear to be deteriorating. Some have suggested, or even concluded on TV news, talk radio, and social media, that these observations represent definite indications of deterioration of Trump’s cognitive abilities and/or a descent into dementia (some have even suggested specific types of dementing illness they believe to be present).
We definitely believe that based upon his observed behaviors, it is clinically indicated that Trump undergo a full and comprehensive neuropsychological evaluation. …
At the same time, we are concerned that many of the opinions being voiced regarding specific diagnoses and Trump’s prognosis are based upon personal experience of people who have suffered through the cognitive/behavioral deterioration of a loved one (also called anecdotal evidence). While we have no doubt that behaviors exhibited by Trump are similar to symptoms observed in persons suffering from dementia, we are concerned that while no specific diagnosis can be definitively ruled out, the public behaviors displayed by Trump may be explicable by multiple individual or combined issues other than (albeit possibly including) a degenerative neurocognitive disorder.
Over the four years during which he has dominated American political life, nearly three of them as president, Donald Trump has set a match again and again to chaos-inducing issues like racial hostility, authoritarianism and white identity politics.
Last week, at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, the winner of the best paper award in the Political Psychology division was “A ‘Need for Chaos’ and the Sharing of Hostile Political Rumors in Advanced Democracies.”
The paper, which the award panel commended for its “ambitious scope, rigor, and creativity,” is the work of Michael Bang Petersenand https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/persons/mathias-osmundsen(a453964f-daa7-4f40-94d0-fde773a485d4).html, both political scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark, and Kevin Arceneaux, a political scientist at Temple.
It argues that a segment of the American electorate that was once peripheral is drawn to “chaos incitement” and that this segment has gained decisive influence through the rise of social media.
“The rise of social media provides the public with unprecedented power to craft and share new information with each other,” they write. In the political arena, this technological transformation allows the transmission of a type of information that portrays “political candidates or groups negatively” and has “a low evidential basis.” The “new information” transmitted on social media includes “conspiracy theories, fake news, discussions of political scandals and negative campaigns.”
The circulation of this type of information (which the authors label “hostile political rumors”) has been “linked to large-scale political outcomes within recent years such as the 2016 U.S. presidential election.”
The authors describe “chaos incitement” as a “strategy of last resort by marginalized status-seekers,” willing to adopt disruptive tactics. Trump, in turn, has consistently sought to strengthen the perception that America is in chaos, a perception that has enhanced his support while seeming to reinforce his claim that his predecessors, especially President Barack Obama, were failures.
Petersen, Osmundsen and Arceneaux find that those who meet their definition of having a “need for chaos” express that need by willingly spreading disinformation. Their goal is not to advance their own ideology but to undermine political elites, left and right, and to “mobilize others against politicians in general.” These disrupters do not “share rumors because they believe them to be true. For the core group, hostile political rumors are simply a tool to create havoc.”
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The phrase “like to see the democratic system go down” is chilling — and raises the question: How worried should we be about a fundamental threat to democracy from the apparently large numbers of Americans who embrace chaos as a way of expressing their discontent? Might Trump and his loyal supporters seek to bring down the system if he is defeated in 2020? What about later, if the damage he has inflicted on our customs and norms festers, eroding the invisible structures that underpin everything that actually makes America great?
A political leader who thrives on chaos, relishes disorder and governs on the principle of narcissistic self-interest is virtually certain to find defeat intolerable. If voters deny Trump a second term, how many of his most ardent supporters, especially those with a “need for chaos,” will find defeat unbearable?
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The document that Bolton produced at Bannon’s request was not a strategy so much as a marketing plan for the administration to justify leaving the Iran deal. It did little to address what would happen on Day 2, after the United States pulled out of the deal. But Bolton’s views were hardly a secret to those who had spoken to him over the years or read https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/opinion/to-stop-irans-bomb-bomb-iran.html?module=inline (the Op-Ed he wrote in The New York Times in 2015): Once American diplomacy had been set aside, Israel should bomb Iran.
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Trump’s withdrawal from the deal, compounded by the events of recent months, has revived fears not just that the United States could take military action against Iran or quietly bless an Israeli strike but also that all the parties could stumble into a conflict out of hubris, miscalculation or ignorance. A strike on Iran, however limited in its design, could unspool widespread chaos in the form of retaliation by Iranian proxy groups on American forces in the gulf region, escalating attacks on commercial ships that could send oil prices skyrocketing, waves of Hezbollah terrorist strikes against Israel, cyberattacks against the West and ultimately more American troops being sent to stamp out fires wherever Iran has influence — from Lebanon to Syria to Yemen to Iraq.
Scaramucci told the network that the president is on "replay mode" in which he has a few phrases "he repeatedly uses."
"Not remembering that he had heard of a Category-5 hurricane is emblematic of what's going on in terms of the mental decline," he said.
"If you look at a whole pattern of speech and you look at the whole deterioration of his syntax and the way he's talking... you're saying, 'Okay, the guy is obviously in mental decline,'" he said.
"But what I find sad and troubling about the whole thing is that he's got a group of people around him that are supposedly loyal to him and like him, that they're not addressing it and they're not evaluating it...There's a little bit of sadness to the whole thing.
"So for me, I'm looking at that, the guy is obviously in mental decline...He is in full-blown meltdown and you have a group of people who have made a decision that they are going to cover this up as opposed to clean it up," Scaramucci added.
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