"I showed a Trump post to my psychologist friend and asked her to do a proper profile. This was, in retrospect, like asking a vet to look at a particularly diseased badger.
She put down her coffee, read it twice, and said: “Right. Where do you want me to start?”
The all-caps, she explained, isn’t emphasis. It’s dysregulation. A regulated adult uses punctuation to signal importance. Trump uses volume, because volume is what worked in the room he grew up in. Fred Trump’s household rewarded dominance and punished weakness. Donald learned early that the loudest person wins. He never updated that software. He never updates anything. The man is essentially Windows Vista with a spray tan.
“NATO HAS DONE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.” The word absolutely is doing a lot of work there. Psychologists call this black-and-white thinking, a cognitive pattern strongly associated with narcissistic personality structures. The world is either total loyalty or total betrayal. No middle ground. No nuance. No evidence of a functioning cerebral cortex.
“MILITARILY DECIMATED.” She paused on this one. Self-glorification dressed as fact, she said. He has no military background, never served, and has a well-documented terror of illness and physical danger. Bone spurs, famously. Four of them. One per deferment. So he compensates verbally, hard and consistently, because words are his only battlefield and even there he fights like a man wearing oven mitts.
“THE U.S.A. NEEDS NOTHING FROM NATO.” The people who most loudly declare their independence, she said, are almost always the most terrified of abandonment. Classic counterdependence. The kid who announces he doesn’t need friends. In the playground. Alone. Eating his lunch next to a bin.
The threat with no content, “NEVER FORGET THIS VERY IMPORTANT POINT IN TIME,” she found genuinely fascinating. It has the grammatical structure of consequence without any actual consequence attached. It’s what you say when you want to punish someone but lack both the means and the attention span to follow through.
And then the signature. His own name. On his own platform. As if the man might otherwise forget who he is halfway through a sentence, which, to be fair, seems increasingly plausible.
She sat back and said: “This is a man who has been pretending to be formidable for so long he can no longer locate the frightened little boy underneath. But he’s still there. He’s always there. TACO is always there. Screaming in capital letters at people who stopped listening years ago.”
I paid for the coffee. It was the least I could do. She’s going to need therapy after this.
"I showed a Trump post to my psychologist friend and asked her to do a proper profile. This was, in retrospect, like asking a vet to look at a particularly diseased badger.
She put down her coffee, read it twice, and said: “Right. Where do you want me to start?”
The all-caps, she explained, isn’t emphasis. It’s dysregulation. A regulated adult uses punctuation to signal importance. Trump uses volume, because volume is what worked in the room he grew up in. Fred Trump’s household rewarded dominance and punished weakness. Donald learned early that the loudest person wins. He never updated that software. He never updates anything. The man is essentially Windows Vista with a spray tan.
“NATO HAS DONE ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.” The word absolutely is doing a lot of work there. Psychologists call this black-and-white thinking, a cognitive pattern strongly associated with narcissistic personality structures. The world is either total loyalty or total betrayal. No middle ground. No nuance. No evidence of a functioning cerebral cortex.
“MILITARILY DECIMATED.” She paused on this one. Self-glorification dressed as fact, she said. He has no military background, never served, and has a well-documented terror of illness and physical danger. Bone spurs, famously. Four of them. One per deferment. So he compensates verbally, hard and consistently, because words are his only battlefield and even there he fights like a man wearing oven mitts.
“THE U.S.A. NEEDS NOTHING FROM NATO.” The people who most loudly declare their independence, she said, are almost always the most terrified of abandonment. Classic counterdependence. The kid who announces he doesn’t need friends. In the playground. Alone. Eating his lunch next to a bin.
The threat with no content, “NEVER FORGET THIS VERY IMPORTANT POINT IN TIME,” she found genuinely fascinating. It has the grammatical structure of consequence without any actual consequence attached. It’s what you say when you want to punish someone but lack both the means and the attention span to follow through. And then the signature. His own name. On his own platform. As if the man might otherwise forget who he is halfway through a sentence, which, to be fair, seems increasingly plausible.
She sat back and said: “This is a man who has been pretending to be formidable for so long he can no longer locate the frightened little boy underneath. But he’s still there. He’s always there. TACO is always there. Screaming in capital letters at people who stopped listening years ago.”
I paid for the coffee. It was the least I could do. She’s going to need therapy after this.
Gandalv / @Microinteracti1"