- Robert Reich channels George Lakoff, about Trump as an abusive parent;
- More examples about how Trump is a clueless idiot, and wondering why his supporters don’t care;
- A bit about Linus.
Robert Reich channels George Lakoff.
Robert Reich, 4 May 2025: Sunday thought subtitled “President as abusive parent”
According to psychological research, we respond to presidents much as we did to parents when we were kids.
George Lakoff, professor of cognitive linguistics at Berkeley, has found that two competing models of parenting shape political preferences: either the “strict parent” or “nurturant parent.”
The strict parent views the world as a dangerous place that needs to be controlled. The nurturant parent emphasizes empathy and mutual responsibility.
Lakoff has found that presidents are elected either because a large portion of the public wants a tough, judgmental parent — or a caring, nurturing one.
Reagan fit into the strict parent model; Barack Obama, the nurturant parent one.
But I think Trump represents a third model — the cruel and abusive parent. A parent so malignantly narcissistic that he wields punishment for his own satisfaction, often in unpredictable ways that make him even more terrifying.
In other words, Trump is not just abusing presidential power by violating laws and the Constitution. His behavior is also abusive.
His malignant narcissism is viciously vindictive. His cruelty borders on sadism; he seems to take pleasure in causing others pain. And he often changes his mind or alters the punishment, creating even more confusion and fear.
Reich goes on about how some of people now “profoundly shaken” by Trump had an abusive parent. While:
I suspect some are overwhelmingly drawn to him for the same reason, but instead of being shattered by him they are fanatically loyal. This would include the sycophants now surrounding him in the White House and Cabinet who appear to share his cruelty and sadism.
Research shows that abusive parents often become more abusive over time — more enraged, more paranoid, and less predictable.
Hence, the children of cruel and abusive parents tend to abandon them as soon as they are able. Or cling to them ever more desperately.
This would be an example of how much of how humanity responds to the universe isn’t based on evidence, reason, or rationale, but on psychological mechanisms for living with other people. What is objectively real is of very little interest to most people.
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And aside from his temperament, Trump is a clueless idiot. But I suppose that’s consistent with what I just said.
CNN, 4 May 2025 (scroll down): Trump says he doesn’t know if he has to uphold the Constitution in immigration crackdown
Does he not remember the oath he took at his inauguration? Likely not; that was irrelevant to his notion of being a king, dictator, or now, pope. (I’m not going to link the image here. See here.
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Some of the transcript.
JMG, 4 May 2025: Trump Suggests He Can Defy The US Constitution
NBC NEWS: “Your Secretary of State says everyone who’s here, citizens and non-citizens, deserve due process. Do you agree, Mr. President?”
TRUMP: “I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know.”
NBC NEWS: “Well, the Fifth Amendment says as much.”
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TRUMP: “I don’t know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said. What you said is not what I heard the Supreme Court said. They have a different interpretation.”
One gathers that Trump has no idea how the US government actually works. He has simplistic notions about everything, that happen to support MAGA and white supremacist goals; he issues edicts, and depends on his lawyers to tell him if he can get away with them or not.
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Again. He *should* know. He’s the president! Why do so many people support this guy?? The answer to that goes to the heart of human nature and the dim prospects for the long-term survival of the human species that cannot get past tribal values.
NY Times, 4 May 2025: Trump says ‘I don’t know’ when asked whether he must uphold the Constitution and provide due process.
President Trump said in an interview that aired on Sunday that he did not know whether every person on American soil was entitled to due process, despite constitutional guarantees, and complained that adhering to that principle would result in an unmanageable slowdown of his mass deportation program.
The revealing exchange, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” was prompted by the interviewer Kristen Welker asking Mr. Trump if he agreed with Secretary of State Marco Rubio that citizens and noncitizens in the United States were entitled to due process.
“I don’t know,” Mr. Trump replied. “I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know.”
Ms. Welker reminded the president that the Fifth Amendment says as much.
“I don’t know,” Mr. Trump said again. “It seems — it might say that, but if you’re talking about that, then we’d have to have a million or two million or three million trials.” Left unmentioned was how anyone could be sure these people were undocumented immigrants, let alone criminals, without hearings.
Mr. Trump responded “I don’t know” one more time and referred to his “brilliant lawyers” when Ms. Welker asked whether, as president, he needed to “uphold the Constitution of the United States.”
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Again. How is the Trump administration different from a white supremacist group? Hard to tell.
Slate, Thomas Silverstein, 4 May 2025: Trump Just Issued an Executive Order Aimed at Decimating the Civil Rights Act of 1964
This is a bit technical. It’s not about laws that are explicitly discriminatory; it’s about indirect consequences.
If a policy harms members of one group much more than others and if there is no good reason for the policy, it violates the law.
With the example of Griggs v. Duke Power Co.
Prohibiting practices like that is the sort of fundamentally fair, commonsense approach to rooting out systemic racism at which the Trump administration has taken aim through its Orwellian “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy” executive order, published last month. The executive order calls for the repeal of agencies’ disparate impact regulations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and demands vague “appropriate action” (presumably dismissal) with respect to pending enforcement proceedings under other laws like the Fair Housing Act. The order proceeds from the baseless assumption that compliance with civil rights laws that allow for disparate impact claims is achieved by taking something away from members of another group.
Again this is a bit abstruse. And so conservatives, since they don’t really believe in civil rights (for blacks) at all, are against it.
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We’re coming up on the 250th anniversary or the United States, next year. And Trump is already planning.
Guardian, Robert Tait, 4 May 2025: Historians alarmed as Trump seeks to rewrite US story for 250th anniversary, subtitled “Ignorance no barrier as president begins to put out approved version of history that ignores American failures”
But this kind of thing has happened throughout history. And today’s media perhaps makes it easier to do.
Under an executive order issued in January, the president has started to churn out his own approved version of US history that professional historians fear will resort to the tried and tested authoritarian playbook of airbrushing out inconvenient and inglorious chapters that do not align with his vision of American greatness.
“He is not now and never has been a student of history, but is basically a restorationist,” said Jonathan Alter, a historian and biographer of several US presidents, including Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama and Franklin Roosevelt. Alter described a “restorationist” as a “political figure who operates on the politics of nostalgia”.
“He’s ignorant of economic history, he’s ignorant of political history. And his idea for the 250 is to use it as a way to celebrate him,” Alter added. “We don’t know yet exactly how he’ll hijack that event next year, but he will certainly try to do so.”
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Linus is home, with a cone on his head, and we’re keeping him in our bedroom for two weeks. He’ll be fine. I’ll post some pictures soon.
