Lot of denial and massive compartmentalization going on in his head, I guess. And probably some prescribed drugs. But his preoccupations so often overwhelm him: those rambling rally speeches and the campaign-era "responses" to questions during editorial board interviews with mainstream media, wow.
His obsessions are myriad. From all casual memoirs revealed to us so far, he drove his staffers nuts when they were trying to get him to focus on the tasks then at hand, on any day when he'd already been triggered somehow into pulling some pet peeve out of his treasure box.
He must be pure hell to manage as a legal client. All they can do though is take the money and try to remember how not to get disbarred in the process of resisting his Pied Piper ways of taking just about anyone down rabbit holes they couldn't have imagined half an hour prior to sitting down with him.
Look at Rudy… a former big-time federal prosecutor for the SDNY and mayor of the biggest city in America. He knows better. He’s got himself banned from practicing law and now is just as crazy as Trump. Michael Flynn, John Eastman…
These aren’t idiots. They didn’t get to where they are by being stupid; that came after being drawn into Trump’s orbit.
It has to be a combination of gaining power by being close to the president, their ego and belief that white collar crime - at least when perpetrated by
them - isn’t criminal. Who knows what goes on in their mind, but it’s way beyond the usual political games of semantics and war of words.
And each time Trump has been given a pass, even for things that aren’t criminal but just deplorable in general - whether it’s his mishandling of COVID and not supporting people like his justice department or impartial figures like Dr. Fauci, refusing to do anything to bring people together but denigrating minorities, unveiling sensitive info to Russians and always praising authoritarian leaders, hiring his unqualified family members as White House advisors, letting scum like Bannon and Miller onto the taxpayer-funded payrolls… why wouldn’t Trump think he can get away with this?
Hell, when Trump turns on Fox News and sees them disparaging the FBI and treating his crimes as if it’s routine presidential business, when he sees Newsmax and OAN exist almost solely as tribute channels to himself, and he sees rank and file conservative members of congress trip over each other to defend his actions and disparage the DoJ
before they even know what those actions are, it’s no wonder he continues pushing the boundaries of norms, ethics and laws.
Trump crossed the threshold from celebrity who did a good job hiding his stupidity to narcissist, racist moron sometime during the Obama administration, and by the 2016 primaries it was clear to the rest of the world he was a buffoon who was unfit to serve and would probably commit every bad act under the sun and abuse his office any way he saw fit.
Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham had Trump pegged exactly right when they were running against him, but that was fleeting truth to benefit themselves. Once their opportunity was gone, they quickly fell in line. Mitt Romney tried to warn the party, but even his backbone is brittle at best. Rand Paul and Cruz have shown their libertarian facades were just that - facades. They’re just MAGA cultists masquerading as constitutional conservatives. If Trump wanted to take people’s guns by military force they’d walk back everything they’ve ever said about the second amendment.
All this is to say, we have watched the GOP transform into a cult over the last decade or so. The good thing is, cults almost always self-destruct and become victims of their own making. I fully expect that to happen here.
It’s funny that Trump has done the same things he accuses mobs of doing. And just like mobs in real life, or in the movies, they have a good run, then end with people turning on each other, having a mole in their midst, being raided by the FBI…
What we are witnessing is a political/white collar version of Casino or Goodfellas.
he can't just snap his fingers to do it. there is a process and the documents would be stamped saying they are de classified. I love the whoops the GOP are jumping through to justify this when they went apeshit about HC's emails its amazing really.
Absolutely. I only use the theoreticals to point out that even if you grant Trump some of the arguments he’ll try to make, it doesn’t absolve him. It’s like saying the bank made a huge error and wiped out thousands of dollars in my savings account, when they didn’t, and using the excuse to rob their vault at gunpoint. Even if they made an error, that doesn’t give me the right to rob them. The fact that there is no proof such an error exists makes my robbery that much worse. This is Trump’s case - his ability to declassify certain things doesn’t make it happen by that virtue alone, and even if it did, it doesn’t grant him the right to hide documents and defy federal subpoenas.
