“Trump speaks from the heart.” For months, Mr. Trump’s supporters have been leaning hard on those words to turn his vengefulness and vigilantism into a virtue.
.. Casting Mr. Trump’s incitements to xenophobia and violence as heartfelt evidently makes them slightly less terrifying. A through-line of the convention has been to set up a powerful antagonism between “political correctness,” the province of the hypocritical, intellectual and weak-willed, and “speaking from the heart,” as a province of … Donald Trump.
.. I’m going to speak from the heart tonight.”
The phrase sounds smarmy. It compromises the Republican Party’s usual claim of hardheadedness over and against the bleeding-heart emotionalism of the other party.
But it’s probably the only possible rhetorical move of the Trump campaign.
.. It’s become impossible for Mr. Trump’s supporters to lend reason or logic to his vendettas, daft misogyny, thoroughgoing racism and bloodlust. Instead, they advertise it as lovable.
Why is everyone surprised Ted Cruz didn’t endorse Trump
But why is everyone so surprised? Trump nicknames him “Lyin’ Ted,” argues he’s a Canadian ineligible for the presidency, retweets an image mocking his wife’s appearance, and suggests his dad had a role in killing JFK, and never apologizes for any of it . . . and the Trump team is surprised Cruz didn’t endorse him?
Donald Trump May Break the Mold, but He Fits a Pattern, Too
Historians see in Mr. Trump’s candidacy the winding together of different strains in reactionary politics under a single banner. No reality television star has run for president before, but Mr. Trump, with his grasp of the art of notoriety, has forebears of a kind in General MacArthur and Charles A. Lindbergh, the celebrity aviator whose “America First” slogan Mr. Trump has appropriated, and in Hearst and Henry Ford, a pair of renowned and eccentric tycoons who eyed the presidency.
.. His message contains echoes of George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who sought the White House on a law-and-order platform, and of Mr. Perot and Lee A. Iacocca, modern industrialists drawn to politics and preoccupied with economic threats from Asia and Latin America.
Viewed from this angle, Mr. Trump looks less like a singular phenomenon of 2016, and more like the political equivalent of a comet that crosses the track of an American presidential campaign every few decades.
“We’ve seen everything in Trump before,” said Kevin Kruse, a political historian at Princeton, “but we’ve never seen it all together at once.”
.. He spoke approvingly of the Chinese government’s brutal crackdown in Tiananmen Square.
.. When a reporter referred to America First in an interview, Mr. Trump embraced it as a campaign catchphrase. The slogan, which dates to the 1930s, was first popularized by Lindbergh as he warned against being drawn into World War II by what he described as sinister British and Jewish interests.
.. Neera Tanden, the group’s president, said Mr. Trump was “very consistently a national socialist.”
“His signature policies are about the state that works for some groups and not for others,” she said.
.. Even some of Mr. Trump’s former opponents have begun to allow that he might be more than an accident of history.
Donald Trump: Sociopath?
Taking his biographer’s claim seriously
Tony Schwartz, the writer of the best-selling book, said that he “genuinely believe[s] that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes, there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”
.. I’m not here to be Trump’s doctor. He has a doctor, and his name is Harold Bornstein—the fellow who wrote in his official doctor’s note, “I can state unequivocally [that Trump] will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”
.. And in the context of an election where Trump has repeatedly, strategically branded people with single words that seem to have proven influential—“Little Marco,” “Lyin’ Ted,” and “Crooked Hillary”—would “Sociopathic Donald” be an intellectually honest equivalent?.. different people define the terms differently, with understandings converging around the feature of lacking “a conscience.”.. Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which the Mayo Clinic defines by “an inflated sense of [one’s] own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others. But behind this mask of ultra-confidence lies a fragile self-esteem that’s vulnerable to the slightest criticism.”.. He had tweeted about me frequently in the weeks following its publication—often at odd hours, sometimes multiple times a day—denouncing me as a “dishonest slob” and “true garbage with no credibility,”Coppins recalls. “For two years, Trump continued to rant about how I’m a scumbag, or a loser, or ‘just another phony guy.’”.. Manipulativeness: Frequent use of subterfuge to influence or control others; use of seduction, charm, glibness, or ingratiation to achieve one’s ends... Steve Becker, a psychotherapist who specializes in Narcissistic Personality Disorder, has written that “we’ve reached the point where we expect our politicians to behave like psychopaths.” We view psychopathic traits as acceptable, perhaps necessary, and even advantageous attributes of politicians... some thought it telling that when Melania Trump spoke of her husband on Monday night, she delivered an endorsement that could have come from anyone. She said nothing of him as a husband, lover, or father to her child—the insight that many were hoping she would provide. On Tuesday, his daughter Tiffany was somewhat more illustrative, saying that her father would write notes to her on her report card... In one incident, he sent The New York Times’ Gail Collins a copy of her column, having circled her photo and scrawled “The Face of a Dog!”