Thus, the question is whether Trump is hiding something, an obvious inference, or whether his observably narcissistic personality means he can’t tolerate even the suggestion that he may be at fault. The narcissist’s first instinct is always to blame others. Combined with his excessive need for admiration, another narcissistic trait, it is conceivable that Trump punches back as a function of a personality disorder.
.. Life teaches us that untrustworthy people or people lacking personal integrity always suspect that others are the same.
.. In these instances when Trump has felt threatened, he has fired or sought to fire investigative chiefs and has apparently pressured others to either end probes or, in Sessions’s case, pressured implicitly to intercede. None of this is proof he has done anything wrong. In fact, some would say he has acted well within his powers and has the right to drain the swamps as alligators permit.
But you’d be a damned fool not to conclude that Donald Trump has something to hide.
Sorry, Harvey Weinsteins of America: The panty party is over
Ailes knew his audience of mostly white, middle-aged men and sold them what they apparently wanted — ample leg and hint of bosom topped off with bee-stung lips and baby-doll eyes. No matter how many advanced degrees the Fox News women have, Ailes set the stage for female objectification and created a prime-time bonanza that relied on implicit and complicit exploitation. As long as everyone was living large, nobody complained.
.. To say that these women, some barely in their 20s at the time, should have just said no and walked out is to misunderstand the power dynamic between a young, inexperienced woman and a powerful, physically imposing boss.
So about that ‘sexual revolution in the Republican Party’. . .
Hefner, who validated the objectification of women by embedding their sexualized bodies between the more-respectable pages of first-rate writing, embraced and championed libertinism and materialism. “Bad boy” behavior — philandering, licentiousness and exploitation — was re-imagined and sold as “freedom,”
.. Perpetually stalled in adolescence, he was an early advocate of the socially debased trends Moore saw as having led to the unraveling of the American family.
.. the current president of the United States may be Hefner’s most sterling achievement. Donald Trump, who has surrounded himself with material excess and women worthy of male admiration, is both protege and prototype, the essential playboy who has acquired wealth and glamour — and boasts that he can do whatever he wants to women.
.. For the president, religion is a convenience — until it’s not. Bannon, though no saint, is a Catholic who respects church doctrine, by his own admission, and is a street fighter for the hard-right.
In Alabama, he, too, defeated Trump... But the standoff between Bannon and Trump via Moore and Strange may foretell the future of the GOP, which can’t survive without its Southern Christian base. Ironically, Hefner, who put Trump on his magazine’s cover in 1990, penned an essay when the thrice-married reality TV star secured the GOP presidential nomination, defeating Ted Cruz, a pastor’s son. To Hefner, this victory signified “massive changes in the ‘family values party’ ” and was “proof of . . . a sexual revolution in the Republican Party.”