On a single day during the campaign, Trump claimed that the National Football League had sent him a letter complaining that the presidential-debate schedule conflicted with NFL games (which the NFL immediately denied), and then he said the Koch brothers had begged him to accept their donations (which they also flat-out denied).
Most people would hesitate before telling easily disprovable lies like these, much as shoplifters would hesitate if the store owner is looking at them. Most people are fazed if caught in an outright lie. But in these cases and others, Trump never blinked.
.. For instance: Bill Clinton survived “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” but he was damaged then, and lastingly, when the truth came out. To close the loop, knowledge of the risks of being caught has encouraged most politicians to minimize provable lies.
None of this works with Donald Trump. He doesn’t care, and at least so far the institutional GOP hasn’t either.
.. I highly recommend this new essay by Ned Resnikoff at the Think Progress site. It explains the chaos-generating logic of Trump’s seemingly illogical stream of nonstop lies big and small, which Resnikoff traces to reality TV, to Breitbart and Steve Bannon, and to Vladimir Putin’s advisor Vladislav Surkov.
.. If the United States is to remain a liberal democracy, then Trump’s non-linear warfare needs to fail. Politics needs to once again become grounded in some kind of stable, shared reality.
.. Journalists need to understand what Trump is doing and refuse to play by his rules. He is going to use the respect and deference typically accorded to the presidency as an instrument for spreading more lies. Reporters must refuse to treat him like a normal president and refuse to bestow any unearned legitimacy on his administration.
They must also give up their posture of high-minded objectivity — and, along with it, any hope of privileged access to the Trump White House. The incoming president has made clear that he expects unquestioning obedience from the press, and will regard anyone who doesn’t give it to him as an enemy.
.. But there are common-sense meanings for terms to describe behavior, which we can use without relying on a medical diagnosis. We can say someone seems cruel without saying he’s a psychopath; that he seems amoral without claiming he’s a sociopath; that he seems moody or depressed without implying a clinical diagnosis. And in common-sense terms, anyone can see that Trump’s behavior is narcissistic, regardless of underlying cause.
.. Nobody seems to realize that normal rules do not apply when you are interviewing a narcissist. You can’t go about this in the way you were trained, because he is an expert at manipulating the very rules you learned. It’s clear to me that reporters (and anyone else) who will deal with DT directly need to take a crash course in handling someone displaying these behaviors.
..
The Times got in trouble by trying to make sense of his words. It’s an easy mistake for people in a word-saturated medium to make, but anyone who’s dealt with a narcissist knows you never, ever believe what they say—because they will say whatever the person they are talking to wants to hear. DT is a master at phrasing things vaguely enough that multiple listeners will be able to hear exactly what they want. It isn’t word salad; it’s overt deception, which is much more pernicious.
.. someone needs to teach reporters the difference between naming narcissism—[JF note: which, to emphasize, there is no point doing]— vs. dealing effectively with a narcissist.
There’s a ton of information out there about how to deal with narcissists.
Simmons vs. Gladwell: The Future of Football
Sagging ratings, national controversy, horrifying head injuries, shameless greed: The conversation about the NFL has officially changed. Is it too late to fix it?
By Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell
NFL Teams Threaten to Leave over Stadium Subsidies
The N.F.L. owners voted this week to let the billionaire owner of the St. Louis Rams move his team to just outside Los Angeles, a move consistent with this league’s tear-’em-up, toss-’em-out ethos.
The players know this drill. Fall out of favor with a coach? Take too long to recover from an injury? Unless you’re an N.F.L. star, you have a problem.
Garry Gillam, a behemoth of a man, offered a stirring story as he went from an undrafted player to starting at tackle for the Seattle Seahawks. He signed a three-year, $1.5 million contract.
However, if in the next game he misses a few blocks or gets nicked up and his coaches tire of him, Seattle could release him and pay just the guaranteed portion of his contract, which is to say $12,000.
.. The N.F.L. has baroque rules of self-governance, not the least covering how it splits revenue. Owners all share in television and general ticket revenue. But luxury boxes are pure gold, and a team’s owner doesn’t have to share a penny of that revenue with the owners of other teams.
This has led to an arms race, as owners seek to build ever-grander stadiums with ever-more-luxurious boxes.
“Concussion” Makes a Christian Argument Against Football
Last January, after the Seattle Seahawks staged an improbable comeback to beat the Green Bay Packers in the N.F.C. Championship Game, the Seahawks’ quarterback Russell Wilson told the football writer Peter King, “That’s God setting it up, to make it so dramatic, so rewarding, so special.” Wilson’s statement was a next-level version of the “all thanks to God” quotes that players regularly give to sideline reporters in the afterglow of a big win—God had not merely given him the strength to do the things he had practiced all his life but, in Wilson’s telling, had arranged the events of the game to provide for the greatest amount of narrative satisfaction. A day later, the Packers’ quarterback Aaron Rodgers, during a radio interview, offered a competing view. “I don’t think God cares a whole lot about the outcome,” he said. “He cares about the people involved, but I don’t think he’s a big football fan.”
The Lord, of course, works in mysterious ways. Two weeks later, following the Seahawks’ stunning loss to the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl, Wilson said that God had spoken to him in the moment after he threw the interception that lost his team the game, and explained that he had ordered the misfortune as a test. (I suspect that the Patriots’ cornerback, Malcolm Butler, has a different take on the event’s authorship.) Then, this past September, after the Packers beat the Seahawks in a regular-season rematch, Rodgers smirked during his post-game press conference and said, clearly trolling Wilson, “I think God was a Packer fan tonight.”
.. Omalu thought that the N.F.L. would be grateful to be alerted about a potential health crisis facing its players and would be eager to collaborate on further study; instead, three doctors employed by the league, part of a committee that had commissioned studies finding no clear links between football and lasting brain damage, wrote a letter to the journal questioning Omalu’s methodology and findings, and demanding that the paper be retracted.
.. Omalu’s boss at the Allegheny County coroner’s office explains the stakes of his discovery by saying that Omalu has gone to war with a corporation that owns an entire day of the week, a day which, he adds, used to belong to the church. In this way, football is presented as America’s secular religion, one that has replaced traditional faith with hedonistic entertainment.
.. But as a polemic, this evangelical argument is interesting and novel, suggesting that football’s dangers are not merely physical, but spiritual as well. This might be the movie’s most subversive message: not that the N.F.L. stood in the way of scientific research about the health of its players but that it occupies a false place within the religious and patriotic beliefs of so many of its fans, whose Sabbath routines are timed perfectly so that Sunday service ends just in time for kickoff.