Gryzemuis on 27/11/2020 at 09:59
I'm not sure Trump really believes that himself.
I think he's just playing his strategy till the end: "Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth".
Which, btw, is a sentence attributed to Joseph Goebbels.
demagogue on 27/11/2020 at 10:14
No, he's almost certainly a person with malignant Narcissist Personality Disorder, so his power of will is limited to non-existent in this domain.
Now we've had this discussion before. NPD isn't a neurological issue like its fellow cluster B cohorts, like Borderline, Histrionic, and Anti-social Personality Disorders, I mean in the sense that brain areas have literally atrophied so that the threshold for signals in emotional areas is really low and they go runaway much more easily. But it's still clearly toying with the frontal lobe and frontal medial lobe in particular, the parts connected with addictive behavior. (Mary Trump said he definitely meets the DSM criteria for NPD, but may be comorbid with a few others.)
Even if NPD isn't a strict "mental illness", it's clearly an established psychological profile or pattern. And in terms of power to break out of it, it's akin to someone addicted to some very addictive narcotic where they lose all will power, to the point of hands shaking pushing the needle in as the tears stream out and they groan "no~", except in his case it's the endorphin hit he gets from "supply", people praising him, and the loss of supply is more devastating than his ego can handle.
So I agree that he'll go to his grave believing there was massive fraud because, the intolerable of intolerables, he doesn't exist if there wasn't. There's no strategy to it. His frontal lobe-amygdala axis is crying out with such a relentless and unyielding banshee shriek of rage and disintegration that it's absurd to think he can get a single word of free will in edgewise. I don't think he ever has in his life. Since he was 13 years old, he's been desperately reacting to that shrieking for dear life every minute of every day since. I mean, watch him. Once you see it, you'll never unsee it.
Pyrian on 27/11/2020 at 19:44
Ah, yes, the best way to push back against being called immature is to throw a tantrum about it.
R Soul on 29/11/2020 at 11:02
Why is a defeated president allowed to do anything at all? Not just Trump, but any of them? I've searched for that on Google but the results are all the usual copycat articles from a few months ago all speculating about what would happen if the thing that is now happening actually happened.
demagogue on 29/11/2020 at 11:38
I mean his term is not over until mid-January, constitutionally, so he's still the legal president until then. We call a president in the time between an election loss (or the election before the end of their 2nd term) and when they leave a "lame duck", which just means while they're still legally president, politically they don't have power to do much of anything, I mean in a normal period. Trump is a bit of a special case because he's created this cult of personality that doesn't care about political (or any) reality.
SubJeff on 29/11/2020 at 11:52
Quote Posted by R Soul
Why is a defeated president allowed to do anything at all? Not just Trump, but any of them?
So wait, in your country (wherever that is) they just frogmarch the loser out and the winner just moves in?
wtf?
R Soul on 29/11/2020 at 13:16
I'm sure we come from the same country. I can't recall the timescales but unless my perception's wrong the transition is quite swift. Recenetly of course we've not had a change of governing party, just PM and new ministers etc, so that sort of thing may drag on a bit, but I'm sure if it's a change of party the PM resigns immediately and there's no faffing around.
I can understand the situation in the U.S. was only allowed because it didn't occur to anyone that the office would be held by a broken diabolical cretin. Maybe Biden could set up some safeguards to legally curtail presidential power in such circumstances.
demagogue on 29/11/2020 at 13:20
The transition used to take until April! Then they updated it to January after railroads were invented. Even that's now absurdly long by today's standards, but the thing is, to change the rule you have to amend the constitution, which means there has to be a referendum in like every state and something like 2/3 of them have to vote for it. It's such a massive hassle, mid-January just kind of stuck.
