Kelly in Crazytown
On a different (yet oddly similar in some ways) subject, John Kelly knew Trump is a psycho.
Donald Trump’s White House chief of staff secretly bought a book in which 27 mental health professionals warned that the president was psychologically unfit for the job, then used it as a guide in his attempts to cope with Trump’s irrational behavior.
News of John Kelly’s surreptitious purchase comes in a new book from Peter Baker of the New York Times and Susan Glasser of the New Yorker. The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy.
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[Kelly’s] struggles to impose order on Trump and his underlings and his virulent falling out with the president have been extensively documented. According to Baker and Glasser, who interviewed Kelly, the retired Marine Corps general bought a copy of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump as he “sought help to understand the president’s particular psychoses and consulted it while he was running the White House, which he was known to refer to as ‘Crazytown’”. “
Kelly told others that the book was a helpful guide to a president he came to consider a pathological liar whose inflated ego was in fact the sign of a deeply insecure person.”
Came to consider? How did he not know that all along?
The authors report that Kelly’s view was shared by unnamed senior officials, quoting one as saying: “I think there’s something wrong with [Trump]. He doesn’t listen to anybody, and he feels like he shouldn’t. He just doesn’t care what other people say and think. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Same. I’ve seen plenty of people who don’t care enough, but not people who don’t care at all.
I think he cares in a way, otherwise he’d be less prone to childish tantrums, but his complete lack of humility is phenomenal. No one matters but him — Plato’s ideal narcissistic moron.
I think he cares what other people think about him, with his tendency to fly into a rage whenever someone says something less than worshipful of him. He just doesn’t care what they think in any other way, because, as twiliter said, no one matters (and nothing matters) except him.
The APA skewered any psychiatrist/mental health professional who offered any warning/insight into how dangerous Trump was/is. Bandy Lee, who was the force behind this book, lost her position at Yale. I hope she sees this and realizes that her sacrifice wasn’t in vain. If that book gave Kelly a blueprint for how to keep Trump in check, the world owes her a great debt.
It’s unfortunate that none of these people whom Trump fired took the opportunity of their dismissal (when they would have a media spotlight on them, perhaps for the last time), to publicly state that Trump was a dangerous, unstable nutcase. Not that most of us didn’t know that already, but it would have dialed back the normalization of his behaviour if one of his many ex-cabinet officials had been civic-minded enough to put the interests of the Republic ahead of their book deals.