Donald Trump’s behavior is so far outside the norm that many people (including mental health professionals) have suggested that he is mentally ill. The most common suggestions I’ve seen are that he suffers from narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), antisocial personality disorder (ASPD, also known as sociopathy), or a combination of the two (known as malignant narcissism). There is also widespread concern about cognitive decline.
I looked up the diagnostic criteria for NPD and ASPD, and it’s shocking how many of the boxes Trump ticks. Here are the criteria for NPD according to the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual, the DSM-5-TR:
Narcissistic Personality Disorder (301.81 [F60.81])
Diagnostic Criteria
A pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more) of the following:
- Has a grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).
- Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.
- Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).
- Requires excessive admiration.
- Has a sense of entitlement (i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations).
- Is interpersonally exploitative (i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends).
- Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.
- Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.
- Shows arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes.
I would argue that Trump meets all 9 of those criteria. Only 5 are required for an NPD diagnosis.
Here are the criteria for ASPD:
Antisocial Personality Disorder (301.7 [F60.2])
Diagnostic Criteria
A. A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, occurring since age 15 years, as indicated by three (or more) of the following:
- Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest.
- Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure.
- Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead.
- Irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults.
- Reckless disregard for safety of self or others.
- Consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations.
- Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.
B. The individual is at least age 18 years.
C. There is evidence of Conduct Disorder with onset before age 15 years.
D. The occurrence of antisocial behavior is not exclusively during the course of Schizophrenia or a manic episode.
I’d say that Trump meets all of the numbered criteria except #4. Only 3 are needed for an ASPD diagnosis. He’s certainly irritable and aggressive, but I haven’t heard reports of any physical altercations. He meets criteria B and D, but I don’t know enough about his early life to comment on criterion C, which is Conduct Disorder.
Anyway, the point is not whether Trump would qualify for a formal diagnosis. Diagnosis or no, any person who meets that many criteria for both NPD and ASPD is manifestly unfit for office.
colewd:
You’ve made similar references to “bias”, “propaganda”, “personal ideology”, etc.
In the mouth of an honest person, those words would mean something like the following:
Said honest person, when challenged, would proceed to present those facts and prove that their interlocutors were, in fact, biased promulgators of leftist propaganda. They would prove the point rather than relying on it as an excuse not to engage.
You haven’t done that. Why? Where are all the refutations? Don’t you have confidence in your position? And if you don’t, why are you accusing us of uninformed bias?
keiths,
Maybe you should review your evaluation methods if he turns out to be a very effective President.
Your ideology is a main cause of the list you came up with. Its you cognitive filter.
Allan Miller,
If you call out a lazy label and then continue to use them most charitably its not a good look.
You appear to be pro Pharma. Is this correct? Did you work in the industry? Trump was behind the Covid vaccines getting out to market rapidly. Do you really think they are not without severe issues. Do you think given the rush they were really studied satisfactorily.
RFK junior does not seem like a bad guy and appears passionate about Americas health. He may not always be right but it appears his heart is in the right place.
colewd:
He’s already been judged the worst president of all time by historians and other scholars who study presidents for a living. I showed you the numbers already. “You just wait and see!” doesn’t cut it when we’ve already waited and we’ve already seen.
Yes! My list is a reflection of my ideology and my values. I sincerely, in my heart of hearts, believe that
Do you actually disagree with any of those? Tell us which ones. They’re numbered for your convenience.
I think you’re on shaky ground here, given that you are an extensive user of lazy labels. Your accusation of hypocrisy rather backfires. Although in this instance, ‘antivaxxer’ is no more a lazy label than ‘dog’. Sure there are big ones, small ones, yappy ones, calm ones, but there is no need to write an essay when a word conveys general meaning.
No, and no. Pharma can engage in shady practice.
Mmmm, that’s spin. There were numerous vaccine candidates in development across the globe. In the UK, we started with AstraZeneca, and I believe we licensed Pfizer ahead of the US.
There are issues. Not sure what ‘severe’ would mean. There’s certainly a lot of amateur anecdotal chatter about it, but not much data.
No corners were cut. Much time in traditional vaccine development is spent with papers on someone’s desk waiting for the wheels to grind or funding to be approved for the next stage.
People fondly imagine we wait years just to see if anyone dies from trials. The reality is, no amount of waiting would have found the myocarditis and pericarditis found in post-marketing monitoring. Their frequency was too low for the size of trial.
He’s a misinformation-peddling ignoramus, responsible for a lot of harmful vaccine hesitancy. It was fun to see him roasted in Congress.
Allan Miller,
I have stopped how about you do the same? Antivax is a classic lazy label.
Mmmm, that’s spin. There were numerous vaccine candidates in development across the globe. In the UK, we started with AstraZeneca, and I believe we licensed Pfizer ahead of the US.
Trump drove the US FDA approval process a key point of legitimacy.
Allan” Lazy Label” Miller strikes again. A truly mindless retort by you.
Both Trump and Kennedy are out of the box thinkers. Does this make you uncomfortable?
Twice as many vaxes in the US as UK prior to age 12. Who is right or are we over vaxing.
https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5LWNvcHk%3D_9fd7ef2c-3307-493e-9738-32ca142f55b3
No, it’s a general term for someone who campaigns against some or all vaccines. “TDS” is intended to portray critics as irrational, whereas ‘antivax’ just means opposed to (some) vaccines. Which they are.
How is this not antivax? What should I have prefixed “RFK” with to convey my meaning that his vaccine views are significantly opposed to Trump’s, yet he put him in charge at HHS?
I calls ’em as I sees ’em. He butchers science at every turn. He is, after all, a lawyer, with no relevant qualifications. I don’t know why you put him on a pedestal (same with Trump, really).
Don’t be silly. If someone talks crap, I’ll call it out, however much people value maverickness for its own sake. David Icke is an out-of-the-box thinker too. It isn’t necessarily a virtue.
I’d tend to ask the paediatricians what they think. Rather than sack everyone.
Allan:
colewd:
Your irony blindness is remarkable, Bill. Here’s the difference between us and you: when Allan labels Kennedy a “a misinformation-peddling ignoramus”, he is correct and can back up his claim. When I label you a cult member, I am correct and can back up that claim. Labels can be correct, and those labels are. There is nothing lazy about labels that are well thought out and justified.
You, by contrast, are a lazy labeler. You’ve been throwing around unjustified labels for months, and when challenged to support them, you can’t. You just run away. I’ve asked you dozens of times by now to identify anything I’ve said about Trump that you know to be false and that isn’t backed up by the facts. I’m still waiting.
“TDS” is a lazy label, an excuse you use for not facing our arguments. Our labels aren’t lazy, and unlike you, we don’t use them as excuses for running away. They’re justified, and we can back them up. Kennedy is indeed an ignorant peddler of misinformation (and an outright liar), and you are indeed a cult member.
Out-of-the-box thinking is fine when constrained by ethics, intelligence, and critical thinking skills. Those constraints are sorely lacking in the case of Trump and Kennedy.
Here’s just one example of why I’m so down on Kennedy (my KDS, if you will): Gardasil. He’s been campaigning against it for years; CHD is full of well-poisoning alarmism against it. “Oh, sure it’s virtually eliminated HPV-related cervical cancers, but whatabout the adjuvants, eh? WHATABOUT THE ADJUVANTS?”. By this strategy, it’s pretty certain that a proportion of girls has cancer they could have avoided.
Kennedy was a beneficiary in various lawsuits. This created Conflict of Interest during his confirmation process. So he ceded those rights to his son. His son… ! What a great way to avoid estate tax! And how does that avoid CoI?
Better IMO to donate to a hospice for terminal care.
Allan Miller,
Hi Allan
Any time you boil down a complex discussion to a single word be it anti-vaxxer, denier etc you are using a lazy label. Using lazy labels is simply a single word bald assertion. TDS or KDS simply means you don’t like those guys and because of this you dismiss them out of hand and you are not open to discussion.
Lets say your right for arguments sake in your quote above. This is not terribly relevant to the job he is doing now. I showed you the mass vaccinations going on based on CDC guidelines. Last week Bernie Sanders in a discussion with RFK indicated that most all of congress on both sides are taking large amounts of money from big Pharma. I would be surprised if this is not a global problem.
If you think the status quo of our governments is right and going well I would agree guys like Trump and Kennedy are not the right leaders because they are disrupters. On the other hand if our systems are screwed up and remaining that way then our only hope is disrupters.
Cashing out your full supply of hypocrisy, here? As I have said, it is no more a ‘lazy label’ than ‘dog’. We use collective nouns all the time, for brevity. Antivax, to me, simply means a campaigner against some or all. A collective term for all those adopting such positions. I don’t know why people bristle so. ‘TDS’ is not in the same category.
I literally just inserted ‘KDS’ as an ironic jest, before going into ..wait for it… discussion.
This is a common antivax talking point. It insinuates that the majority of physicians and politicians are motivated into doing something they know to be harmful for money, and not motivated to do good by improving health outcomes. This is a gross slur on entire professions.
I would note that the ‘Wellness’ industry from which much of this rhetoric comes is 5x the size of “Big Pharma”. Kennedy has made himself very rich from his antivax activism.
Bit of a false dichotomy there. It’s not “everything’s perfect” vs “it needs root-and-branch reform”.
And it helps if a ‘disruptor’ has a clue what they are doing.
Grok:
● Between 2017 and 2023, Kennedy earned approximately 2.2 million from CHD, despite public claims that he was not profiting from the organization.
● Additionally, Kennedy earned $856,559 in referral fees from the law firm Wisner Baum for cases, including lawsuits against Merck over the HPV vaccine Gardasil, which align with his anti-vaccine [my emphasis] advocacy.
old Grok and its lazy labels though, eh?
colewd:
That ‘discussion’…
Haha. I loved that Mini Musk cameo. Played it over again several times.
But the video makes its point.
ETA: Including Musk’s sink was a nice touch.
colewd:
The fact that a label applies is just incidental — it’s a conclusion, not an assumption. Labels aren’t the basis of our arguments, unlike of yours. Yes, the label “anti-vaxxer” applies to Kennedy, but our criticism of him isn’t based on the label, it’s based on the facts. Yes, the label “cult member” applies to you, but that isn’t the basis of our criticism of Trump, which is based on the facts.
And the labels themselves are based on facts and reason, in our case. You challenged Allan’s labeling of Kennedy, and he responded with facts. You’ve challenged my labeling of you as a cult member, and I’ve responded with facts — among others, the fact that you haven’t acknowledged a single Trump lie in this entire months-long discussion. Labels backed up by facts are not lazy, they’re justified.
Have you backed up the labels you’re tossing around, when challenged? No, because you can’t. You lazily assume them, act as if they’re true, and use them as an excuse to run away from our arguments. Example: I cite specific Trump lies, and what do you do? Do you address them? No, you just throw out a lazy label: I have TDS, that’s the only reason I’m calling Trump a liar, so you don’t need to address the evidence itself. You can just dismiss it based on the source, which you have lazily mislabeled. It’s lame, it’s old, and it isn’t fooling anyone.
Yours are bald. Ours have hair.
You’re proving my point. You disagree with our claims not because you can show that they’re wrong, but simply because you have lazily labeled us. It’s pitiful. As for not being “open to discussion”, we’ve been trying to engage you for months. We want to have these discussions, but you prevent that when you run away and start lobbing lazy labels at us.
Not every disrupter is ethically and intellectually challenged, and the smart ones know what to disrupt and what not to disrupt. We don’t need bulls in china shops like Trump and Kennedy.
colewd:
Let’s see who’s open to discussion and who isn’t. Remember my list from the tariff thread? I’m open to discussing any or all of these. Are you?
Are you “open to discussion”, or was that just a bluff?
Allan Miller,
Over a 10 year period big Pharma has contributed to the CDC and candidates. The amount to candidates is 414 million according to Grok. Do you claim that all vaccines on the market are without problems?
Bit of a non sequitur. Why are those 2 things related in your mind? As Sanders rightly says, political funding is screwed. Does that mean vaccines don’t work?
Everyone is corrupt ‘except you [RFK]’.
What makes him the only virtuous one in the village, if money inevitably makes people do Bad Things?
I’ll add that things are very much tighter in the UK. Contributions are in the hundreds of thousands range per annum, not the tens of millions ‘over there’.
I find all lobbying and the purchase of influence distasteful. But in the matter of vaccines, which vaccine is approved in the US but not in the UK? This might point to something a little less hand-wavy with respect to possible corruption.
Allan Miller,
This is a key point and where I think we can reach common ground. We have a system problem that leads to candidate problems. The democratic system has been corrupted by media and money which are also linked.
To me this is what RFK has been fighting against. Is he right or wrong about vaccines. I don’t know but as I learn more about our health system I think he has been both right and wrong depending on the case. The value he is adding is questioning the status quo when the status quo appears to have some real problems.
I agree RFK junior is human and no more virtuous than most politicians. He is a contrarian regarding health standards. Personally I think we need debate for checks and balances.
Trump doesn’t have any mental illness, unless dementia counts (and I’m not sure it should).
He’s an evil piece of shit who embodied every human sin: wrath, envy, gluttony, lust, pride, greed, and sloth. He’s stupid, ignorant, and apathetic; he’s a racist, a rapist, and a pedophile. He is the figurehead of an authoritarian fascist political movement based in white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia, and eugenics.
It is a damning indictment of the entire US political system that this pathetic shit-stain excuse of a human being was ever elected, let alone twice.
If the Christian God existed, he would burn in hell for all eternity, and so would his supporters.
Epstein’s birthday book has a Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein's_50th_birthday_greeting_album
It contains the link to the birthday book itself. Take a look and think whether any of the contributors to the book can be considered mentally healthy. Note that the contents is meant to be warm friendly memories, well-wishes and jokes.
KN:
Hi, KN. Reading between the lines, are you concerned that calling it mental illness absolves Trump of responsibility for the horrible things he’s done and is doing? That it implies that he’s really a decent guy underneath it all, and that the shitty stuff he does doesn’t come from his true self — it comes from his illness? I don’t think it gets him off the hook.
NPD and ASPD are personality disorders, and they aren’t curable. They’re different from other mental illnesses. They’re lifelong, and Trump has been like this his entire adult life. Our personalities are our true selves, and we judge people on the basis of their personalities, and that includes people whose personalities are far out of the norm, on the tails of the distribution. Trump is on the malignant end of the distribution, and that’s who he truly is, as a person. NPD and ASPD aren’t excuses, they’re characterizations.
It’s truly disturbing. There are shitty people like Trump in the world; there always have been, and there always will be. That’s just a given. What’s astonishing is that half of the American electorate actually thought it was a good idea to put one of those shitty people in the Oval Office, even after seeing eight solid years of his shittiness. A society can function with shitty people in the population, but can it function when half of the population has lost all discernment or embraced the shittiness themselves?
In the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, Trump said:
Breathtaking hypocrisy. I wonder how many MAGA folks are blind to it. Bill, can you see it?
So calling someone an evil piece of shit who should burn in hell does not count as demonization?
petrushka,
I do.
Do you recognise that you and most others posting here are also part of the problem?
colewd:
I’m happy to discuss it if you’ll point to something I’ve said that you think is problematic. Please quote my actual words, though. Don’t just toss out a lazy label.
keiths:
petrushka:
How did you make the leap from “keiths is pointing out Trump’s hypocrisy” to “keiths thinks that calling someone ‘an evil piece of shit who should burn in hell’ doesn’t count as demonization”? I’m not following your reasoning.
Also, in case you’re confused, I didn’t say that. I think Trump is a horrible person and a terrible president, and I’ve explained why, but I’ve never called him ‘an evil piece of shit who should burn in hell’.
keiths,
How in the world did the discussion get to this point? Do you not see your own accountability?
colewd,
Those are not my words. Scroll up and look at the name next to that comment.
colewd has gone from mass-misreading of Grok to mass-misquoting. He has no clue what is going on and how anything works. And, by his own words, he does not see that he is the problem.
keiths,
They are words that arose after you spent weeks bashing the President of the United States that no one can do anything about for at least a year and most likely 3 years.
Hate filled rhetoric is a likely reason a 31 year old father of 2 is dead. Someone became so angry they resorted to extreme violence.
It is time for more rational dialogue that is policy based and not based on personal attacks.
This is what we have been asking of you for half a year by now. Why do you still ignore facts, refuse reality, keep undermining expertise in everything that matters, including common sense? Why, instead of taking sources of information seriously, do you misread Grok and now misquote your fellow posters, and take no accountability for any of this?
This is not a personal attack. You have been behaving like a moron bastard hyperpartisan brainwashed hypocrite for half a year now. When will you stop? Somehow you are getting even worse now.
colewd,
Are any liberals, transsexuals, gays or people of colour dead as a result of hate-filled rhetoric? Or is it just a ‘them’ thing?
Here‘s our own Daily Telegraph fanning the flames. We don’t even know if he was left,leaning. Could have been resentful of Kirk’s altitudes for personal reasons – possibly trans .But still, it’s all our collective fault, cos we’re the intolerant ones!
I just want equitable taxation, universal healthcare, respect for minorities. Suddenly I find I killed Charlie Kirk.
Here’s a generalisation I’ll make about the Right: they often seem unable to separate individual action from the group to which they belong. I see people who see all Muslims as violent jihadis, all trans people as dangerous, all liberals as ‘intolerant’.
A parallel issue is seen here: if we express contempt for Trump, or Kirk, we’re seen to be applying that to the entirety of the Right. We aren’t. There are generalisations we may make about the right (such as this one) but that doesn’t mean we tar everyone with the same brush if we call out an individual. Calling Trump an odious oaf is not demonising the Right.
keiths:
colewd:
Seriously? You’re holding me responsible for what KN says? You think KN — a grown man, a professor of philosophy, a consumer of news, someone who thinks for a living — is incapable of forming his own opinion of Trump, independent of mine, based on his own observations? That the only reason he despises Trump is because of what I’ve said? Get real.
Even if for some reason he actually had based his opinion partly on mine, how would that make me responsible for the things he says that I don’t agree with? I don’t think Trump supporters should burn in hell. I haven’t said they should, I haven’t demonized them, and I haven’t encouraged violence against them.
Not this again. First, you’re being hypocritical. If it’s wrong to criticize Trump between elections, then it was wrong to criticize Biden between elections. Did that stop you? This has nothing to do with elections and everything to do with the sting of seeing your Dear Leader criticized. You don’t like it, you want it to stop, and the elections are just an excuse for you to make that demand.
Second, think about what a disaster it would be if citizens and the press were discouraged or forbidden from criticizing officials between elections. Holding politicians accountable is crucial to democracy, and it’s just as important between elections as it is during campaign season.
I know you like to fall back on lazy labels and vague accusations, but that won’t cut it. If you want to criticize my words as encouraging violence, then quote the words you are criticizing and we can discuss it.
We’ve been over this already:
And:
Trump is a horrible person and a terrible president, and the latter is largely because of the former. Bad character leads to bad policy and bad choices, and the country suffers as a result.
This guy is very effectively demonizing himself. Three days before the assassination of Charlie Kirk he posted the following:
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/055/214/deport.jpg
Is he being fair and balanced? Rational? Competent? Not inflammatory? Not evil?
I don’t believe that there’s any ‘true self’ underneath all of our memories, desires, habits, pathologies, etc. But my response to you was based on the assumption (perhaps erroneous on my part) that a psychiatric diagnosis gets him off the hook, morally speaking. It’s now evident that you weren’t making that assumption, so I apologize if I seemed to be critical of you on that point.
Lately I have been ruminating on the idea that moral virtue and mental health are really deep down the same thing, and that we’d be better off in our understanding of both concepts if we understood that. I like to call this “the Plato-Spinoza thesis”. (I’ve also been getting more interested in how Platonic Spinoza is, and Spinoza is one of my all-time favorites, so there’s that too.)
My understanding of the 2024 electoral data is that about 30% of all eligible voters voted for Trump. About 29% voted for Harris, and the rest either didn’t vote or voted for a third party.
So there’s only a 1 point difference between Trump and Harris, and “none of the above” was significantly more popular than either of them.
I don’t see how it can function when the very worst people have so much power. I don’t just mean Trump, who is more of a figurehead at this point than anything else, but also the whole cabal: Rubio, Miller, McMahon, Noem, Hesgeth, Kennedy Jr., Bondi, Vought, Vance. Not to mention the Christian white nationalists in Congress and the authoritarian apologists on the Supreme Court.
If “demonization” is supposed to be another word for “dehumanization,” or a kind of dehumanization, then no.
Dehumanization is when someone is described as being less than fully human. This usually involves describing them as being like nonhuman beings: as animals, vermin, filth, plague, pestilence, rats, cockroaches, etc. To dehumanize someone is to describe them as lacking some essentially human characteristics, and as a consequence they fall below the minimal standard of care and respect that anyone deserves as a human being.
Demonization is a variety of this, because demons were never human and cannot know redemption. Depending on one’s theology, they were either created as permanently and essentially evil, or they were angels that rebelled against God. (Augustine argues that they rebelled against God at the very moment of their creation. They never stood a chance!)
Trump is a wicked, depraved person, but he’s a human being. His variety of fascism is pretty much what one would expect if someone who had only known the absolute power of being a CEO of a privately owned company were given control of a national government. He’s always been surrounded by people who either kiss his ass in order to win his favor or else people whose asses he wants to kiss in order to win their favor.
In 1939, with World War II well underway and the outcome by no means certain, the American philosopher John Dewey wrote that democracy is a way of life exemplified in how people encounter each other in public spaces to amicably discuss the issues of the day that affect them all.
And while there is perhaps something quaint in this New England, town hall image of democratic deliberation, I don’t think he’s wrong.
And by that standard, Trump’s entire way of life is deeply, fundamentally opposed to Dewey’s ideal of deliberate democracy. Because deliberative democracy requires treating others as equals in the space of reasons, who can disagree with you on the basis of reasoning. Trump bullies, cajoles, mocks, and humiliates anyone who doesn’t share his narrow-minded view of the world and who doesn’t delight in cruelty as he does.
It might be thought interesting how a democratic society can democratically reject democracy itself. But this happened a few times in classical Athens — enough, anyway, that Plato argued that democracies are the second-worst form of government because democracies always devolve into tyrannies. And it has happened a few times since then — in 1930s Germany, and now in 20202s America.
Allan Miller,
So a 31 year old father is dead and no one here is doing self reflection that outward political hate may be a problem. There are alternative ways to win elections. Your point about hate on the right is valid but who is going to take the initiative to tone down the rhetoric?
Has the lazy label grok man done any self reflection? Or this guy?
Be the change you want to see. Your own rhetoric is not particularly hateful, but you don’t seem to recognise hatred from your own side. Kirk appeared to embody hatred of people of colour, the Left, of gays and transsexuals. Trump is very hate-filled, as are most prominent Republicans. The Left is reviled at every turn, and every one of us deemed culpable. It’s ironic that the party of gun control is deemed to have pulled the trigger. What is this but propaganda?
Allan Miller,
Hi Allan
Kirk appeared……
No this was a great kid. Your opinion is based on misinformation. He showed extreme empathy for all he came in contact with. I had a very close friend ( passed away 2 years ago) that worked with him.
Again, your point about Trump is correct and that is why I have empathy for those who do not like him. I prefer his policies to the alternative….hard stop.
Allan Miller,
Hi Allan
Kirk appeared……
No this was a great kid. Your opinion is based on misinformation. He showed extreme empathy for all he came in contact with. I had a very close friend ( passed away 2 years ago) that worked with him.
Again, your point about Trump is correct and that is why I have empathy for those who do not like him. I prefer his policies to the alternative….hard stop.
He explicitly rejected empathy. But no, I base my opinion of him on his words. You seem to think your opponents lack basic intelligence, and simply sit consuming what the media feeds them.
Yes, I get that you prefer someone hateful to whatever ills you think Kamala would have perpetuated. Weird, but it’s your opinion.
Allan Miller,
What words do you have that you know are real? Charlie Kirk was not hard to understand. The characterisation you implied is not Charlie.
More importantly…
https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1966517269812408324
Your words Allan. We are all hateful to some degree given the right circumstances.
Well, the words I have heard him speak.
Guess I’ve been fooled by deepfakes, eh? No other possible explanation.
Cough! J6! Take your damn blinkers off.
You agreed with me. I took that to mean you agreed his rhetoric is hateful. “We are all hateful sometimes”, but Trump has made it his personality.
Allan Miller,
What words? Where did you hear him speak?
More than the commenters here?
What purpose would be served? We’ve all seen how impervious you are to criticism of your heroes.
Yes.