The Previous President and Neuroreality, Chapter 24, webpage 3, continued

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TRUMP'S TRUST DEFICIT IS THE CORE PROBLEM

GAIL SHEEHY, PH.D.

The fundamental bedrock of human development is the formation of a capacity to trust, absorbed by children between birth and eighteen months. Donald Trump has boasted of his total lack of trust: "People are too trusting. I'm a very untrusting guy" (1990). "Hire the best people, and don't trust them" (2007). "The world is a vicious and brutal place. Even your friends are out to get you: they want your job, your money, your wife" (2007).

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His biographers have recorded his worldview as saturated with a sense of danger and his need to project total toughness. As we know, his father trained him to be a "killer"' the only alternative to being a "loser." Trump has never forgotten the primary lesson he Iearned from his father and at the military school to which he was sent to be toughened up still further. In Trump's own words, "Man is the most vicious of all animals, and life is a series of battles ending in victory or defeat."

In the the biography Never Enough, Trump describes to Michael D’Antonio his father's "dragging him" around tough neighborhoods in Brooklyn when he collected the rents for the apartments he owned. Fred Trump always told the boy to stand to one side of the door. Donald asked why. "Because sometimes they shoot right through the door," his father told him.

Today, this man lives mostly alone in the White House, without a wife or any friends in whom to confide, which he would never do anyway, because that would require admitting vulnerability.

Leon Panetta, former CIA director and defense chief under Clinton, stated on Fox Business channel in February 2017, "The coin of the realm for any president is trust - trust of the American people in the credibility of that president." In the nearly two years that Donald Trump has been in our face almost daily, he has sown mistrust in all his Republican rivals, alienated much of the conservative Republican bloc he needs in the House for legislative success, ignored congressional Democrats, and viciously insulted Democratic leaders, calling them liars, clowns, stupid, and incompetent, and condemning Barack Obama as "sick" and Hillary Clinton as "the devil." When he represents the American people abroad, his belligerent behavior and disrespect for leaders of our closest allies rips apart the comity and peace-keeping pledges built over decades. Yet, he never hesitates to congratulate despots, such as Turkey's Erdogan, Egypt's General Sisi, and, most lavishly of all, Russia's Putin.

As president, Trump is systematically shredding trust in the institutions he now commands. Having discredited the entire seventeen-agency intelligence community as acting like Nazis, he

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also dismissed the judiciary because of one judge's Hispanic background and another's opposition to his travel [nee Muslim] ban. Even his Supreme Court justice, Neil Gorsuch, said it was "disheartening" and "demoralizing" to hear Trump disparage the judiciary. Not content to smear the media on a daily basis, Trump borrowed a phrase used by Lenin and Stalin to brand the American media as an "enemy of the people."

By his own words, Trump operates on the assumption that everyone is out to get him. The nonmedical definition of paranoia is the tendency toward excessive or irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of others. For a man who proclaims his distrust of everyone, it is not surprising that Trump drew closest to him two legendary conspiracy theorists: Stephen Bannon and Gen. Michael Flynn.

And even after he was forced to fire his choice for top national security adviser after Flynn blatantly lied, Trump's White House desperately stonewalled congressional investigators to keep them from getting their hands on documents that could prove Flynn's paid collusion with Russia on Trump's behalf. The closer that case comes to a criminal referral to the justice Department, the closer Trump's survival instincts will propel him to a wag-the-dog war.

A leader who does not trust his subordinates cannot inspire trust. Though Trump boasts of fierce personal loyalty, he himself is loyal only until he isn't. Among his anxious aides, only Jared Kushner, it seems, may be safe, deputized as Trump's de facto secretary of state. Where Trump succeeds in inspiring trust is by giving his subordinates the license to lie. In fact, this virus of licentiousness has spread from the White House to congressional Republicans, to wit the stunt that exposed Rep. Devin Nunes as unfit to lead the House Intelligence Committee probe into Trump operatives' possible collusion with Russia. As the chaos of the White House rolled with a crisis-a-day fever into the month of May, a hide-and-seek commander in chief began sending out his most trusted national

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security advisers to defend him (Gen. James "Mad Dog" Mattis, Gen. H. R. McMaster, and the muted secretary of state, Rex Tillerson) and then cut the legs out from under them with his own blurted half-truths.

We hear repeatedly that Trump as a manager likes chaos. I asked a deputy White House counsel under Obama, a decorated former officer in Iraq and former White House counsel to President Obama, how such a management style impacts trust. "Trump explicitly or implicitly manages the situation so it's never possible for his advisers to know where they stand," he said. "It's the opposite of what you want in a high-functioning organization." Trump's anxious aides must know just how easy it is to fail his loyalty test, or to be the fall guy if a scapegoat is needed. While publicly they may defend him, it is clear to reporters that White House staffers are leaking information constantly. The leaks can only exacerbate Trump's mistrust perpetuating a vicious circle.

His failure to trust or to inspire trust is even more dangerous on a global scale. He sees alliances such as NATO as suspect (until he changes his mind); he sees trade agreements such as NAFTA as ripping off America (until he changes his mind three or four times in the same week). "This is because Trump's worldview is that we live in a snake pit where everybody is out for themselves," observes the former White House counsel. He and his co-conspiracy theorist adviser Bannon take everything that the left-behind white working class hates about globalization and they turn it into personalized enemies: Muslims, Mexicans, and refugees whom they believe are taking away their jobs. "Those people aren't like us," is the alt-right message; "they're polluting our culture."

In the course of his first one hundred days, Trump appeared to be increasingly out of touch with the reality in which the majority of us live. His pathological propensity to lie is not the worst of it - his monomaniacal attachment to his lies is, such as the transparent one in his March 4 twitterstorm accusing President Obama of putting a tap on his phone. It raises the question: Is this president floating in his own alternate reality?

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When I attended Dr. Bandy Lee's Yale town hall meeting to write about it for The Daily Beast, I cited insights delivered there by two of the authors in this book. Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, the eminent former professor of psychiatry at Yale University and today at Columbia University, elaborated in a follow-up interview, "Trump creates his own extreme manipulation of reality. He insists that his spokesmen defend his false reality as normal. He then expects the rest of society to accept it - despite the lack of any evidence." This leads to what Lifton calls "malignant normality"- in other words, the gradual acceptance by a public inundated with toxic untruths, of those untruths, until they pass for normal. And this becomes society’s neuroreality.

Dr. James F. Gilligan is a psychiatrist and author who has studied the motivations behind violent behavior over his twenty-five years of work in the American prison systems. "lf we psychiatrists who have experience in assessing dangerousness, if we give passive permission to our president to proceed in his delusions, we are shirking our responsibility," Gilligan said. Today a senior clinical professor of psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine, Gilligan told Dr. Lee's town hall attendees, "I don't say Trump is Hitler or Mussolini, but he's no more normal than Hitler."

We don't have to rely on psychiatrists to see that this president is not consistent in his thinking or reliably attached to reality. We have had vastly more exposure to Donald Trump's observable behavior, his writing and speaking, than any psychiatrist would have after listening to him for years. It is therefore up to us, the American public, to call him on it. And some of the most experienced hands in and around the White House are doing so.

Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley believes that Donald Trump represents a very different subculture from any commander in chief. "He represents the New York building business - where you don't let your right hand know what your left hand is doing," says Brinkley. "In Trump's world, he must win at all costs. It's not about character or public service or looking out for your band of brothers."

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The president to whom Trump is most often compared is Richard Nixon. John Dean the famous White House counsel who testified against his fellow conservative Republican, compared Trump to that notably paranoid president. "Nixon was two personae - in public and with his top aides, he was trusted. But in private, his deeply paranoid and vengeful dark side came out."

Asked for the best example, Dean snapped, "He had zero empathy!" Just like Trump. "Nixon let twenty-two thousand more Americans die in Vietnam [after he sabotaged the 1968 Paris peace talks], plus who knows how many Cambodians and Laotians and Vietnamese, all to ensure his election." It took forty years before Nixon's worst crime was revealed: treason. That was when then-presidential candidate Nixon was heard on tape (from recordings ordered by President Johnson) scuttling the Vietnam peace talks to derail the reelection campaign of the Democratic candidate. Nixon sent a message to the South Vietnamese negotiators that they should withdraw from the peace talks and wait for him to be elected, at which point he would give them a much better deal.

Sound familiar? Fifty years later, Donald Trump's go-between with Russian officials, General Flynn, hinted to Putin's ambassador that Russia could get a much better deal if it didn’t retaliate against Obama's sanctions and instead sat tight until Trump was elected. Also, Trump frequently tweeted about his eagerness to lift those sanctions - that is, until his fantasy bromance with Putin looked like it could arouse a federal investigation. Trump's appetite for vengeance is also matched by Nixon's with his long "Enemies List." No two modern presidents have had a more serious case of "political hemophilia," in the phrase of the latest Nixon biographer, John Farrell, by which he means: "Once wounded, these men never stop bleeding."

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To the dismay of even conservative observers, Trump appears totally indifferent to the truth. Time magazine gave Trump an opportunity to clarify his refusal to correct his long string of falsehoods. What the March 23 interview produced instead was an astonishing revelation of his thinking: He states what he wants to be true. If his statement is proven false, he is unfazed, and confidently predicts that the facts will catch up with his belief: "I'm a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right." Even when the top sleuth in the country, FBI director James Comey, condemned Trump as a fabulist, Trump ignored the public rebuke and bragged about his ability to persuade millions of his paranoid version of Obama as "sick" and surreptitiously spying on him.

"Narcissistic people like Trump want more than anything to love themselves, but desperately want others to love them, too," wrote professor and chair of the Psychology Department at Northwestern University, Dan P. McAdams, in The Atlantic. "The fundamental goal in life for a narcissist is to promote the greatness of the self, for all to see."

Yet, what is an extreme narcissistic personality such as Trump to do when he fails to win glorification? "Trump, from his own writings, has shown massive hypersensitivity to shame or humiliation," says Dr. Gilligan. Yet, how does he dodge the humiliation when he is exposed as sacrificing the nation's security on the altar of his infantile need to impress Russian officials by giving away sensitive foreign intelligence?

Beneath the grandiose behavior of every narcissist lies the pit of fragile self-esteem. What if, deep down, the person whom Trump trusts least is himself? The humiliation of being widely exposed as a "loser," unable to bully through the actions he promised during the campaign, could drive him to prove he is, after all, a "killer." In only the first four months of his presidency, he teed up for starting a war in three places, Syria, Afghanistan and North Korea. It is up to Congress, backed up by the public, to restrain him.

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WHY "CRAZY LIKE A FOX" VERSUS "CRAZY LIKE A CRAZY" REALLY MATTERS

Delusional Disorder, Admiration of Brutal Dictators, the Nuclear Codes, and Trump

MICHAEL J. TANSER PH.D.

Since becoming president, Donald Trump has made increasingly staggering statements contradicted by irrefutable evidence to the contrary (videos, photos, tweets), such that we have no choice but to consider whether his psychological disturbance is far more severe than what has widely been proposed as merely narcissistic personality disorder, merely antisocial personality disorder, or merely pathological lying.

Delusional Disorder

I begin with a presentation of the exceedingly rare diagnosis of delusional disorder, which may help us understand why DT makes such jaw-dropping statements. I am intending not to diagnose but to educate the general public so that each person can make his or her own informed assessment. (The criteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual,5th ed., are easily observable, simple behavioral

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characteristics that even a fifth-grader could understand.) I will then examine the final five minutes of a meandering, free-flowing, fifteen-minute videotaped speech DT delivered to the CIA the morning after Trump's inauguration, to see if the diagnosis can provide a lens through which to make sense of three egregious, separate, and startling statements contained in a mere five minutes.

Delusional disorder is coded as 2973 (F22) for the purpose of insurance coverage for treatment. Those with delusional disorder scoff at the notion that there is a problem in the first place, such that insurance coverage for treatment is irrelevant. This “stealth" disorder is exceptionally beguiling because such individuals can seem perfectly normal, logical, high functioning, and even charming so long as the delusion itself is not challenged. Delusional disorder is described as “one of the less common psychotic disorders in which patients have delusions that differ from classical symptoms of schizophrenia." Psychosis is defined as "a condition in which there is profound loss of contact with external reality." The schizophrenic person tends to display bizarre behavior, hallucinations, and overtly disordered thinking. Whereas in schizophrenia the disconnection tends to be highly visible and all-encompassing, the less serious delusional disorder is neither bizarre nor readily apparent to the outside observer:

- Delusions are beliefs that exist despite indisputable, factual evidence to the contrary.

- Delusions are held with absolute certainty, despite their falsity and impossibility.

- Delusions can have a variety of themes, including grandeur and persecution.
 

- Delusions are not of the bizarre variety ("I am being poisoned by the CIA”) but rather, seem like ordinary figures of speech except

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that each word is meant literally: e.g., "I alone am the chosen one, invincible, extraordinary beyond words, the very best of the best in every way."

- Delusional people tend to be extremely thin-skinned and humorless, especially regarding their delusions.

- Delusions are central to the person's existence, and questioning them elicits a jolting and visceral reaction.

- Delusional disorder is chronic, even lifelong, and tends to worsen in adulthood, middle age and beyond.

- Words and actions are consistent and logical if the basic premise of the delusion is accepted as reality: e.g., "Because I am superior to all, it follows that I would never apologize because I am never wrong."

- General logical reasoning and behavior are unaffected unless they are very specifically related to the delusion.

- The person has a heightened sense of self-reference ("It's always all about me"), and trivial events assume outsize importance when they contradict ("You are a con man, not a great businessman") or, conversely, support the delusional belief ("These adoring crowds recognize that I am extraordinary beyond measure"), making trivial events, whether positive or negative, hard to let go of and move past ("Have I mentioned my greatest ever electoral Iandslide?").

Delusional disorder may help us make sense of the last five minutes of DT's CIA address (CNN videos 2017), which contain three staggering statements that lead us to think, "He can't possibly mean

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that." In the tenth minute, DT declared he was "a thousand percent behind" the CIA, and accused the Fake Media, "some of the most dishonest people on the planet. . . of making it sound like I had a feud" with the intelligence community, when the truth is the "exact opposite." Anyone in the audience with a cell phone who doubted his own memory could instantly have googled DT's innumerable tweets about the incompetence and dishonesty of the "so-called intelligence community," a position he has since reverted to. Did DT actually believe that the truth was defined by his words and not hard facts to the contrary? Why would he merely lie despite knowing that each and every person in attendance knew there was not an iota of truth to the claim? His stunning falsehood lacks the shrewdness of the typical pathological liar. If he had been hooked up to a reliable lie detector test and were in fact delusional, he would have passed with flying colors because he literally believes every word he says, despite irrefutable facts to the contrary. He takes it as a given that the world around him will conform to his own warped view of events, and that those who do not believe so are irrational enemies backed by the Fake Media.

A minute later in the speech, he described his disappointment that, as he began his inaugural address, it was raining, but then he claimed, with a finger to the sky, "God looked down and said, 'We're not going to let it rain on your speech.' " He then insisted that the rain stopped immediately and it became "really sunny" before it "poured right after l left." Again, anyone at the CIA that day with a cell phone could immediately have watched the video demonstrating clearly that the drizzle on Inauguration Day started as DT began to speak, and that it never got sunny. It never subsequently poured. Again, did he believe every word he was saying? If the answer is yes, this would be compelling evidence of underlying delusional disorder leaking through the veneer of normality.

The third statement, of course, was his insistence that the inaugural grounds were packed "all the way to Washington Monument."

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Despite his badgering the National Park Service to come up with photo angles that might suggest a larger crowd, the aerial shots clearly showed that DT's audience was many hundreds of thousands fewer than Obama's in 2009. Again, DT claimed this was another example of Fake News, because the photos did not accord with his certainty of his personal reality. Again, his otherwise inexplicable insistence can be explained only by an understanding of grandiose, delusional detachment from reality.

These three incidents of demonstrably factually false statements made in the space of five minutes exemplify scores of other completely false claims: He has claimed to know more than all the generals. He has said he has the best temperament of anyone ever to be president. He still believes that the black and brown teenagers wrongly convicted of raping and brutally beating a woman jogger in the 1989 "Central Park Five" case are guilty, this despite the fact that the actual rapist confessed nine years after the crime and knew intimate details of the scene, and despite the rapist's DNA matching a sample from the crime scene. DT insists he saw on TV thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. He insists that he was the very best high school baseball pro prospect in New York City. He has bragged that, "in a movement like the world has never seen," he won the presidency by the greatest electoral landslide since Reagan when, in fact, he trailed five of the previous seven electoral totals. And so on, and so on. The fact that he lost the popular vote by three million, because it does not comport with his grandiose delusions, he explains away by declaring that these votes were made by were fraudulent voters, despite study after bipartisan study demonstrating at most a few thousand illegal votes nationwide.

Though the term solipsism comes from philosophy, not psychology, it appears relevant to this discussion: "Solipsism is the belief that the person holding the belief is the only real thing in the

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universe. All other persons and things are merely ornaments or impediments to his happiness."

DT lies regularly and reflexively, telling the truth only when it randomly suits his purposes. Yet pathological lying does not nearly seem to account for the staggering, self-aggrandizing statements I have referred to. Does he actually believe what he is saying based upon underlying delusions of grandeur? Had he been hooked up to a lie detector test during his CIA speech, would he have Passed without so much as a blip, as I believe?

You now have the simple diagnostic criteria. You make the call.

Why Does Trump Admire Brutal Dictators?

Thomas Jefferson insisted that an "informed citizenry" is the best protection for democracy. It is therefore extremely disconcerting that a staggering percentage of Americans cannot name our president during the Civil War or the country from whom we won our independence. Even more worrisome is that DT himself did not understand that there are three branches of the federal government and that judges cannot simply "sign bills into law." During a late campaign interview (Stephanopoulos 2016), he was unaware that Russia had not only invaded but had been occupying Crimea for two years. In his first global tour, he commented that he was happy to be in Israel after coming from the Middle East.

In keeping with Jefferson's warning, if in fact DT harbors an underlying delusional disorder, from a clinical perspective, his delusions would likely be grandiose and paranoid in nature. This would help us to answer once and for all the question of why, during the 2016 presidential campaign and beyond, DT has repeatedly and openly expressed admiration for Kim Jong-un of North Korea, Bashar al-Assad of Syria, Iraq's Saddam Hussein, and especially Vladimir Putin. There is considerable evidence to suggest that absolute tyranny is DT's ultimate fantasy. The unopposed dictator is the embodiment of the ability to demand adulation on the one hand and to eradicate

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all perceived enemies with the simple nod of the head on the other. With statues and thirty-foot portraits everywhere attesting to his godlike status, there would be no problem whatsoever with critical Fake Media, marching protesters, pesky appellate courts, or the slightest political opposition. Such is the awesome Power of the despots whom DT so inexplicably reveres.

Here are statements DT made about each during his campaign, followed by brief illustrations that barely scratch the surface of their hideous brutality:

- Kim Jong-un: "You gotta give him credit. . . when his father died, he goes in, he takes over these tough generals and he's the boss. It's incredible. He wiped out the uncle, wipes out this one, that one. It's incredible." Kim’s uncle was ripped out of a large government meeting as an example and summarily executed by a machine-gun-toting firing squad, along with seven of his aides. Kim’s aunt, his father's sister, was poisoned. All their remaining children and grandchildren were killed. He executed one general with a firing squad of antiaircraft missiles at close range and another, bound to a post, with a mortar round, while requiring multitudes to watch, including their families. His entire country is quite literally starving to death while he finances his nuclear ambitions.

- Bashar al-Assad: "I think in terms of leadership he's getting an A and our president is not doing so well." In his struggle to stay in power, Assad has ruthlessly suppressed his countrymen, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths of civilian men, women, and children, many by gassing. If deposed, he will be charged with crimes against humanity.

- Saddam Hussein: "Okay, so he was a very bad guy. But you know what he did so well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good! He didn't read them their rights. They didn't talk. You were a terrorist, it's over!" Hussein is universally regarded as perhaps the most monstrous tyrant of the last several decades, among his countless atrocities in what has been described as "the worst chemical weapons attack in human history," he gassed more than 100,000 of his Kurdish citizens, then hunted down tens of thousands of survivors, whom he buried alive, for a total of 180,000 murdered in this slaughter alone.

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- Vladimir Putin: "If he says great things about me, I'm going to say great things about him. He's really very much of a leader. . . very strong control over his country. . . and look, he has an eighty-two- percent approval rating!" Stunning comments. DT states clearly that his radiant view of Putin required only that he be flattered by him. In fifteen years of Putin's tyranny, journalists who dissent are shot in the back of the head. Dissidents who flee the country are regularly stalked and murdered, with poison the favored method, KGB style. Others in asylum are in constant fear for their lives, including the former world chess champion and current chairman of the Human Rights Foundation, Garry Kasparov, and the Russian Olympic runner who blew the whistle on Russia's pervasive doping program, Yuliya Stepanova. Either DT is incomprehensibly naive regarding Putin's popularity at home - the 82 percent rating was fabricated - or he was swooning from the compliment when Putin called him "bright" (not a "genius," as DT has bragged ever since).

In addition, during the campaign, DT spoke of "fighting for peaceful regime-change" if elected. (America is not ruled by a regime.) He bloviated that he would "blow out of the water" the seven small Iranian boats whose sailors had harassed and given the finger to our "beautiful destroyers." He bragged that "Russia and I would get along really well." He suggested that maybe "the Second Amendment people" might be able to stop Hillary; that his supporters should patrol voting sites to ensure he was being treated fairly, andthat he would love to "hit and hit and hit [his critics from the DNC] until their heads spin and they'll never recover."

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He insisted that he will "bomb the shit out of ISIS" and order our soldiers to kill their presumed families. He repeatedly goaded supporters to rough up hecklers at his speeches and pontificated that NFL players who refuse to stand for the national anthem should find another country. He quoted Mussolini's "Better to live one day as a lion than a hundred years as a sheep" and he expressed genuine bewilderment about why we build nuclear weapons if we don't use them.

In the clinical assessment of such frightening characteristics, why would DT admire grotesque tyrants while never praising our own past presidents but boasting that he himself could be the greatest in history, "except maybe Abe Lincoln"? From childhood throughout life, we all look for role models to emulate, especially when trying to navigate new and unfamiliar life challenges and transitions. We select inspirational people, often from a different time or place, who guide us by their example of how to get it right. We search for what has been called an "ego ideal" who best personifies our own highest intentions.

Whether or not his admiration for despots derives from an underlying delusional disorder, grandiose and paranoid in nature, DT is drawn to leaders who already fit his fundamental personality makeup. While anticipating the presidency, he looked for role models for how to preside, what that would look like, which leaders performed in ways that were inspiring. For Obama, it was Kennedy, Reagan, Dr. King, and Mandela. Bill Clinton turned to JFK and Hillary to Eleanor Roosevelt. George W. Bush modeled his leadership after Jesus and Winston Churchill. For DT, it was Hussein, Jong-un, Assad, and Putin. Those guys know how to run a tight ship!

Once elected, certainly DT, many argued, would moderate his words and actions in a so-called "soft pivot." When a person is character-disordered or worse - especially one who always blames others, never apologizes or displays accountability, and who never for an instant believes there is anything wrong with himself - the

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only possibility for change is for him to become worse, not better. In fact, all DT's despicable traits have been frighteningly exacerbated by his ascension to the presidency. He has tried to become more of the tyrant he wants to be, not less.

And since becoming president what has DT's attitude been toward brutal dictators? He has congratulated President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines for dealing with his country's drug problems in the "right way," with the vigilante slaughter of nearly ten thousand people merely suspected of using or dealing drugs. In April, DT invited him to the White House, though Duterte has not yet come.

He has expressed support and approval to President Recep Erdogan of Turkey, another invitee to the White House, who has engaged in a harsh, systematic purge of all opposition over the past year while arrogating dictatorial powers to himself alone over what had previously been a democratically elected government. During his Washington visit, Erdogan unleashed his bodyguard thugs to savagely repel peaceful protesters in front of the Turkish embassy.

Despite their clashes and nuclear saber rattling, DT has referred to Kim |ong-un as a "smart cookie," one whom he continues to admire for the insanely harsh methods Kim has used to maintain control over North Korea since his father's death. Bizarrely, Kim, too, has been invited to the White House. Ditto President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi, who has viciously ruled Egypt with an iron fist since taking office in 2013.

By contrast, shortly after his inauguration DT insulted Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of Australia in a phone call, reportedly slamming the phone down, and he childishly refused to shake the hand of German chancellor Angela Merkel, with live television cameras broadcasting the world over, during her April visit to the White House. Australia and Germany have long been among our closest allies. DT also stunningly shoved aside, while all the world watched, the prime minister of Montenegro, Dusko Marcovic, in his haste to get to the front row for a group photo op during a G20 conference.

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Far beyond his staggering affinity for monstrous tyrants, Trump, since coming to office, has railed against a critical free press; villified millions of marching protesters as paid professionals; denigrated our federal appeals courts for thwarting his Muslim travel ban as unconstitutional; abruptly fired forty-six state attorneys general; and, shockingly, fired FBI director James Comey for what DT brazenly admitted was Comey's ongoing investigation of potential collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.

The day following Comey's abrupt departure, despite the mind-boggling optics, DT welcomed Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov to the White House, and allowed Russian film crews into the meeting, while blocking American press and photographers.

Days later, reports circulated that DT had shared, without permission, highly classified information given to the United States by Israel, possibly leading to the deaths of embedded lsraeli spies. DT reportedly did so in an impulsive and boastful way seeming to try to impress the Russians. The event has rattled our allies, who now feel they cannot trust the United States with intelligence, and thus exposed and endangered the intelligence sources who provided the information. In addition, he reportedly bragged to the Russians about firing FBI director Comey, whom he called a "nut job," and expressed relief that the Russia-Trump campaign collusion investigation was over. (It is not.)

His honeymoon with Putin has already cooled, but what is DT capable of when the bromance ends? Given his mental instability, his thirst for adulation is rivaled only by his obsession for vengeance, even for the tiniest of slights. What happens when he discovers that Putin has been playing him like a fiddle or when Putin potentially humiliates him on the world stage? As Trump stated dozens of times during the primary, “As long as they're nice to me, I'll be nice to them. But if they get nasty and hit me, I'll hit back much, much harder."

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Checks and balances? Hey, nobody writes checks anymore. And you can't see his balances until his IRS audit is completed!

The Constitution? Believe me, those are rules, and rules are meant to be broken. Besides, rules are for losers, and DT's a winner. He's a winner!

Like the despots he idolizes, DT intends to rule, not lead; to control, not compromise. The 2016 presidential election was not about traditional Republican-versus-Democratic views. Quite literally, it was about apocalypse, not politics.

This can't be happening? It can and it is. Jefferson's warning has never been more relevant.

The Previous President and Neurorealities - Chapter 24, continued...