Trump’s no good, very bad, horrible week


On Monday, the US Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that firing employees because they are gay or lesbian or transgender violated the law, thus striking a blow against Trump’s anti-LGBT agenda. Then on Thursday, they ruled against his attempt to get rid of the DACA program. On Wednesday accounts about John Bolton’s book describing Trump as an ignorant idiot unfit to hold his office appeared.

And that was not all. On Tuesday there was the announcement of another book, this time by Trump’s niece Mary L. Trump, a psychologist, who really lays into the highly dysfunctional Trump family.

New details have emerged about a book by Donald Trump’s niece, which its publisher says will “explain how her uncle became the man who now threatens the world’s health, economic security, and social fabric”.

According to Simon & Schuster, Mary L Trump will describe “a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships, and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse” that explain the inner workings of “one of the world’s most powerful and dysfunctional families”.

According to the blurb, “a trained clinical psychologist and Donald’s only niece” will “shine a bright light on the dark history of their family” and offer a “revelatory, authoritative portrait of Donald J Trump and the toxic family that made him”.

“She describes a nightmare of traumas, destructive relationships, and a tragic combination of neglect and abuse. She explains how specific events and general family patterns created the damaged man who currently occupies the Oval Office, including the strange and harmful relationship between Fred Trump and his two oldest sons, Fred Jr and Donald.”

This book should be far more illuminating than Bolton’s attempt at extricating the neoconservative movement and himself from the wreckage that comes with being aligned with Trump. It is always interesting to see what formative experiences went into the creation of a extreme narcissistic sociopath. Mary Trump having a ringside seat during the entire period of Trump’s early life, coupled with her professional expertise, should shed quite a bit of light on how he became the awful person he is now.

According to Simon & Schuster – which is also behind Bolton’s tell-all and Bob Woodward’s Trump books – Mary Trump “has the education, insight, and intimate familiarity needed to reveal what makes Donald, and the rest of her clan, tick.

“She alone can recount this fascinating, unnerving saga … because she is the only Trump willing to tell the truth about one of the world’s most powerful and dysfunctional families.”

Former Trump adviser Sam Nunberg told the Beast that Mary Trump’s book would worry the president more than that by Bolton, because “it’s about family, it’s a personal betrayal … I’ve never seen something like this.”

There have been other books that psychoanalyzed Trump such as this one and this one but both were without the benefit of the personal knowledge that Mary Trump brings.

Trump is threatening to sue to block publication of her book but unlike the similar threat against Bolton, this case has even less chance of succeeding since she is not the possessor of classified information the way that Bolton was. She had apparently signed a non-disclosure agreement to not discuss some aspects of the family’s business such as the disputes over her grandfather’s will but how sweeping that NDA is remains to be seen.

Comments

  1. says

    When people defect away from defective fanatics, the fanatics and their protectors try to attack and discredit them. And almost always fail. Just think of the Phelps family (Nathan Phelps and Zach Phelps-Roper), $cientology escapees (Jenna Miscavige Hill), moonie cult relatives, Ron Reagan (the atheist son), recently ex-TERF Amy Dyess, and now Mary Trump.

    It must be hard for the insane to portray the sane as less stable than themselves.

  2. Pierce R. Butler says

    AND … Buzzfeed revealed Friday that Roger Stone had notified the Trump™ campaign in mid-2016 that Wikileaks would be publishing stolen Clinton campaign emails, meaning that Trump™ apparently lied under oath to the Mueller investigation about having no inside information about that.

    AND Friday night Wm. Barr attempted to fire the federal attorney for the Southern District of New York, who has a number of cases involving the Trump™ campaign and the Trump Organization® underway -- but said federal attorney, with the law on his side, refuses to go until the Senate approves a replacement.

    AND today Trump™ goes to Tulsa to spread lies and infections, and probably to provoke a riot.

  3. blf says

    And… Bolton’s book is not blocked…

    (The following is a cross-posted from poopyhead’s current [Pandemic and] Political Madness all the Time thread here at FtB.)

    Whilst I do not suggest anyone buy the thing, this is still good news, John Bolton: judge declines to block tell-all Trump book:

    […]
    A federal judge has declined to block the publication of a tell-all book by John Bolton, Donald Trump’s third national security adviser.

    […] Judge Royce C Lamberth […] did have harsh words for Bolton, who he said had failed to complete a national security review and “likely published classified materials”.

    On Twitter, Trump said Bolton must pay a very big price for this, as others have before him.

    […]

    Lamberth, a US district court judge in Washington, wrote that though Bolton’s “unilateral conduct raises grave national security concerns, the government has not established that an injunction is an appropriate remedy”.

    He added: “As noted at the hearing, a CBS News reporter clutched a copy of the book while questioning the White House press secretary. By the looks of it, the horse is not just out of the barn — it is out of the country.”

    […]

    “[… I]n the internet age, even a handful of copies in circulation could irrevocably destroy confidentiality. A single dedicated individual with a book in hand could publish its contents far and wide from his local coffee shop. With hundreds of thousands of copies around the globe — many in newsrooms — the damage is done.”

    On Twitter, Trump cited Steve Schmidt, a Republican critic of the president [sic], who called Wacko John Bolton ‘a despicable man who failed in his duty to protect America’. Also stated that he should never be allowed to serve in government again. So true!

    Plain and simple, John Bolton, who was all washed up until I brought him back and gave him a chance, broke the law by releasing classified information (in massive amounts). He must pay a very big price for this, as others have before him. This should never to happen again!!!

    Schmidt responded: “He failed in his duty to protect America from you. The most failed president in American history. You are incompetent and inept. You are amoral and indecent. You are losing this election. You will be defeated and repudiated. Your legacy is death, weakness and economic collapse.”

    […]

    In January 2018, Trump responded to the publication by the Guardian of excerpts from Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff, the first Trump tell-all, by threatening to sue its publisher. Henry Holt & Co simply rushed the book to sale.

    […]

  4. Ridana says

    I guess it wasn’t all bad for him, or at least maybe this explains in part why he picked this Friday to attack on two new fronts. Death never sleeps.

    Aside from Fox and OANN, he now has a formerly non-partisan, world-wide (including in the US), tax-funded radio network at his beck and call after sacking all the directors of the Voice of America and its offshoots and all their staff and replacing the head with a Bannon drone.

    Now I’ve never really been a fan of VOA, having viewed it as US propaganda to the world, especially parts that didn’t have much alternative outside viewpoints to counter, but this is bad. Can he do the same to PBS and NPR (which is already way too accommodating to him)? I don’t see why not. No one will stop him.

    Via Barr, he’s also sacked US Attorney for NYSD Berman, which is where a lot of important Bunker Baby shit will be (or would have been) adjudicated, and installed another puppet there (who previously represented Deutsche Bank in a Russian money laundering probe still pending in the SDNY). That’s also bad. Berman says he’s not going until a replacement is confirmed, so I wonder how fast the Senate will move on that confirmation? The way they work, it’ll probably be done by end of today, regardless of any rules, which there seem to be none of lately. Probably no one will stop them.

    The more cornered he is, the more shit like this we can expect. And no one will stop him until he’s voted out. But since the Thugs are busily wrecking the entire voting system, that’s still iffy regardless of polls or actual votes. And the courts have not and will not stop them.

    If the planets aligned in a previously unknown configuration which somehow allowed Republicans to feel shame for the first time in their lives, is there any procedural way to override McTurtle’s sitting on all legislation not explicitly useful to Bunko Baby? Not that it matters, since they never will feel shame and will never stop any of this.

    I suppose watching Linseed and Fight Club’s Cruz defending all this will be entertaining as it all burns down. This is fine.

  5. publicola says

    Blf@3: Everyone should boycott this book as a matter of principle. Bolton could have served the Constitution as he swore to, but instead he chose to serve his greed. Let him fall on that sword.

  6. blf says

    And… It’s now quite clear hair furor only roughly half-filled the 19,000-seat arena in Tulsa for his Covid-19 spreading event (which is still on-going as I type this). The entire upper section is all-but-empty. The outdoors overflow area started to be dismantled, as it obviously wasn’t necessary, before Air Force 1 even landed. His cronies had claimed there were 800,000 requests for tickets.

  7. Who Cares says

    @blf(#6):
    From the news it seems they did get that many (or even more) requests. The twist being that the people who made the requests never were going to show up. They got trolled by a (virtual) flash mob of K-pop fans.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *