Porno for Pyros
Paul Campos
Lawyers, Guns, and Money Blog
Monday 7 April, 2025
As we watch the international financial markets burn down today, a few observations:
(1) Trump is extremely stupid, extremely evil, and extremely mentally ill. I’ve noticed that very many people have an overwhelming desire to deny one or more of these things. The most common defense mechanism is to deny the stupid and mentally ill parts, and just treat him as some sort of criminal mastermind. For example, there’s a bunch of stuff out there now about how the chaotic tariff regime is “really” just an extortion scheme, by which Trump can force businesses and countries to beg him for exemptions. I mean it is that in part, but Trump has been babbling about the magical power of tariffs for decades, long before he had any prospect of being in a position to use them as part of his venal rackets. In other words, yes he really is that stupid: he thinks a trade deficit means that the country running the surplus is ripping off the country with the deficit. Like all extremely stupid people, he thinks that a complex issue has a simple answer, and he can’t be talked out of that view because he’s extremely stupid. This doesn’t mean he isn’t also extremely crooked, and will therefore use his extremely stupid beliefs about tariffs to try to extort people: he is, and he will.
(2) The mental illness part of this whole mess is another one of those complicated things that don’t have a simple answer, but a psychologist I’ve known for nearly 30 years who diagnoses a lot of criminal psychopaths has this to say:
*
When referring to a real-deal psychopath “Never, ever, say ‘Oh, he wouldn’t go THAT far.'” And the corollary: “There is no bottom.”
What the “malignant narcissist” descriptor misses about Trump: as a really, really, psychopathic person (far more so than all but a few of the psychopathic criminals I see in risk assessments professionally), Trump is highly callous and enjoys creating chaos for its stimulation value. He isn’t doing this just to make others grovel before him while “holding all the cards” in a shakedown. That too, of course, but he also simply enjoys destruction, no less than a child knocking over a Lego tower.
*
Trump is getting off on the chaos he’s causing right now, because he’s a sick twisted individual. If you want to predict the USA’s tariff policy over the next few months you’re better off having a degree in abnormal psychology than any kind of background in finance or economics. Again, that doesn’t mean he isn’t also extremely stupid and extremely evil: the presence of A doesn’t exclude the simultaneous presence of B and C. Indeed, the stupidity and evil and abnormal psychology all feed off of and reinforce each other.
(3) There’s no formal legal solution in our system to any of this, other than waiting for the next round of national elections. Some people are talking about the 25th amendment (again), but that is a much more cumbersome process than impeachment and conviction, and the latter can’t be used because the Republican party is a cult, and part of the cult’s identity is that Donald Trump is a god-like savior figure, not the perpetrator of high crimes and misdemeanors. Trump’s stupidity and evil and madness are going to continue largely unimpeded until at least November of next year, absent solutions that are extremely prejudicial to formal legal processes.
*
https://tinyurl.com/22ove6qo
aLoneWorldEnds
npub1ak…u88mz
2025-04-07 22:02:04
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2025-04-07 22:02:04Event JSON
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