Tag: mary trump
The Persistent 'Both Sides' Mediocrity Of Jon Stewart

The Persistent 'Both Sides' Mediocrity Of Jon Stewart

Thank you, Mary Trump, for plumbing the shallow waters of Jon Stewart's wit. A psychologist and sharp critic of her uncle Donald, Mary Trump accused the Daily Show host of long suppressing the liberal vote by telling his fan base that the candidates stink equally. She cites political research showing that his what's-the-difference jabbering helped elect Donald Trump in 2016.

But Stewart's recent resurfacing with a nuance-free view of the current presidential choices was truly the last straw to drift off the bale. After reciting some antique jokes about AARP cards, Stewart shifted into his old brand of analysis, holding that Donald Trump and Joe Biden were basically the same.

"We're not suggesting neither man is vibrant, productive or even capable," Stewart said with his don't-you-love-me grin. "But they are both stretching the limits of being able to handle the toughest job in the world."

To which Mary Trump wrote in response: "In what universe is Donald vibrant, productive or capable?? And this statement wasn't even tongue-in-cheek. Stewart was making a straight-up comparison."

It would seem that a president who has successfully managed two global conflicts, resurrected U.S. manufacturing, slashed the price of insulin and overseen the strongest economy in decades would be called "capable." Biden did it, and he didn't grow younger in the process.

Stewart clearly wants everyone to love him, so he uses his both-sides arguments to ingratiate himself with the right, marketing it as truth-telling. Ten years ago, I was sucked into that vortex.

Back then, when bloggers at respectable publications could still get away with junior-high misogyny, a troll at The Wall Street Journal became obsessed with me. He kept calling me a "Baroness Catherine Ashton look-alike," a reference to a British parliamentarian whom he deemed ugly. About that, I could not care less.

Then he accused me of hypocritically trying to censure honest conservative speech, which this once-upon-a-time Republican doesn't do. (I sometimes even agree with it.) He had no idea of what my position was, but that didn't matter.

Anyhow, Jon Stewart swallowed his attacks whole.

The Daily Show treated the powerful New York media with fluffy gloves. But being identified as a lefty in the howling wilderness of Rhode Island, I was regarded as easy game for both-sideism.

And so John Oliver was shipped out to "interview" me. The segment that aired had Oliver repeatedly hollering a bleep-out F word, followed by a spliced-in photo of me allegedly looking shocked, followed by canned laughter. It was on that level.

Stewart's favorite theme was to broadly condemn the mainstream press as hopelessly lazy and incompetent. And then Stewart pinned on me beliefs I never had based on what some blogging bro said they were. He had done zero research.

Stewart opened by hissing "Journalists! Journalists!" After the segment aired, the blogging pest praised it as "comedy gold."

When Oliver had his own show years later, many of the greatest traditional news sources had fallen into deep trouble. The ever-earnest Oliver looked into the camera with doggy eyes and beseeched the audience to subscribe to their local newspapers.

Just a few weeks ago, lo and behold, Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn was recycling one of his raps on liberals when he took yours truly to task for those beliefs I never had. And what was his impeccable source? The Daily Show of 10 years ago. I mean, my real beliefs are all over Google.

As Mary Trump notes, the stakes are too high for guys like Jon Stewart to get away with neutralizing the toxicity of Donald Trump with comparisons totally lacking in substance. It's a creepy kind of brand-building. And it comes at the expense of our fragile democracy.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Why Ron DeSantis Is Not Quite An Adequate Substitute For Trump

Why 'Robotic' Ron DeSantis Is Not Quite Adequate To Replace Trump


This week’s new vocabulary word is “decompensate.” Psychiatrists use it to describe mentally ill people who are totally losing their ... well, acting like former President Donald J. Trump: having Nazis over for dinner and then demanding that the Constitution be set aside and that he be reinstated, presumably for life.

And then denying his own written words.

Mary Trump, the clinical psychologist and would-be Fuehrer’s niece, has long predicted something like this. “He’s never been in a situation in which he has lost in a way he can’t escape from,” she told Politico’s Michael Kruse soon after the 2020 election. For a pathological narcissist, psychiatrists warn, being seen as a loser equates with “psychic death.” More recently, with her uncle’s legal troubles multiplying and the walls closing in, Mary Trump fears for the worst.

“We don’t know just what kind of information he has on other people in his party,” she said last week on MSNBC. “What we do know is he would be willing to use it ... Donald will burn everything down if he feels like he is going down — we cannot discount that. We ignore him at our peril.”

If he were a real gangster, they’d have him whacked.

But this isn’t The Sopranos, which was on HBO, not Fox News.

Who’s apt to be the first target of Trump’s ire? His presumptive heir apparent, of course, the Florida governor he’s already dubbed “Ron DeSanctimonious” — a derisive nickname that has fallen flat. Partly because most Trump idolaters don’t know what it means, and partly because Trump himself may not. It has the ring of a line fed to him by a speechwriter.

More ominous from the perspective of those who see DeSantis as “Trump with a brain” may have been what the former president told The Wall Street Journal about his rival for the 2024 nomination: “If he did run, I will tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering. I know more about him than anybody, other than perhaps his wife, who is really running his campaign.”

Sounds like a bluff to me. Trump always knows more about everything than anybody else. The generals, the doctors, you name it.

Sure he does.

But DeSantis does have an ambitious wife who’s totally on board with his presidential aspirations. A former local TV news anchor, Casey DeSantis is credited as the brains behind possibly the most bizarre political commercial in recent American history — the one where the Florida governor is depicted as being on a mission from God, kind of like Belushi and Aykroyd in “The Blues Brothers,” except with no songs.

The thing has to be seen to be believed. It begins like a Bible documentary, with dramatic footage of the Earth as seen from space.

“And on the eighth day,” a deep-voiced announcer intones, “God looked down on his planned paradise and said, ‘I need a protector.’ So, God made a fighter.”

Cut to a series of video clips of DeSantis with various citizen groups, each clip punctuated with the repeated slogan: “So God made a fighter.”

Me, I’d go with “Ron DeLusional” as a nickname, but then I tend not to see his political enemies — Democratic school board members, liberal professors at Florida universities, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Mickey Mouse (DeSantis picked a fight with Disney World over gay rights) — as enemies of God.

Indeed, the idea strikes me as both laughable and offensive.

Speaking before a forum at right-wing Hillsdale College in Michigan last February, as reported by Frank Bruni in The New York Times, DeSantis urged his audience to: “Put on the full armor of God. Stand firm against the left’s schemes. You will face flaming arrows, but if you have the shield of faith, you will overcome them.”

Ho-hum. You hear this kind of tent revival talk all the time in Southern politics. It rarely succeeds over time because it brooks no compromise and wears people out. What’s unusual is hearing it from a politician like DeSantis, a Yale graduate with a Harvard law degree.

So he won a 19-point victory over a washed-up Democratic opponent. Sen. Marco Rubio defeated a more formidable Val Demings by 16. Nobody’s touting him as a presidential contender. Filling up with Yankee snowbirds, Florida’s gone all Republican now.

It’s more DeSantis’ perceived personal shortcomings that are apt to keep him out of the White House than anything Trump — likely a convicted felon before 2024 — could say about him. Unlike Trump, he comes across as didactic and humorless. People use the word “robotic” to describe him.

“A strange no-eye-contact oddball,” is how GOP consultant Rick Wilson puts it. “I’d rather have teeth pulled without anesthetic than be on a boat with Ron DeSantis,” a Tallahassee lobbyist told The Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich.

Politicians who run on sheer anger eventually wear people out.

Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President.”

Reprinted with permission from Chicago Suntimes.

The Dilemma Confronting Merrick Garland Is Worse Than You Think

The Dilemma Confronting Merrick Garland Is Worse Than You Think

None of us wants to live in the kind of country where losing an election means going to prison. Russia, for example, or the proverbial Banana Republic. Anywhere the powerful can have their freedom taken away, many fear that theirs too is in danger.

Even more oppressive, however, are regimes where the powerful enjoy absolute impunity. Equality under the law is the one right upon which all the others depend.

It follows, then, that Attorney General Merrick Garland faces the toughest of choices. Politically speaking, the only thing worse than failing to indict Donald Trump for his role in the January 6 mob assault upon the U.S. Capitol would be to charge the crazy SOB and fail to convict him.

Conspiracy charges are notoriously hard to prove.

Trump’s trial would be a legal spectacle like none before it. Jury selection alone would be a nightmare, mob violence a strong likelihood.

Too bad former Vice President Mike Pence, former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, and other cabinet members who talked about using the 25th amendment to remove Trump from office after the insurrection failed to follow through.

A majority vote of Trump’s cabinet signifying that he was non compos mentis on the subject of the 2020 presidential election might have given pause to all but the most delusional members of the Trump cult before their suspicions hardened into dogma.

Non compos mentis as in crazy as a loon, crazier than the proverbial outhouse rat, crazier than a bag of cats, etc. During his videotaped testimony to the committee, Trump's former Attorney General William P. Barr said, “I was somewhat demoralized because I thought, boy … he has become detached from reality if he really believes this stuff.”

When he would try to explain how bizarre some of the voter fraud allegations pushed by cranks like Rudy Giuliani and the My Pillow Guy were, Barr added, “there was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were.”

Former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien told the committee that following the election, the former president’s immediate circle separated into “Team Crazy” vs. “Team Normal” and that the president had no use for the normal ones.

Mere reality, you see, has never meant much to Trump when compared to the intensity of his needs. That’s how he managed to go bankrupt running a casino; an airline, a make-believe “university,” etc. If the numbers don’t add up, he invents his own numbers, declares bankruptcy, and then cons somebody into lending him some more.

Anybody want to buy a used golf course?

In the present instance, the House Select Committee has learned that the Trump campaign solicited political donations for an “Official Election Defense Fund,” which happened not to exist.

Instead, Trump put the cash to other uses.

Same as it ever was.

So what are his needs? Well, the diagnostic criteria for “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” are as follows:

“A. Grandiose sense of self-importance or uniqueness, e.g. exaggeration of achievements and talents….

B. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance….

C. Exhibitionism: the person requires constant attention and admiration.

D. Cool indifference or marked feelings of rage, inferiority, shame, humiliation or emptiness in response to criticism…or defeat.”

Also, “entitlement,” “interpersonal exploitativeness,” and “lack of empathy.”

Sound like anybody we all know?

According to his niece, Mary L. Trump, a clinical psychologist and author of Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, Uncle Donald is essentially a textbook case.

Like his cruel, bullying father before him.

Years ago, I wrote a book called Widow’s Web about an Arkansas murderer who turned the state upside down with the help of a showboating elected sheriff and a gullible, sensationalizing news media. Best thing I’ve ever done. Anyway, for a couple of years, the exploits and bizarre alibis of Mary Lee Orsini were all anybody here talked about; another textbook case.

Here’s how I summed her up:

“Criminal psychopaths live as permanent impostors. They know right from wrong; they just don’t give a damn. Their world divides into user and used; morality consists of fear of getting caught. And whatever happens, somebody else is always to blame. To the question: Are psychopaths sick or are they evil? There is just one answer: They are both…. ‘Moral imbeciles’ was the nineteenth-century term. The prisons are full of them.”

Could Trump himself end up in prison? Frankly, I can’t imagine that happening. There’s just no telling what mad acts he and his more enraptured followers would be capable of to prevent that happening. Remember, whatever happens, somebody else is always to blame.

As the evidence accumulates of the former president’s complicity in raising a mob to prevent Congress from certifying the presidential election, Merrick Garland’s dilemma deepens. He’s no rookie, having prosecuted both “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski and Oklahoma City terror bomber Timothy McVeigh. But he’s walking into a snake’s nest now.

Mary Trump

Mary Trump’s New Lawsuit Claims Fraud By President And His Siblings

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

President Donald Trump is facing a new legal battle with his niece Mary Trump who insists she was duped into forfeiting her inheritance following the death of her grandfather, Fred Trump, Sr., and her father, Fred Trump, Jr.

In the New York State Supreme Court lawsuit, filed in Manhattan on Thursday morning, Mary Trump named the president, her aunt, Maryanne Barry Trump, and her late uncle, Robert Trump — who passed away in August of this year. She outlined claims of fraudulent representation, fraudulent inducement, negligent representation, civil conspiracy, and fraudulent misrepresentation and concealment dating back to the "beginning of the 1980s."

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