Donald Trump is ‘gone’ ex-backer of President warns: ‘The brain’s not doing too hot’

Jokes aside, check out any interview with Trump from the 90s or 00s. It's actually crazy, the difference in his speech patterns and word selection.

You could, I suppose, call it *The Emperor Has No Brain.* Unfortunately, the Republicans have already updated that parable with a moral message more appropriate for these times: “That kid should have kept his f’ing mouth shut!”

Concept of a brain

There is something in there keeping the meat suit awake.

The smooth one the size of of peanut

Agree. I thought this Iran attack might have been an exception since Russia and Iran have been allied fairly closely during the Ukraine conflict. But then trump used the straits closure as an excuse to lift sanctions on the import of Russian oil. Almost every action he takes in office is an answer to the question, "What would a Russian asset do in this situation if he were POTUS?"

I don't think Trump is the only one 'accidentally' stooging for Putin. It also doesn't help that the American Oligarch's motives align real well with what happened during the collapse of the USSR - same shoe, different foot.

I think Trump is just really f****** stupid and very easily swayed by propaganda. I don’t think he’s taking money or anything and doing Putin’s direct bidding, I just think he’s an incredibly predictable dullard and Putin knows how to play him.

Beat comment. It validates everything.

Well, there’s the January 2027 theory.

Probably not your intention but that made me laugh. I am grateful for any humor in these trying times.

That's an image I would like to unsee

Malignant narcissists pretty much do *nothing but* worry. Its why they're so insufferable and irrational.

Narcissists worry constantly. They are very insecure

It depends on the use of the word worry. They don't process these things with any self-reflection, insight or critical examination, if they did those things they wouldn't be narcissists. But they do 'feel' constant peril of dissonance and respond to it on an emotional level. Really, everyone is confronted with potential sources of emotional harm all the time. People have a range of mechanisms for dealing with that, relatively few people agonise over each thing on an intellectual level and think about the nature of the feeling and whether it's justified, and whether it isn't. Most rely on heuristics that sort the feeling into inappropriate or appropriate in one of a number of ways. For a narcissist, their mechanism is to use conceptual self-importance to overwhelm and nullify any perceived sense of insecurity, and the dissonant conflict between that self-image and evidence is therefore greater because of the heightened idealisation. But a person who reacts by viewing themselves negatively can have a similar trajectory. And a person who constantly struggles to know how to perceive themselves, negatively or positively, while they have a very different trajectory is nonetheless suffering something that can be pathological, but involves a great deal more processing, thought and self-examination. Most people who are considered healthy simply have relatively benign heuristics, but ones that also demand very little self-examination most of the time, because cognitive parsimony dictates that a mind we tend to view as neurotypical minimises effort on dealing with repetitive experiences that could be compressed into heuristical resolution. You'll see a lot of deficits in narcissists because certain core faculties run contrary to how they operate emotionally. Empathy being a big one, having a sophisticated internal construct by which you understand how other people generate their behaviours, how they think and feel, that's not something that is well aligned with narcissism. You see two different flavours with Musk and Trump. Musk is more or less utterly defective, whereas Trump has superficial social skills, learned ability through feedback and engagement, he's much better at managing people, but that's not quite the same as the aforementioned. It's just another set of feedback-mediated heuristical developments.

I mean, yeah. Rogan's pretty vocally turned on him and his policy, Fuentes has turned on him and his policy, Tucker's turned on him, Margie turned on him, etc. etc. For a lot of these grifters the Iran war is genuinely too far. They could bury their head in the sand on the Epstein files and keep going "LALALAL YOU'RE JUST TRYING TO MAKE HIM LOOK BAD BECAUSE YOU HAVE TDS LALALALA" even if they ultimately knew that it was *factual*. However, Iran is a two-fold issue. For schizoid religious reasons, a lot of Conservatives for the longest time have had this weird mindset of hating Jews but loving Israel, because Israel needs to exist and effectively become an arm of the Anti-Christ in order to usher in Armageddon where they get to go to Heaven and live in paradise whereas are stuck on Earth to suffer in brutal conflict and agony. This mindset of "Hate Jews, love Israel" is butting heads with the less dogmatic religious members who just hate Jews no matter what, including Israel. *Especially* Israel. So they're pretty pissed that Trump has been super open about the fact that the US is getting into this war for no other reason than "Israel told us to" and that we're supposed to be committing ground troops to the war that will result in probably thousands dead and no foreseeable US victory while Israel commits absolutely nothing, but the reason is still "because Israel told us to." On top of this, a lot of them view the military as the ultimate in American machismo. It's the rough, tough, strong killers of the nation who put down the mean scary brown people overseas with glorious rocket fire and bullet storms. They don't like the idea of these paragons of American ideal being wasted dying in a meat grinder on the behalf of a nation that they don't like full of people they don't like for literally no reason. It also doesn't help that the middle classes and below are going to eventually start feeling the economic burden of this war, as most already have, which is going to add the "but now it effects ME!" anecdote to the mix which will REALLY piss them off.

They're all circling the sky and leaving him as fast as vultures leave a dying vulture

Or maybe it was a private pic she leaked to get ahead of divorce.

Nobody wants a President Vance except for about 5 insufferable oligarchs. And Lil Marco.

Only problem is they have to thread the needle just right on this. They have to be successful with stealing the election. If they fail, and Democrats inevitably have one or both chambers, if Vance ascends, he won't have majorities to install whatever vice president he wants. And in the meantime, let's say it's a 50-50 Senate or even 51D-49R w/ a lot of Fetterman crossing over into 50-50 votes, there will be no VP to tiebreak. Murkowski, with reelection coming up, might even be liable to break from the party very frequently. e: Fun fact about Murkowski: she has only ever run in red wave years and presidential election years where an R won. 2028 could be interesting for her. I don't see her losing, but she has to play 2027-2028 differently in the Senate.

RED Alert, Red Alert, red alert red alert......

I am sweating!

I have great respect for knowledge fight https://youtu.be/u1h4TgaLTqE

Hijacking this comment to say that Policy Wonks know that Alex's opinion of Trump sways with the wind and is never as definitive as this headline suggests. F*** Alex Jones. This is just mid-week equivocation while he waits for marching orders.

The horrors of this knowledge has scarred me.

Agreed, kinda tired of comments that refuse to acknowledge degrees. Yeah, Trump said mostly nonsense in 2016, but at least he could follow his own thread of lies and cruelty. Now he can't even muster that much.

He's being held together by cutting edge modern medicine and spray tan

Yeah, I stopped reading when I saw it was Alex Jones. He’s a moronic conman, who gives a shit what this verifiable idiot has to say?

it's not platforming he literally has millions of people that listen to him, like it or not, this is journalism reporting on an ally of the idiot in chief making public comments that his allies are losing confidence in him

Just because I observe the flow of sewage doesn't mean I want to swim. He's a data point buried deep in MAGA land, I don't really care why he's turned on Trump (the narrative always comes first for these guys), but the fact that so many hardliners are running for the hills is meaningful information.

Like it or not a huge chunk of the electorate is getting their info from these kinds of people. Like it or not, they're normal already.