Tag: liar

Donald Trump is a Psychopath

I have been listening to a podcast about a serial killer and they mentioned what makes a person a psychopath as opposed to someone who is psychotic.

I have been listening to a podcast about a serial killer and they mentioned what makes a person a psychopath as opposed to someone who is psychotic, suffering from delusional thoughts. The main thing is that psychopathy is not a mental illness. It is not something that can be controlled by medication, as is the case with true mental illness, specifically psychosis. A person suffering from psychosis does not have the mental capacity to understand that they are committing a murder, as an example. They are operating on delusional thinking, that when controlled by medication will disappear or at least moderate. Conversely, a psychopath is totally aware of what they are doing and lacks the empathy to even care. Not everyone who is a psychopath becomes a murderer, but I can bet that most people have someone in there sphere (neighbor, friend, family member) who fits the description of a psychopath, even if they have not murdered someone (as in an extreme case).

Here are the basic hallmarks of a psychopath:

  • Glibness/superficial charm
  • Grandiose sense ofself-worth
  • Need for stimulation/proneness toboredom
  • Pathological lying
  • Conning/manipulative
  • Lack of remorse orguilt
  • Shallow affect (i.e., reduced emotional responses)
  • Callous/lack of empathy
  • Poor behavioral controls
  • Lack of realistic, long-termgoals
  • Impulsivity
  • Irresponsibility
  • Failure to accept responsibility for one’s own actions

Does this list sound like a certain former President of the United States?

It is so amazing to me that the entire Republican party has been hijacked by a psychopath. We all know the reason: Because his base of neanderthal voters somehow have fallen under his spell and the Senators and Congressman want to get reelected. They do not care about what is right or the rule of law. They are willing to sell their souls  to the devil to get reelected. These people know better but by embracing Trump’s ignorant supporters, they come closer to the big prize, which is capturing the House and Senate and ultimately the presidency.  In 2016, when this con man was running for President, he famously said that he could shoot a person on 5th Avenue and he would get away with it. He was correct and he knew his audience. His supporters were willing to elect a con-artist, grifter, mafia like boss, terrible businessman, sexual assault perpetrator, and pathological liar, because they simply do not pay any attention. They have their minds made up and no matter what egregious things he does or says, he is forgiven. This is mob mentality. This person caused thousands of people to die of Covid due to his inability to take action, his initial denial of the seriousness of this pandemic, and refusal to tell people to wear masks. There are many people in the MAGA community that hang on his every word, as if he is some sort of god, who were duped into believing that the pandemic was some sort of HOAX and died in the hospitals alone and on ventilators.

This man is toxic and the sad part about it is that he still has many people fooled into thinking that he has the good of the country at heart, when in fact, he is the only one he thinks about. The country be damned if it means that it gets in the way of his blind ambition.

Unfortunately, he has snatched these unfortunate, ignorant believers’ minds who go willingly to slaughter.

Luck

Luck can be either good or bad and sometimes you can put a spin on something that starts out as horrible luck but becomes good luck. A perfect example of that is being in a catastrophic car accident, but surviving. It was unlucky that you were in an accident, but lucky that you survived. Sometimes something unlucky can result in meeting the love of your life. If you had not been there or gone through what you did, if you had not been in that hospital, or that building, then you would not have been in that exact place at the right time. You’ve heard of the wrong place at the wrong time but there is also the right place at the right time. Maybe one day you decided to just go another direction on your way to work and avoided getting killed. Maybe you woke up late one morning and missed your flight, only to discover later in the day that that was really the luckiest thing that could’ve happened to you because you missed the crash. I was sure lucky that I decided to go on vacation during the 9/11 tragedy since I worked there. Luck and bad luck are fluid—they are constantly changing because what you consider to be an unlucky event may turn out to be the luckiest day of your life. But is it really luck or divine intervention? It all depends on what one believes but I like to think that all good luck is a blessing and something to be thankful for. Then there are some people who always seem to be lucky, or so you think.

You know those people—the ones who are lucky in love, winning money, or great job. You get those people who win the lottery more than once but can’t handle the consequences and responsibilities of having more money than they are equipped to handle. They change, start living above their limits, destroy relationships and end up broke, and alone. I do believe that luck is not just some random thing—you make your own luck. I hear people described as lucky when they win an award, but in reality they have been working hard to earn that reward. That is not luck—that is skill, talent, and tenacity. To me, pure luck is when you have done nothing to earn your good fortune—lottery, horse racing, or betting on anything. But there are also many people who chase luck as in the case of compulsive gamblers.

My Dad was a person who believed in luck so much that he would spend most every Saturday at the “track” betting on the horses at either of the two racetracks around the NYC area: Aqueduct (the big A) or Belmont. Sometimes he was lucky and would come home as the jubilant big shot, ushering my brother, mom and I out the door to a nice steakhouse. But those were bittersweet memories because even as we were enjoying our night out, I knew that the next weekend could be a totally different scenario. I could never predict what type of mood he would come home in because it all depended on his luck that day. Oftentimes on Saturday evenings, after losing his shirt at the track, he would come home drunk, belligerent, and looking for an argument—it was always a roller coaster. My Dad’s quest for luck sometimes resulted in me, a little girl at the time, fielding phone calls from creditors and telling them my dad was not home when he was standing right near me. I became a liar because of my dad’s unlucky forays into the world of horse racing. My Dad’s obsession with hitting it big required him to have two jobs to support us. Luckily (or rather smartly) my mom held the family together with her job as a legal secretary. I so vividly remember hearing my parents arguing about money through the thin wall of our bedroom at night when my dad came home from his second job. Unfortunately those arguments laid the groundwork for my lifelong phobia of never having enough money and going broke. But it also made me the fiscally responsible person that I am today although I still struggle with a fear of “losing it all”.

The sad part of all this was that no matter how much money my dad won on any given day, he would throw it all back the next week in pursuit of hitting the big one. My parents were always one step away from divorce, but as was the case in those days they just stayed together. Even when my dad no longer went to the track to bet, NYC came up with a new way for people to feed their obsession—it was called OTB (off-track betting) and he just walked down the street to place his bets. Sometimes you have to practice acceptance and just stop fighting and in my mom’s later years that is what she did. She knew she could never change him and just stopped trying.