So, the late news out of Davos is that Trump threatened Greenland, then he backed down on using force, then he backed down again on the tariffs against eight European nations.

Don’t believe it for even one second.

The speech itself was a masterclass in what he calls the “weave,” and what I call “they shot him up with something that was not vitamin B.” Joe Biden should be suing him for a portion of everything he’s got, Biden’s name takes up so much of Trump’s speeches, his mind, his day, his Truth Social mania, his toilet musings, hell, every bloody moment the man hasn’t been drugged to sleep by whomever is in charge of his injection schedule. Between his press conference yesterday and his Davos speech today, the mentions of Biden were easily in the dozens. When Melania finally plants him next to his first wife in the wood line at his Bedminster golf course, his headstone should be inscribed, “Better than Biden.” That is clearly the way he measures himself. If I was Joe Biden on this first anniversary of Trump’s second term, I’d have a shit-eating grin on my face so huge, I’d have to take a muscle relaxant to get to sleep at night.

Lies, lies, more lies…you end up asking yourself, does he know he hasn’t been wheeled out in front of a high-school auditorium filled with JD Vance’s alleged tobaccy-chawin’ South Ohio relatives? Looking out at his audience in Davos, he was probably asking himself, where are all the red hats?

He bragged about how many bureaucrats he’d fired, then claimed, “They started off hating me when we fired them, and now they love me.” He was talking to an audience of corporate executives and politicians who know something about firing people, and he tried that line on them? Every suit in that room knew what it is to be hated, and hated with a passion by those they laid off to tack another few million on their salaries or cut taxes on their billionaire pals.

He prattled on about making fictional demand of Macron that he double or triple the price of some drug that France exports, “I said, Emmanuel, you’re going to have to lift the price of that pill to $20, maybe $30.” Then he starts mocking Macron’s accent, “No, no, no, Donald I won’t do that.” Embarrassing and pathetic doesn’t adequately capture that disgusting moment, and never will.

He told the crowd that a year ago when he took office, he promised to cancel 10 regulations for every new one imposed by his government, “But so far it’s averaging out to 129, if you can believe it.” He pulled “129” directly out of his ass, just like he pulled “no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime,” and everybody knew it. He was throwing the same old red meat to an audience with a taste for foie gras and truffles, and the lines landed as if he had just ordered a well-done burger at a three star Michelin restaurant.

He told them that “every major oil company is coming in with us” to Venezuela three days after headlines all over the world featured the CEO of Exxon-Mobil calling Venezuela “un-investible,” as if the Davos crowd can’t read.

Then he went after Europe’s energy policy, claiming that Germany is producing “22 percent less electricity than they did in 2017.” Two percent less electricity would be causing blackouts all over Germany. His Fox News addled speech writer probably saw some Aqua-net sprayed half-wit talking about a twenty-something reduction in fossil-fuel energy production in Germany.

You had to be listening to the speech live to get the full effect of his rant about windmills – killing “all the birds,” the usual nonsense. He claimed that every time the windmill “goes around, you’re losing $1,000. You’re supposed to make money with energy, not lose money.” Then he came up with a new whopper, that China makes all the windmills, “and yet I haven’t been able to find any wind farms in China. Did you ever think of that?”

Well, actually, no, you gibbering, fading fool.

He finally got around to Greenland, and you could have heard the proverbial pin drop in the room. A thousand European machers had been losing sleep for a month wondering if World War III was around the corner, and he whines and tells lies about the history of Greenland, how “we” owned it after the war, and “we gave it back,” and still the room is utterly silent. Then he somehow starts in with his standard load of lies about the “rigged election” that “I won by a landslide.” How he sandwiched that into his Greenland rant you will have to imagine for yourselves, and how Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine if he had been president, because, you know, he and Putin are such close pals, and all he would have had to do is tell Vlad, “hands off.”

He throws in a couple of paeons to his almighty battleships: “I thought maybe we could take them out of mothballs. They said, no, sir. These ships are 100, think of that, 100 times more powerful than those big, big, magnificent pieces of art that you saw so many times ago that you still see on television.” Because everyone at Davos stays up at night in their bedrooms thumbing stupid shit on their phones and watching World War II movies on TV. Then he starts babbling about Ukraine again and talking about how many people are dying every month, and this word-salad comes out of his mouth. Remember “word salad,” from those relatively innocent days when we called his spew of invective and hate and lies and fascist crap a “word salad?” Well, listen to what he said today at Davos:

“I’m dealing with President Putin and he wants to make a deal. I believe I’m dealing with President Zelenskyy, and I think he wants to make a deal. I’m meeting him today. He might be in the audience right now, but they got to get that war stopped because too many people are dying needlessly. Dying. Too many souls are being lost. That’s the only reason I’m interested in doing it. But in doing it, I’m helping Europe, I’m helping NATO, and until the last few days, when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. They called me daddy right last time. Very smart man said he’s our daddy. He’s running it. I was like running it. I went from running it to being a terrible human being. But now what I’m asking for is a piece of ice, cold and poorly located that can play a vital role in world peace and world protection.”

Fu-u-u-u-u-ck.

I wish the cameras had panned the audience so we could see their faces like we saw the faces of the generals in Quantico when he was spewing lies and hate to that crowd. A half-dozen or more times, he confused Iceland with Greenland, and all those suits are sitting there, and you know what’s going through their minds. He’s fucking losing it, and he’s building up to give me what I want or I’m going to start bombing.

And then he did it. He said, “We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force where we would be, frankly, unstoppable. But I won’t do that. Okay, now everyone saying, oh good. That’s probably the biggest statement I made because people thought I would use force. I don’t have to use force. I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force. All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland.”

By that time, I was walking Ruby, listening to the speech on NPR on my phone, and with a 7-degree wind in my face, slipping on the ice and silently begging Ruby to get her business done so we could get back inside, I could hear the exhalation of relief in the room, the biggest sigh the world has heard for 75 years, as they realized some of the money guys in New York had gotten to him and told him that their net worth fell by 10 or 20 percent when the market crashed worrying about whether he would attack Greenland. And Donald Trump, like the good wealth-poodle that he is, caved.

He had an explanation for why he was caving. He couldn’t admit that the money guys got to him. He couldn’t admit that Europe getting together and forming their own Mini-Euro-NATO had gotten to him. He couldn’t back down in front of Putin and Xi. He couldn’t look, for God’s sake, weak.

So, what did he do? He reverted to who he is, who he always was, who he’ll always be: A real estate guy, who sees the world not in terms of war and peace and the almighty “deals” that he’s always talking about, because all they are is a piece of paper, and everybody knows that real estate guys don’t deal in pieces of paper, they deal in property. Listen to this, and then I’ll tell you where it comes from:

“All we’re asking for is to get Greenland, including right title and ownership, because you need the ownership to defend it. You can’t defend it on a lease. Number one, legally, it’s not defensible that way. Totally. And number two, psychologically, who the hell wants to defend a license agreement or a lease?”

There it is. Yesterday, he told the press he didn’t want us to be “a nation of renters.” In the world of Donald Trump, there is nothing lower than a renter. If you pay rent, like the poor people he used to collect from in Brooklyn and Queens for his father, you’re a sucker, you’re a loser.

That is really what he was talking about when he turned to his chief of staff John Kelly, who had retired as a four-star general in the Marines, and asked of the dead in Arlington Cemetery, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” He knew that the graves he was looking at held the bodies of young people who had died never having owned a home, a piece of land with their name on it. So what did they die for, really?

A piece of paper. An oath. An idea that the Constitution was worth defending with their lives.

Trump didn’t understand that any more than he understood why people were such suckers that they would pay rent. What do you get from paying rent? Nothing. It’s not an investment. Rent has no real value. It’s just money you give to someone smarter than you, someone who owns the crappy apartment you’re paying rent for.

Donald Trump doesn’t want to rent Greenland, any more than he would want to rent his apartment in Trump Tower or his home/resort/hotel/gilded hellhole, Mar a Lago. It bothers Trump so much that he doesn’t own the White House that he has set about remaking the place in his own image, doing more than putting his stamp on it with gold leaf and marble. He tore part of the place down. That’s something a real estate guy from New York understands, because that’s the first thing you do in New York when you buy land that you’re going to build on: You tear down the stuff built by little people, the shops and bars and little apartments little people live in, and then you build something spectacular…

Like a zillion square foot ballroom that is bigger than the White House that you can put your name on that will be there long after you have gone. That’s what his stupid arch on the mall is about. He’ll put his name on that, too, like he did on the Kennedy Center. If he can’t own it, he’s going to pretend to own it by slapping his name and…I can’t believe I’m going to write this…marble arm rests on the seats.

Can you imagine how small, how tiny, how infinitesimal is the mind that sees the world in terms exclusively of whether you own it or not? It’s a way of perpetual unhappiness. You walk down a street in New York City, and you can’t look a building and say to yourself, gee, that’s a beautiful plaza they’ve done for the entrance, that’s some outstanding architecture there. You can’t see the world around you and appreciate it, because you don’t own it. If you own it, and you’re Trump, it’s the biggest. It’s the best. It’s the tallest. It’s the most expensive. It’s got the most gold. It’s got the most expensive marble.

It’s got gold bathroom fixtures.

That’s what it comes down to for him. A better toilet than the other guy’s, a golf course that’s greener and better groomed, a lobby that’s got bloody gold escalators. That’s what a woman is for him. She’s not beautiful unless he can own her by grabbing her pussy or raping her in a dressing room in a department store, for crying out loud.

In New York when I first moved there in 1970, there was, and had been for decades, a thing called “key money.” This was money that a new tenant paid to the tenant occupying an apartment or loft you had just rented to compensate them for improvements they had done while they lived there. You were paying to get the apartment’s or loft’s keys. It was completely “under the counter,” not acknowledged by the landlord, who owned the building and the apartment. It was an informal way for someone who had lived in an apartment and had invested some money in it to get their investment back, without having owned it.

To Donald Trump, of course, key money was sucker money, because the ultimate beneficiary was the landlord, who would reap the benefit of the improvements made by tenants by raising the rent because the place was better than it had been when he rented it to the old tenant.

That’s part of the basis for Trump’s rant about not wanting to defend a “license agreement or a lease.” My god, that’s not real estate! That’s not land! That’s not property! It’s a piece of paper! It’s why contracts are quite literally not worth the paper they’re written on. For Trump, you don’t have to pay that contractor you contracted with a piece of paper for his work, because he doesn’t own the bathroom he just put a new sink in. You own it! All he’s got to show is his labor. God, can you imagine depending on your labor to make a living?

Late today, Axios reported that the deal that Trump came to with NATO Secretary Mark Rutte includes an agreement that anything new established by the United States in Greenland, like new “Gold Dome” bases and new deep ports, will be considered part of the United States. We won’t be renting. It will be U.S. territory.

It is obvious that Trump does not know that the United States already has U.S. territory in foreign lands around the world. The cemeteries where our war dead are buried, yes, including the ones he refused to visit in Europe, are little pieces of the United States.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share

It takes a couple of years to finalize the income distribution data, and thus the Congressional Budget Office has just published “The Distribution of
Household Income, 2022″ (January 2026). The report is mainly graphs and data, rather than analysis or policy recommendations. Here are some patterns that caught my eye.

Start with focus on the income distribution produced by the market: that is, not taking account how government tax and spending policies affect the distribution. The pattern over time shows a well-known fact that income at the top has grown more rapidly. This figure shows that average income growth for the bottom quintile has been much the same as for the middle three quintiles, while the top quintile has gained faster.

Moreover, within the top quintile it is the top 1%, and indeed the top 0.1% and top 0.01%, that has seen the fastest income growth. This pattern emerged with force in the 1990s and early 2000s, and has remained in place since then

As a broad pattern, federal income taxes do take a higher share from those with higher incomes, and federal transfer payments and refundable tax provisions do provider greater benefit for those with lower incomes. Thus, these lines will tend to be closer together when looking at after-tax-and-transfers income.

The CBO uses a standard tool called the Gini coefficient as a way of measuring inequality. At an intuitive level, the Gini measures the gap from a completely equal income distribution: thus, a completely equal income distribution would have a Gini of zero, while a completely unequal income distribution (all income goes to one person) would have a Gini of 1. (For a more detailed description of the Gini, this earlier post offers a starting point.) For perspective, countries in highly unequal regions of the world like Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa often have Gini coefficients in the range of 0.4-0.5, while countries in more equal regions like the advanced economies of Europe are closer to 0.3.

For the US, the top line shows the rise in the Gini coefficient based on market income. The category of “income before transfers and taxes” measures inequality after including income arising from benefits linked directly to earlier employment: Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance. The next line shows income inequality after transfers and before taxes, while the bottom line shows income after transfers and taxes.

The specific Gini coefficient number for incoem after transfers and taxes in 2022 is 0.434. While this level of inequality is toward the higher end of the range, it’s quite comparabe to the level of after-taxes-and-transfers inequality in, say, 2018 (0.438), 2012 (0.444), 2007 (0.455), 2000 (0.440), or even 1986 (0.425). At least over the last quarter-century or so, government taxes and transfers have more-or-less offset any rise in market-income inequality.

The post Snapshots of the US Income Distribution first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Everyone who has ever had a baby will understand exactly what I’m about to say. If you haven’t experienced the delight and terror at the birth of a new human being, you should pay attention, because I’m going to describe our president, Donald Trump.

A newborn is wonderful…for a while, anyway. They’re so tiny and helpless, you can pass them around, hand to hand. Even someone with no experience with a baby can handle one, at least when they’re that size. There are lots of duties and pains and anxiety that come with a new baby, but in general, it’s an exciting and delightful time.

Then, without your hardly even noticing, they’ve turned one year old, and terror sets in, especially when you must venture with your not-yet-vertically-mobile but excruciatingly terrifying ex-newborn who has somehow turned into a child.

Now comes the time of endless preparation for disaster. In my day, you ventured forth into stores like Target and Walmart and specialized “baby stores” to look for anything, and I mean anything, that can relieve the stress of dealing with a one-year-old in public. You equip yourself in any way you can: you stock bottles of formula – many, many of these – and diapers and wipes and blankets and changes of clothes and whatever allegedly solid food they’ve begun to accept. And then you gather together an entire storehouse of baby-toy crap that will hopefully entertain and distract them when the inevitable meltdown happens. You’ve got stuffed animals, rattles, little cups they can bang on the sides of a stroller when they’re enraged – I can’t even remember all the stuff you gather, emptying store aisles as you go.

Because then it happens. Your darling little child will turn into a monster who cannot be controlled, and you’re stuck with him or her, because there is no place you can go when you are out in public away from a room and a crib and a door you can shut. The preparation for this moment has taken months, and still when it happens, it’s horrible, because not only is there nothing you can do, the whole world around you is watching and having to endure whatever form the meltdown has taken.

Dear readers, what I have just described is every single day in the White House. Donald Trump’s attendants must spend hours, days, even weeks in preparation for each moment they must turn him loose in front of the public, because they have no idea what he will do. Will he curse at a female reporter? Give an autoworker the finger? Fall asleep in a meeting with 15 people around him and a good portion of the White House press corps in the room? Use Joe Biden’s name 15 times in six minutes? Forget the name of the woman who just presented him her Nobel Prize? Utter a national security secret out loud? Read a private note passed to him by his Secretary of State suggesting he change the subject?

Or, as he did today in the White House press room, show up with a huge folder of reports and photos and other material meant to give him examples of his accomplishments in the first year of his presidency and then start babbling incomprehensibly as he thumbs through a stack of meticulously prepared mugshots of what are supposed to be criminal immigrants who were arrested by ICE in Minnesota, and then proceed to treat the whole thing like it’s something he’s never seen before, it’s just another toy that has been prepared for him to keep him busy and entertained in public that has utterly failed.

Karoline Leavitt observed Trump’s press conference from that row of chairs along the wall you probably remember from his nightly COVID briefings, when the chairs were occupied by the doctor who wore a different expensive scarf around her shoulders every day and Anthony Fauci, who always looked like he wanted to be anywhere else in the world but in that room having to push the broom it would take to clean up after Trump had done shit like suggest that people inject bleach as a cure for COVID. Watching Leavitt watch Trump was like being in a restaurant with a couple whose baby had just melted down and was screaming at the top of its lungs and nothing they did, nothing they handed it, not the bottle they tried to stick in its mouth, not the little stuffed animal they shoved at it, nothing was working. Leavitt sat there with a look on her face that showed how glad she was that after it was over, after Trump had stomped all over every single thing they had prepared for him and set fire to every preparation they had made, after the press room was a smoking ruin, she would get on Air Force One with him and find a big cushy seat and try to lose herself in slumber.

The president of the United States is barking fucking mad. Of course, this has been evident to anyone with eyes and ears and a relatively normal collection of synapses within their skull. Today’s performance was another in a long line of public disasters. Remember the day he appeared in the Oval Office with a bunch of drug company executives and one of them fainted or suffered a stroke and fell to the floor, and Trump stood up and looked blankly straight ahead as the entire group of guests and cabinet members like “Dr. Oz” tried to do something for the poor guy? The event was something they had been preparing for months. Trump was going to announce a big price reduction for the popular weight-loss drugs made by Ely Lilly and Novo-Nordisk. Instead, when the guy fell, he froze. He may as well have begun screaming and waving his arms in panic and anger, the effect of a man completely out of control of his surroundings was the same. The press was there to record the whole thing, like a restaurant filled with people witnessing the couple with the baby in full-melt down, stopping the entire place with its screams.

Trump’s brain ping-ponged from one “thought” to another, now holding up another photo of an alleged brown-skinned murderer or car thief, now yapping about Don Lemon at a church in Minneapolis, now accusing a woman of being a “professional opera singer” who shouted “Shame! Shame!” after Renee Good had been shot. “That’s not a normal person,” Trump bellowed, waving his arms around. “That’s a professional agitator, professional people that want to see our country do badly, but that’s not happening, because we have the hottest country anywhere in the world despite this stuff.” And he holds up another photograph of a brown face, “Look at this, all top-of-the-line criminals. They’re not going to be good, they’re not going to be well-behaved here.” He holds up another photo. “I could do this…I could do thousands. We had over 3,000 just in a short while, just in Minnesota.” He turns to Leavitt: “What’s the number, Karoline?” She speaks up from the wall where two chairs sit empty on either side of her. “Ten thousand.”

They’re talking about ICE arrests of “top of the line criminals” in Minnesota. A lie, naturally. Earlier, Trump had said that the dollar amount of childcare fraud in Minneapolis was “$19 billion.” The general fund budget for the entire state of Minnesota in 2025 was $32 billion. Of course! The childcare spending that could have been ripped off but mostly wasn’t was nineteen billion dollars!

On and on and on it went for two and a half hours, babbling about stopping wars he didn’t stop, Nobel Peace Prizes he didn’t get, the millions of barrels of oil in Venezuela that no major American oil company wants to drill for, “We’ve taken out 100 percent of drugs coming in by water,” and on and on the lies flowed, one after another.

So, what is different about him this time? He just sent that insane letter to the Prime Minister of Norway, then he posted private texts from French Prime Minister Macron and NATO Secretary General Rutte, apparently because they were so complimentary, opening with “My friend,” and “Dear Donald,” even though Macron expressed grave puzzlement over what he intends for Greenland.

Nothing is different. That’s the story. This man has sent what amounts to an occupying army into Minneapolis, Minnesota. Without a warrant, ICE goons broke down the door of an elderly American citizen yesterday and removed him in handcuffs in the freezing cold wearing nothing more than a t-shirt and underwear and then returned him to his home hours later after having discovered his citizenship, which he had been telling them all along. They killed a woman last week. They are breaking car windows and hauling people from their cars and arresting them and releasing them without charges because no crimes had been committed. You know all this. You also know he wants to take possession of Greenland even if he has to invade the island with the United States military. He’s pulling us out of various NATO committees just because he wants to. He still has several of his fake U.S. Attorneys who have been removed from their positions by federal judges going to work every day and signing official filings and documents as if they are legitimate.

He is, in fact and deed, breaking U.S. laws on a wholesale basis and enriching himself in office to the tune of $1.4 billion, according to the New York Times. That’s $1.4 billion they can find. The total has to be much, much higher.

And then there are the Epstein files that his Department of Justice is still sitting on, because it’s taking them so long to black-out the names of all his friends and supporters who are in there, and his name is doubtlessly one of them. Although the Epstein scandal has drifted from the headlines because of all the rest of the insane shit he’s been doing, we must not forget that it is about the abuse and rape of more than 1,000 underage girls.

I will repeat myself here: the man is barking fucking mad. His attendants cannot even begin to manage him. They can’t let him anywhere near a glass of water because his hands shake so badly that he cannot pick it up and drink without spilling. They are, as we are, stuck with an adult baby in a diaper who throws a tantrum with every breath he takes.

We, and the world at large, must stiffen our spines and get ready for even darker days ahead. He is going to pull something so outrageous it’s going to drop our jaws even further than they have already fallen. A fucking madman with the world’s biggest chip on his shoulder is in command of the most powerful, advanced military in the world, and he is followed around everywhere he goes with an officer carrying the nuclear “football.”

We will take our country back in November, if we make it that far.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share

Ogre Note: I will be slowly bringing over the most important articles (aka the personal ones) from The Banter over the next several months. I’d like to get all of my stuff in one place. :)

Trigger Warning: This article contains instances of child abuse both physical and emotional.

At the beginning of October 2020, I was potentially diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder called “Muir-Torre Syndrome.” MTS is a subcategory of Lynch Syndrome, a broader set of genetic disorders that greatly increase my chances of developing a variety of cancers. Since then, I have been scrambling to get all of the tests I need to find any lurking tumors.

Part of this scrambling was going through family medical history to see who else had cancer, what kind they had, and if anyone else had been diagnosed with Muir-Torre or Lynch syndrome.

Naturally, I talked to my father first (my mother died in 1999) since he’s one of the oldest members of that side of the family (the Puerto Rican side). He confirmed what I had suspected, that cancer was not really a thing among our relatives. There are a lot of us on that side, and since MT/Lynch is inherited, one would expect a significant number of relatives to have developed cancer over time. They had not.

The confusion came when I contacted Janis, one of the last living relatives on my mother’s much smaller side, and she also confirmed that cancer was not really a thing on that side, either. Muir-Torre is rare, and spontaneous cases are even rarer. It happens, but it’s ”winning the lotto twice” levels of unlikely. So why would I possibly have it?

That confusion was hypothetically cleared up the next day when my father called to let me know he was most likely not my biological father. I am 48 years old.

“Uhhhhh...OK?”

It was not a long conversation, but I was informed that my mother had (allegedly) slept with someone I had known growing up as “Fat Larry,” and I was almost certainly the result of this. Looking back, it is clear I was not immediately processing the full magnitude of what I was being told. I understood what was being said, but my reaction was far too calm and coherent. It was not until maybe thirty minutes later that the ramifications of what I had learned started to come into focus, and I got angry. But not entirely for the reasons you are probably thinking.

Interlude: When I was maybe 6, I got a teddy bear. It wasn’t fluffy and soft. In fact, it was kind of rough with almost denim-like material. But that didn’t matter. I loved it. I do not recall if I gave this teddy bear a name, but I do know I slept with it. A few years later, my father decided I was too old for teddy bears, and instead of quietly making it disappear, which would have been bad enough, he stood with a few friends around a barbecue grill and burned it while I watched, screaming and crying.

The first thing that came to me was the level of sheer disrespect required to keep this a secret. And that was before I found out that almost everyone knew about it except me. My mother died several years after I went to live with her, and I have no doubt that she was afraid to tell me. But after her death two decades ago, there was really no reason for my father to keep it a secret other than to protect himself from the embarrassment. Except he told my brother Matthew. But not me.

It has been suggested that this was kept quiet because I had placed my mother on a pedestal. The idea is risible. I am well aware of who my mother was. She was having an affair with my father while he was still married to his first wife, Marie. She had another affair with another married man when I was maybe six years old and left to marry him. I love my mother, but anyone who believes I placed her on a pedestal does not know me at all.

A little later, after I was done seething at the lack of respect, I started to think about the abuse.

Interlude: One day, both Matthew and I did...something. I do not even slightly recall what it was. I don’t even know if it was the same thing or if we had both done something different to incur our father’s wrath. Whatever it was, a spanking (of which there had been many) wasn’t going to cut it, so he took us down to the basement and used a horsewhip. He chased us around the basement, whipping our backs, arms, and legs for what seemed like forever. We were bleeding when he was done.

This was the most extreme case, but of the two of us, I got the lion’s share of the beatings. I was always the problem child. The one who got in trouble in school and acted out at home. The divorce exacerbated the situation significantly. My father regularly resorted to spankings, first by hand, then by paddle, and a level of emotional abuse that is hard to describe. As an adult, I wondered if he had even been aware he was doing it, but now? Now I wonder how much of it was from being a bad parent and how much was because he resented me for being the (possible) bastard son of an affair.

Would he have kicked me out of the house if there had been no question that I was his? Would the abuse have been as severe? He was abusive to Matthew as well, but I will never know how much of his cruelty towards me was out of spite, conscious or otherwise.

Interlude: When I was in fifth grade, my father decided that he’d had enough of me. One weekend when I was visiting my mother, he left a message on the answering machine that I would not be coming home. I was no longer welcome there and would be living with my mother from now on. At the ripe old age of 9, my father had kicked me out of the house. A few weeks would pass before family and friends pressured him to undo this.

On my way home from school, he picked me up without a word to my mother and took me back to Brooklyn. She must have been frantic when I disappeared, but I was too young and stupid to think about that. I was just happy to be going home. A home where I was not wanted.

The opposite of love

I saw a therapist for a while, and Joanne really helped with my self-control. I had hospitalized a kid who had punched me in the face (he’s fine), and clearly, my home life was causing me no small amount of stress. Fortunately for me, this was long before school resource officers, or I would have certainly been arrested. Joanne and the kid at school were a turning point for me. I stepped back from physical confrontations, acutely aware of how easily I could break people.

Once my rowdier behavior eased up, one would think things at home would go more smoothly. That’s not how it worked out. Arguably, the next phase of the abuse was even worse. They say the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. I can tell you with certainty that this is true.

Interlude: By the time I was in middle school, my father had almost completely checked out on raising me. There was no one going over my homework or asking if I even did it. No one cared about my grades or if I was studying for tests. I was left to my own devices in one of the worst middle schools in the city. Later, when I somehow passed the test to get into Brooklyn Technical High School, one of several specialized schools in NYC, I was completely unprepared for the level of academics required. “Smart” does not equate to “good student” if no one bothers to teach you how to be one.

I occasionally wonder why I went to Brooklyn Tech while Matthew went to South Shore, our local high school. I was always smarter, but Matthew is by no means stupid. I’m not even sure he took the test. Maybe I was sent to the advanced school because it would give my father bragging rights? I find it unlikely he was concerned about my future because he did not pay the tiniest bit of attention to what I was doing there. He did not really pay much attention to Matthew, either, and was surprised by how that turned out.

Interlude: By high school, my brother Matthew had discovered marijuana and sex were more fun than attending class. His once-excellent grades tanked, and the only way my father could think to deal with this since we were too old to spank was to take him to the backyard and start a fistfight. Matthew spent most of this with his face buried against a tree, crying. Later, he threw Matthew out of the house to go live with our mother. I guess it gets easier with practice.

After Matthew left, I moved down to the basement. At the age of 15, I had a studio apartment to myself, with my own bathroom, kitchen, and entrance to the house. No one cared to know what I was doing. I had no curfew, no one checked on me. I could come and go as I pleased.

I didn’t abuse this wild freedom, though. I had no interest in partying until all hours of the night, and I wasn’t much of a Lothario. Nobody was getting drunk, stoned, or pregnant at my place. When I was a teen, and even into my twenties, I used to think I had this level of “trust” because I had earned it. Maybe not with my grades, but undeniably with my staid behavior. Compared to the rest of my family, I was actually kind of a wet blanket.

It occurred to me when I was older that I had been stashed as far away from my father and Kim, wife #3, who despised me (the feeling was mutual), as possible. Out of sight, out of mind. Indifference is a hell of a thing.

Interlude: After I had started 10th grade, my father and Kim announced that we were leaving New York and moving to Florida. The idea of leaving everything I had ever known to be trapped, alone, with a woman who hated me and a man who didn’t care was too much. I left to live with my mother. My father made no attempt to stop me, even though he had legal custody.

Moving in the middle of the school year might have been one of the most selfish things I have ever seen. It wasn’t like I was thriving at Brooklyn Tech, but I could have been the Valedictorian, and they still would have moved. This was about them starting their perfect life in Florida, and I was, at most, an afterthought. Curiously, my father still thought he had the right to dictate Matthew’s life, although he still had no interest in mine.

Interlude: When Matthew inevitably got Dawn pregnant. She had an abortion. When they continued to have unsafe sex, even after we were both living in Long Island with our mother, Dawn kept getting abortions until she was no longer able to do so without risking permanent damage. 18 years old, Matthew was going to be a dad. Our father, who had his first child at 17 or so, was enraged by this despite never having bothered to have The Talk with us. He called Dawn a “crack whore” and ordered Matthew to stay away from her.

Abuse is generational

After escaping my father, and it did feel like escape, I was badly scarred. When I was maybe eleven years old, I saw the movie Mr. Mom and thought being a stay-at-home father would be pretty cool. I liked the idea of raising kids in a loving home. By the time I was in college, though, the idea of having children horrified me.

Abuse is often generational. It’s a cliche that we become our fathers/mothers, but cliches exist for a reason. I was worried, for very good reason, that I would be exactly the same kind of father, and why would I ever inflict that on another soul?

Interlude: When Dawn gave birth to Cassie and made it clear she expected Matthew to stick around and be a father, Matthew spent a few years not really doing that, and then moved to first Florida and then Arizona to escape his responsibilities. Was this Matthew fulfilling his father’s wishes to stay away, a deep character flaw of his own, or a combination of both?

Matthew ended up being worse than our father in some ways. There’s a lot to say about my father, but leaving for another woman a decade and three kids later as my father did is not the same as never being there in the first place. Marriages end. Staying together in a deeply unhappy marriage “for the kids” can be far more toxic than even a bitter divorce. And as far as I know, Marie (again, his first wife) always got child support. Matthew never manned up, and his child support was...inconsistent to be charitable. His parenting skills, the random times he showed up, were just as inconsistent.

Many people become their fathers and fail to break the cycle. Matthew was a case study in why I did not want kids. As Cassie got older, he got worse.

Interlude: When Cassie turned 16, Matthew apparently decided the hard part of raising Cassie was over, so he moved into her neighborhood to be a real “Dad” for the first time in his life. But as a teen, Cassie had a fully developed life of her own that did not revolve around her father. Matthew took offense to this and started to deliver increasing amounts of psychological abuse, exactly like his father had inadvertently taught him. When I tried to tell Matthew that he was driving Cassie away in precisely the same way our father had driven me away, Matthew exploded in rage and stopped speaking to me. His current relationship with Cassie is incredibly strained. Matthew has “disowned” his daughter about three times. I’ve only been disowned by our father once. For the crime of telling him something he didn’t want to hear, and the even greater crime of being right, Matthew has not spoken to me in 11 years.

Jordan was already a year old, and Debbie was pregnant with Anastasia when this happened, and thank god for that. If I had realized earlier that Matthew had become the spitting image of our father, I might have gotten cold feet and never agreed to have kids. As it was, I almost didn’t. If my friend Maria had not asked me to be a donor and if Debbie hadn’t agreed under the condition that she get a baby as well, I would have missed out on the most important and fulfilling role in my life. I would have missed everything because of the scars left behind by an abusive father.

Your Ancestry DNA results are in!

Knowing that the abuse was worse because of something I had nothing to do with makes everything infinitely more horrible, and the rage that has been boiling through my mind since early October is something I have not felt in a very long time. The only way it could possibly be worse is if it turned out that I was, in fact, his biological son. I needed to know, without a doubt.

A regular paternity test was no good because I would have to trust my father, who lives in Florida. You might be shocked to learn that after all of this, trust is in short supply. A DNA kit like Ancestry.com, on the other hand, would tell me things I needed to know regardless of what my father did or did not do with his kit.

If my results came back that I was 100% not Puerto Rican, well, then that’s that. Presumably, I would show up as 100% European Jew since Larry was also Jewish. If they came back that I was 50% Puerto Rican, well, then unless my mother had an affair with another Puerto Rican (not entirely impossible, I suppose), chances are my biological father is a man who did not think I was his for almost the entirety of my life and exacted a cruel price for it. The worst-case scenario. His kit would confirm it.

Think about it this way. If I’m not his son, then nothing really changes other than the fact that now I know the why of it all. A question that has always been at the back of my mind gets answered, and the status quo remains. He was abusive, I got the brunt of it, now that is explained.

If I am his son, it was all for nothing. I would have been abused anyway, because that is just who he is. But the additional cruelty? That would not have been there.

Interlude: I don’t have a very clear memory of my childhood. Repressed trauma? Maybe. Regardless, I remember my father telling me on multiple occasions when I was young that I was an accidental pregnancy. He told me that enough times that I remember it continuing across a number of years. I don’t remember anything that clearly over a period of time, but I remember that because it did wonders for my self-esteem. I didn’t even understand the concept of self-esteem at the time, that’s how young I was, but I know it made me feel bad. Just a little extra icing: Not only was I an accident, I was also the reason he had gotten a vasectomy. To make sure I was the last accident.

You might say that once as a joke. You don’t say that to a child you don’t think is yours over and over again for years unless you’re being cruel.

I got my results the day before Thanksgiving:

That’s one half. Here’s the rest:

If you’re having a little trouble interpreting that, don’t feel bad, it took me a minute, too. I had forgotten that “Puerto Rican”, as we understand it, is a mish-mosh of Spanish (colonizers), Native Caribbean (colonized), and African (enslaved). My father literally had an afro in the 70s. Like, several inches thick, and he used a pick. I was probably the only White kid in my school who got this joke in Spaceballs:

According to various sources, Puerto Ricans are, on average, about 65% European, 20% African, and 12% Native. Since I would be half, my percentages would also be half. So, 32-33% European, 10% African, 6% Native.

Let’s take a quick peek at my results again: Spain 18% + Portugal 12% + Scotland 4% = 34%. Senegal 4% + Nigeria 3% + Ivory Coast & Ghana 1% = 8%. Indigenous/Native 6%.

Well, I guess I’m a Puerto Rican, after all, and almost certainly the son of the man who raised me. Don’t you feel like a fucking idiot after all these years? I know paternity tests weren’t a thing until the 90s, but did you even do a non-DNA blood test during the divorce? Did it even occur to you to try and find out? It clearly didn’t. Years of abuse for something that wasn’t even true. Well done. Enjoy having that on your conscience.

Greater than the sum of his failures

It’s true that my father made me the man that I am. But in all the wrong ways and for all the wrong reasons, whatever they were. I did not have a guide to manhood. I had an albatross dragging me towards a lifetime of being emotionally distant, unable to make meaningful long-term connections. With great difficulty, I overcame the mental and emotional landmines left behind. This is why I’ve been with Mrs. Ogre since 1997, but Matthew has wrecked almost every relationship he’s ever been in (the jury is out on his most recent), and my father has been divorced more times than Donald Trump (4, if you’re curious).

I had the strength of character and perseverance to rise above such poisoned beginnings. Who could I have been had I been raised in the kind of nurturing home I am providing for my children? I’ll never know and, I suppose, I don’t really care outside of the most abstract thought experiment.

Because I am a massive nerd, I often think about stuff like time travel. I think about it enough that I have a code phrase a time traveller would have to use to convince me they are from my future. I also have a rule that I would never go back before the last major event I would never risk changing. First, it was meeting Mrs. Ogre, then it was Jordan’s birth, then Anastasia’s. After that was Kyle’s birth. A few years later, it was meeting Claudia and Lila and folding them into our family. These are the people who give my life meaning. This is my family. I am where I am supposed to be, and I am surrounded by the love denied to me growing up. I am a father unbound by the failures of my own upbringing.

Matthew was never able to overcome those failures, and his limitations as a father to Cassie are manifest. He knocked up another woman several years ago and is now, ironically, also a stay-at-home parent. Only time will tell whether he will be able to break the cycle on his second try. I have my doubts.

Breaking the cycle really wasn’t that hard, though. For the first five years of Jordan’s life/three of Anastasia’s, my ruling principle was “What would my father do?” and then do the opposite. It was oddly effective. This is a man who could not tolerate his sons not being cast in precisely the same mold as him. This is why three of the five of us stopped speaking to him. Louie stopped speaking to him until he died from heart failure, Marky has not spoken to him for years, and I only started speaking to our father again when I decided, after months of serious deliberation, to allow my kids to know their grandfather. My issues with him were not their issues, and I chose to be the bigger man.

For maybe a second or two, I contemplated not writing this article. I mean, I was always going to write it, but I was going to wait until after he died. I felt there was no sense in dredging it up now. But that was before. Now, I have years of pointless abuse to address. This is my retort. I hope you’ll be gracious enough, father, to allow it without comment. It is neither necessary nor welcome. We will not be discussing this. Any of it. Ever. That is the price for continuing to exist in my life. If that is not good enough, that is your choice to make but I cannot imagine many people would give you a better offer.

You may find that some, or much, of this does not match your recollection. You may feel you have been treated unfairly. You may feel hurt. You may feel betrayed.

Trying living it for five decades. That is what you did to me. That is your legacy.

By the way, all of my tests came back negative. I do not have cancer. Enjoy your holidays and I’ll give you a call on Christmas Day. Answer the phone. Or don’t. It’s up to you.

The Opinionated Ogre is a Stay-at-Home parent first, foul-mouthed hater of fascist Republicans second. He’s been making the most horrible people in the country miserable for over 15 years, and the hate he feels for American Nazis is eternal and without limits. He plans to stop torturing right-wing trash the day the last fascist dies. So, you know, never. Please help support this potty-mouthed newsletter for just $5/month or $50/year (Almost 17% less!)

☠️This Subscription Kills Fascists☠️

Prefer a one-time tip? We got you!

ICE has never been an agency filled with nice people hoping to uphold the law for the sake of decency. Almost by definition, an agency created to keep undocumented immigrants out of the country is going to attract nativists and bigots. That never ends well without intense and constant oversight which, well, never happened. That made it extremely easy for a fascist regime to turn ICE into a modern-day Nazi secret police.

But alongside the secret police, there have frequently been Brownshirts in many authoritarian regimes. Paramilitaries roughing up the public to pave the way for the real violence. But where have the militias been here? It’s not like we have a dearth of violent far-right groups to pick from. Why haven’t the Proud Boys been rampaging through the streets? Where are the Three Percenters? Where are the Oathkeepers? You know, the people who swore to defend America against a tyrannical government but turned out to be the footsoldiers of fascism all along?

Amanda Marcotte of Salon has an answer: Who needs Nazi Brownshirts running around doing the dirty work for the fascist regime when the United States government has BECOME the Nazi Brownshirts?

I’m far from the first observer to notice how much ICE, under the leadership of Homeland Security Secretary — and proud dog-killer — Kristi Noem, has come to resemble the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist group founded by Gavin McInnes in 2016. As Wired’s David Gilbert wrote in response to ICE’s recent invasion of Minneapolis, the reason we haven’t seen a resurgence of the Proud Boys in Trump’s second term is that the president’s “militarization” of ICE and “embrace of white nationalist rhetoric” leaves the group “without a role to play.”

In other words, it would be redundant for the Proud Boys to come out and beat up protesters under the banner of white nationalist slogans. The federal government is quite literally doing that:

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security used a song beloved by white supremacists in a recruitment ad for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The self-pitying “We’ll Have Our Home Again,” which equates living in a diverse community with being oppressed, has long been an anthem for racist terrorists, neo-Nazi groups and, crucially, the Proud Boys — one of the paramilitary organizations that led the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. As a local journalist in California reported at the time, the Proud Boys covered their faces and sang the song at a November 2020 Sacramento event, vowing to “put ourselves on the line” to help Donald Trump steal the 2020 election.

This explains a lot about what we’re seeing in ICE and a lot about what we can expect. and I have discussed this more than once on the podcast. ICE has lowered its hiring standards and truncated its training schedule. We’ve recently learned just how bad it is:

Many of ICE’s critics worry that the agency is hoovering up pro-Trump thugs—Jan. 6 insurrectionists, white nationalists, etc.—for a domestic security force loyal to the president. The truth, my experience suggests, is perhaps even scarier: ICE’s recruitment push is so sloppy that the administration effectively has no idea who’s joining the agency’s ranks. We’re all, collectively, in the dark about whom the state is arming, tasking with the most sensitive of law enforcement work, and then sending into America’s streets.

And we are all, collectively, discovering just how deadly of an arrangement that really is.

If you haven’t read Laura Jedeed’s article in Slate, you really should just so you understand how insanely dangerous and out of control ICE is:

To be clear, I barely applied to ICE. I skipped the steps of the application process that would have clued the agency in on my lack of fitness for the position. I made no effort to hide my public loathing of the agency, what it stands for, and the administration that runs it. And they offered me the job anyway.

It’s possible that I’m an aberration—perhaps I experienced some kind of computer glitch that affected my application and no one else’s. But given all of the above, it seems far more likely that ICE is running an extremely leaky ship when it comes to recruitment.

With no oversight and with ICE concealing its agents’ identities, it’ll be extremely difficult for us to know.

The regime says Jedeed is lying, which might as well have been a sealed and signed confession that her article is the gospel truth.

Part of this will be that they’re overwhelmed trying to obey Stephen Miller’s command to fill their ranks as quickly as possible. America’s Himmler is speedrunning the Holocaust, and he needs an army to do it.

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

Join The Ogre Nation Conversation!

But I believe the real reason for the “confusion” is intentional. The regime needs to fill the ranks of ICE with unstable, violent criminals, people who would never in a million years qualify to wear the badge and uniform of law enforcement. People with domestic abuse charges. Drug charges. Assault and battery. Links to domestic terrorist groups. Links to foreign terrorist groups. All of this is catnip to the regime but they would never be able to justify it to a court of law. So the process has been broken intentionally.

And now the dregs of society are flocking to ICE. The incels and losers. The small and petty. The angry and resentful. All of the men who look around them and see persecution because a Black man was president. Because a Latino is speaking Spanish on their cell phone. Because two men are holding hands in public. Because the girls in high school and college (if they even made it that far) laughed at them.

They see a world of injustice because they have been denied their rightful place as masters of the world. They’re not rich. They’re not powerful. They’re not respected. They earned all of that, dammit!

By “earned,” of course, I mean they were born with a penis and white skin. Asking America’s white men to do anything else beyond that is oppression. Grooming? Oppression. Emotional labor? Oppression. Stand up for the rights of others so the rich don’t loot your future? Fuck you! That’s oppression!

Making the world a better place is hard work. Making yourself a better person is really hard work (ask me how I know). Hate and violence, though? That’s easy. It takes no effort at all to blame everyone for your own failures. It takes less effort to blame those with less power than those with all the power, too. Then you don’t have to challenge the status quo, you simply have to reinforce it and, hey, maybe you can be rewarded! $50,000 is a lot of money to get a badge, a gun, and legal immunity to shoot women who laugh at you in the face.

At this point, does Kristi Noem even have to bother using Nazi imagery and propaganda to recruit small-dick energy losers? Why bother? She could put up ads on X stating “You can punch women in the face for money!” and the exact same pool of men would apply. Maybe sweeten the deal by promising them some quality time with the children they kidnap? I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, the Venn diagram of white nationalism, misogyny, and pedophilia is a goddman perfect circle.

This is why the Proud Boys and neo-Nazis are not smashing up stores with anti-Trump signs and attacking crowds of protesters. Why do it for free when you can be paid a shit ton of money by the regime to do it?

It doesn’t help that they would have to find very small protests to attack, as most of them, even in small towns, have been in the hundreds, and there just aren’t that many neo-Nazis and Proud Boys in any given area. Wouldn’t do to show up, start a fight, and then get beaten to a pulp. Very embarrassing for the limp-dick incels trying to reclaim their “lost” manhood. Best to wear a uniform and have the “right” to throw tear gas at children. Like a real brave manly man.

But all of the violence against women and children and immigrants in the world is never going to make that tiny dick any bigger, buddy. Once a loser incel, always a loser incel. Now you’re just a loser incel wearing a Nazi uniform.

One last point about all of this worth making. Another piece of the puzzle about the missing Brownshirts is more obvious and something I’ve mentioned before. Something all of these ICE agents will come to regret: Federalism. While JD Vance and Stephen Miller and Fox News keep saying federal agents have total immunity, they do not. When the regime falls, and it will, we all know Miller will use the autopen to give pardons to every ICE agent. Miller is not nearly as clever as he thinks he is, and there’s a very good chance he will fuck that up, leaving his Gestapo exposed to legal jeopardy, but we’ll have to wait and see.

That, however, is in the future. Right now, Brownshirts would not be protected. Pardoning the Proud Boys for rampaging in Chicago would be political suicide for the GOP and even Miller knows it. Putting pardons aside, even if the regime’s corrupt DoJ refused to investigate or prosecute, there’s nothing the federal government can do to stop state and local charges from being filed against private citizens. The feds are interfering with the state investigation of Jonathan Ross, the piece of shit who murdered Renee Good, but they’re only going to be able to play that card so many times before the courts step in and put a stop to it. They would not be able to protect militias at all.

As I’ve said numerous times, 20 years in state prison is not an improvement over 20 years in federal prison.

This is something we have to keep speaking into reality for when the regime falls. California, Minnesota, Oregon, Virginia (not that we’re a target of ICE violence), and every blue state Miller has sent ICE to invade must be prepared to arrest and prosecute every ICE agent that stepped foot in their cities and violated their laws. Their Attorneys General have to be prepared to issue an arrest warrant for the leadership of ICE and DHS. To go after everyone in the White House involved in orchestrating this campaign of terror. Miller, Homan, Noem, Bovino. All of them should be looking to flee the country or face decades in prison.

Build an army of violent dickless incels, there’s a price to pay. Count on it, you fascist fucks.

I hope you feel better informed about the world and ready to kick fascists in the teeth to protect it. This newsletter exists because of you, so please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!). Thank you for everything!

🌊Join The Blue Wave!🌊

Prefer a one-and-done tip? Click here!

Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

There are 287 days until the most important midterm election in American history. The regime is afraid, and they should be. We are legion, and they are weak. Stay strong. You are never alone.

Have you seen Trump’s letter, or text message, or whatever it was that he wrote to Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre of Norway yesterday?

“Dear Jonas:

Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America. Denmark cannot protect that land from Russia or China, and why do they have a “right of ownership” anyway? There are no written documents, it’s only a boat that landed there hundreds of years ago, but we had boats landing there, also. I have done more for NATO than any person since its founding, and now, NATO should do something for the United States. The World is not secure unless we have Complete and Total Control of Greenland.

Thank you! President DJT”

Others have debunked the thing line by line, but all you need to know is that wants to take over Greenland because he was denied the Nobel Peace Prize. But why is he addressing the Prime Minister of Norway, who has nothing to do with awarding Nobel Prizes, and certainly nothing to do with Greenland? Does he know that Greenland is a territory of Denmark, not Norway? That possibility is jaw-dropping all by itself, and so is the rest of his gibberish. Attempting to apply logic to his lies and nonsense becomes the same tiresome burden we face with everything else he says late at night on Truth Social, at Oval Office press gaggles, as he walks to his Marine helicopter on the way to Mar a Lago, or on Air Force One standing in a doorway that is conspicuously devoid of elaborate decoration or gold leaf, an absence soon to be remedied with the airborne crime scene the Qataris gifted him recently.

Trump’s utterances, no matter their form, have a unifying theme that he was good enough to put into words during his recent interview with four reporters from the New York Times. After telling them that ownership of Greenland was “psychologically needed,” he was asked if taking over Greenland was “psychologically important to you or the United States?”

“Psychologically important for me,” he replied without hesitation.

One day, we may discover how a smidgen of honesty accidentally found its way out of his mouth on that day, but we have for now, on the record, Donald Trump telling us how complete is his need for dominance over everything he sees, and how deeply rooted and enormous is his narcissism. The man wakes up in the morning and proceeds to go looking for things that will make him feel better about himself – a Diet Coke, a “win” in a game of golf he has to cheat to achieve, a quick dressing down of a cabinet member, an expletive or putdown flung at a female reporter, a demand that unmet, he can double down on, something to tear down, something on which to add gold leaf.

Lies and nastiness and exaggerations are just a means by which to assuage his doubts and inadequacy. He is a man who spent years as a boy being yelled at by his mother and father and told that no matter what he did, he couldn’t get anything right. So what did he do when he grew up and took all his daddy’s money? He bought things. He bought wives. He bought friends. He bought buildings. He bought an airline. He bought the loyalty of employees. He bought a beauty pageant so he could be guaranteed access to young women whom he could ogle and abuse. And he took. He took advantage of those weaker than himself, such as contractors he hired. He took from women he groped and abused and raped. He took top secret documents, some of them about nuclear weapons and proposed attacks on foreign nations, so he could show them off to golfing buddies. He tried to take an election away from voters who had elected the candidate running against him. He took away the dignity of everyone around him, even his supporters and cabinet members and aides, by belittling them and falling dead asleep in the middle of their trying to suck up to him with praise.

Donald Trump has been on a lifelong search to find something to fill the empty hole inside him. He puts his name on institutions built by and meant to honor others, thinking, or hoping really, that his name represents something other than his neediness. The Nobel Peace Prize was just another starchy, fatty Big Mac he thought would fill him up. Not having it as his own only deepened and widened the hole he is left trying to fill.

He is a man who craves the attention, and yes, the love, he never received as a child and has been unable to either buy or acquire by threats and violence and punishment of those who would deny him that love even now.

This has been said before, but it needs to be said again: Trump is a weak man who is always trying to appear strong. Somewhere inside him, he must be aware that his “psychologically important” need for love and approval is as visible to others as it is to him when he looks in the mirror every morning. Can you imagine how sad it is to be Donald Trump? It must be why he falls asleep all day sitting in his chair. If I were him for even a moment, I wouldn’t want to be awake either.

Give a gift subscription

Leave a comment

Share