Trump and Trumpism: A Witches Brew Times Two, By Hal M. Brown
I'm a mental health expert, not a political scientist, so I'm only qualified to expound on Trump and not Trumpism.
First, throw all the ingredients that make up Trump’s personality, from actual psychiatric diagnoses to personality traits, from his being a psychopath, a grandiose narcissist, and a sadist, to his being a bully who gets a thrill out of grabbing women by their genitals together and we have a toxic witches brew boiling in the cauldron I call Trump.
Second, we have the “ism” he has imposed on the country. Political scientists endeavor to describe it. For example, in “How much corruption can MAGA stomach? Trump and Musk test the limit: Autocracy? Oligarchy? Kakistocracy? No, Trump's Mad King behavior is a hallmark of patrimonialism,” Salon’s Heather “Digby” Parton references an article in The Atlantic where “Jonathan Rauch gives a definition to the process that makes the most sense to me. He reaches back to German sociologist Max Weber who defined this as something called patrimonialism."
Quoting a book called "The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future" by Stephen E. Hanson, a government professor at the College of William & Mary and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, a political scientist at UC Irvine, which defines it as the state being "little more than the extended ‘household’ of the ruler":
Patrimonialism is less a form of government than a style of governing. It is not defined by institutions or rules; rather, it can infect all forms of government by replacing impersonal, formal lines of authority with personalized, informal ones. Based on individual loyalty and connections, and on rewarding friends and punishing enemies (real or perceived), it can be found not just in states but also among tribes, street gangs, and criminal organizations. In its governmental guise, patrimonialism is distinguished by running the state as if it were the leader’s personal property or family business.
Patrimonialism is the most fitting one word definition I have seen to date, but it needs to be modified to precisely fit the “ism” of Trumpism. If I had to pick just two prefixes to that term I’d add cruel and self-aggrandizing. I could include deranged, delusional, and lying. George Conway calls him a “stage four megalomanic (here). I could throw in bullying and sadistic and the description would run off the page. I could go into his underlying psychodynamics and include “needy” and “wounded by childhood experiences” because both of these are correct.
Witches, and those they’ve enchanted, find the fumes emanating from the roiling steaming brew sublime, even intoxicating. For everyone else they are toxic. They are deadly. They can be lethal.
MacBeth’s witches said it best:
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg and howlet's wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
Cool it with a baboon's blood,
Then the charm is firm and good.
I don’t think I need to explain the analogy between the witches and Trump and Trumpism.
Bonus:
Trump really said this in his speech at the Dept. of Justice: "So now, as the chief law enforcement officer in our country, I will insist upon and demand full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred." I decided to use AI to make an image showing his fantasy.
Another bonus:
Something Musk re-tweeted and then deleted is making the news (here for example: Elon Musk Shares Post Saying Hitler 'Didn't Murder Millions Of People'.) The tweet said "Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector employees did.”
In fact, this Alice Smith is correct. They public sector workers did the murders. However, left unsaid is that they were psychopathic public sector workers who thought the people they killed were vermin.
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Witches take umbrage at this comparison.