THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2024
The wages of tribal denial: We'll start with a statistical update concerning the ongoing "rout."
And yes! It was in that way that last week's election results were described on this very morning. This is how Storyline grows:
He received 50 percent plus in the vote tally that came in. He did— He swept the swing states, did far better than anybody expected as far as that big of a rout...
Again, you had a president who wanted to be a 50-plus president. He certainly started, did very well in that direction.
That's where the fuzzy overview ended. For the record, that was cable's Joe Scarborough, describing last week's "rout."
That said, was last week's election a rout? As of this morning, with millions of votes still unrecorded, this is where CNN says the matter stands:
Nationwide popular vote (to date), 2024
Candidate Trump: 75,936,465 (50.1%)
Candidate Harris: 72,925,551 (48.1%)
Nationwide, the victory margin now stands at two points. Based on CNN's numbers, something approaching two million votes remain unrecorded in California alone. Something like a million more votes wait to be counted and recorded in three other blue states—Washington, Oregon, Maryland.
We'll take a guess! We'll guess that Candidate Trump may dip below 50 percent when all the counting is done. We'll further guess that his victory margin will dip below two points.
It's true, of course—Candidate Trump did win all seven swing states. That said, many people predicted that one of the two candidates might in fact sweep all seven states, even in an election which was too close to predict.
That said—as we noted yesterday, it wasn't even close! As of this morning, Scarborough has applied the word "rout" to this developing profile.
Meanwhile, and needless to say, the results weren't close in those seven swing states either! For example, Trump's victory margin in Michigan was a walloping 0.8 points! The rout was enormous there!
(As of last Friday morning, Scarborough didn't even seem to know that many millions of votes remained uncounted. So it frequently goes within the realm of corporate "cable news" stardom.)
Where do such observers come from? What explains the inevitable promulgation of misleading or false Storyline?
Presumably, such Storyline starts in the imperfect wiring of our imperfect human brains. That brings us to yesterday afternoon's deluge.
At the start of the year, it seemed that the race was going to be President Biden v. Candidate Trump. As we said at the time, each man seemed to be unelectable, as judged by traditional norms and standards—but, to us, it seemed hard to believe that President Biden could win.
At this site, we retreated to the dawn of the west—to the verses of the Iliad, the western world's first great "poem of war." As it was then, so it was now:
Our nation had divided into a pair of unthinking armies, bristling with arms in the midst of a long tribal conflict.
In late July, President Biden withdrew; Candidate Trump went on to squeeze out a win. Now we're told that he won in a rout—and on come the wages, the fruits, of the long-standing failures of our own Blue American tribe.
Hegseth and Gabbard and Matt Gaetz oh my! On this particular day, we'll author a few brisk reminders about the apparently disordered man to whom our tribe lost in a rout:
That candidate's niece, Mary Trump, is a clinical psychologist. That doesn't mean that everything she says is accurate—but in July 2020, she published a best-selling book, Too Much and Never Enough.
According to the leading authority on the matter, her book "sold close to one million copies on its first day of sales"—1.35 million copies just in its first week. Early on, she offered this:
MARY TRUMP (pages 12-13): None of the Trump siblings emerged unscathed from my grandfather's sociopathy and my grandmother's illnesses, both physical and psychological, but my uncle Donald and my father, Freddy, suffered more than the rest. In order to get a complete picture of Donald, his psychopathologies, and the meaning of his dysfunctional behavior, we need a thorough family history.
In the last three years, I’ve watched as countless pundits, armchair psychologists and journalists have kept missing the mark, using phrases such as "malignant narcissism" and "narcissistic personality disorder" in an attempt to make sense of Donald’s often bizarre and self-defeating behavior. I have no problem calling Donald a narcissist—he meets all nine criteria as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5)—but the label only gets us so far.
It isn't true just because she says it. But right there, early in her book, she referred to her grandfather's "sociopathy."
As far as we know, that isn't a technical clinical term at the present time. That said, she thereby seemed to be saying that her grandfather was, colloquially, a "sociopath."
She never quite said that about her famous uncle. Soon, though, she offered this
MARY TRUMP: [Clinical] experiences showed me time and again that diagnosis doesn't exist in a vacuum. Does Donald have other symptoms we aren't aware of? Are there other disorders that might have as much or more explanatory power? Maybe. A case could be made that he also meets the criteria for antisocial personality disorder, which in its most severe forms is generally considered sociopathy but can also refer to chronic criminality, arrogance, and disregard for the rights of others...
The fact is, Donald’s pathologies are so complex and his behaviors so often inexplicable that coming up with an accurate and comprehensive diagnosis would require a full battery of psychological and neuropsychological tests that he’ll never sit for.
It isn't true because she said it—but you can see what she said about her uncle's various "psychopathologies." That said, our struggling nation's immature discourse isn't able to handle such talk. The leading authority offers this wonderful excerpt from the review the book received in Blue America's leading newspaper, the brainiac New York Times:
This is a book that's been written from pain and is designed to hurt. ... Forget the psychologist's vocabulary of childhood attachment and personality disorders; it's when Mary talks about her need "to take Donald down" that she starts speaking the only language her family truly understands.
— Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times, July 2020
Forget all that silly brain doctor talk! In this case, the reviewer was saying the quiet part out loud—and so it went within Blue America's upper-end press corps, with Mary Trump quickly transformed into a standard political pundit in the many appearances she made on various "cable news" programs.
What does it mean to diagnose someone as a "sociopath?" Does it mean anything at all?
We'll guess that it probably does! But by the long-standing rules of the game, questions like that can't be discussed in newspapers like the New York Times or on our own brainiac tribe's brainiac "cable news" programs.
And so it turns out, for better or worse, that Mary Trump's uncle is now gifting the world with a remarkable roster of broken children with broken toys—with Hegseth and Gabbard and Gaetz oh my, but also with Kennedy Jr. and Musk and Vance and also with Tucker Carlson, who was bloodied by demons last year as he slept in his cave with his wife and with his four dogs.
Many of these participants report highly unusual childhood experiences. At the Republican Convention, Candidate Vance's wife spoke about the way he has dealt with his "childhood traumas"—with the traumas which emerged from a childhood in which his family's moral exemplar was the grandmother who literally set her husband on fire as he soundly slept on an evening when he'd come home drunk again.
She was the stable one in that child's family! We offer these notes as reminders.
"Sacred Troy must die," Hector said, as he considered the blind tribal fury confronting his sacred city out on the teeming plain.
Colloquially, Mary Trump was saying this in her best-selling book:
We had a nutcase in the White House. And as her uncle says the names of those who will serve in his second term, he may seem to be surrounding himself with quite a few other such people.
As we face this circumstance, a question comes to mind. Did we over here, within our own tribe, possibly earn our way out? Did our own behaviors, down through the years, somehow lead to last Tuesday's (less than two-point) rout?
Our intentions may have been good—but how about our performance? We humans aren't wired to consider such questions—and at this extremely late date, the answer may not exactly matter.
In closing, we'll recall one more point. As far as we know, "sociopathy" isn't some sort of one-in-a-million phenomenon. Once again, we'll link you to this April 2018 report in Psychology Today:
Between 2001 and 2005, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded the largest study ever done regarding the prevalence of personality disorders in the United States. Structured interviews were done with approximately 35,000 people who were randomly selected to be representative of the U.S. adult population in a variety of ways including age, income, gender and region. This study found that...3.7% [of the general population] would meet the criteria for ASPD [anti-social personality disorder] (5.5% male and 1.9% female).
[...]
[W]hen the fifth edition of the diagnostic manual was published in 2013 (the DSM-5), it included a “range from 0% to 6.2% in community samples” for NPD5 and “twelve-month prevalence rates” of ASPD “are between 0.2% and 3.3%.” In both cases, the DSM-5 acknowledged the large NIH study, but considered it as simply part of a range of possibilities. While this is good cautious science reporting, we are left wondering whether these are significant mental health problems or significantly increasing mental health problems.
Colloquially, ASPD is "sociopathy." According to that largest study, it can be diagnosed in more than five percent of adult American males!
Does that statement even make sense? What can it possibly mean? By the prevailing rules of the game, none of this can be discussed within the immature "public discourse" of our endangered and flailing nation.
Beyond that, you still won't see the New York Times reporting the full range of troubles with the past behaviors of Nominee Mister Gaetz. As with the more civilized Trojans who were eventually subdued by the furious army down on the plain, the New York Times is too refined to walk us through such matters.
As we noted yesterday, Nominee Hegseth is so dainty that he won't even say the name of the Democratic Party! The New York Times is too dainty to report the various things Nominee Gaetz has done.
Meanwhile, Candidate Trump won in a rout. It wasn't even close last week, especially up in Michigan!
Tomorrow: Did we Blues possibly "earn our way out?" We hope to return to our list of allegations.
Up in Michigan: To read the Hemingway story in question, you can just click here.