SATURDAY: Demise of the two percent revolution!

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 16, 2024

Plus, more text from Mary Trump: Was the recent election a "rout?" Was it "not even close?"

Was it "a wipeout," the language we heard on this morning's Fox & Friends Weekend, language which came from Mark Penn?

Is it true that "Democrats Were Crushed?" That's language from the headline someone placed on this Ed Kilgore essay—language we encountered today on a rebroadcast of an earlier Morning Joe segment.

You're asking important questions! In our view, before we traffic in Storyline, it's important for us to retain our hold on some basic facts. 

With that in mind, and as the vote count slowly turns, here's the current state of the nationwide vote in the most recent White House election, CNN reporting:

Nationwide popular vote (to date), 2024
Candidate Trump: 76,453,640 (50.0%)
Candidate Harris: 73,755,129 (48.2%)

There was no seven percent resolution this year. By now, this year's ballyhooed two percent decimation has even ceased to exist. 

As the nationwide vote count continues, the winning candidate's victory margin is down to something like 1.8 points. Also, with something approaching a million votes still unrecorded in California, his portion of the total vote is on the verge of dropping below 50 percent.

Candidate Trump did win the election, but did he produce a wipeout, a rout? Language like this is exciting and fun, but did some such event take place?

We'd be slow to say something like that. Also, consider this:

Candidate Trump had been running for more than nine years. Candidate Harris got to run for a bit more than three months. 

Adjusting for length of opportunity, we'd be extremely reluctant to adopt the soul-stirring language in which she is said to have lost in a rout. That said, Storyline is a powerful god, and this great god routinely prevails.

As to why the winning candidate won this year's election at all, we'll be returning to that question on Monday. Readers will be asked to take The Blue America Challenge:

Are we able to imagine the possibility that those of us in Blue America may, in some amazingly tiny ways, possibly have managed to earn our way out?

Did we ourselves make mistakes? The notion seems absurd on its face, but we plan to examine it anyway, just to be extra safe.

This morning, we've continued to offer some basic numbers. Also, we thought we should probably offer you a bit more text from that best-selling book.

We refer to Mary Trump's 2020 best-seller, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. 

As we've noted (again) in the past two days, Mary Trump flatly described her paternal grandfather, Fred Trump, as "a sociopath," though she didn't exactly go that far in describing her uncle, the incoming president.

Mary Trump is a clinical psychologist. That doesn't mean that her various assessments are automatically accurate. Still, her assessments remain, even after the mainstream press corps has agreed that they must never be reported, evaluated or discussed. 

In the last two days, we've shown you some of Mary Trump's basic assessments concerning her aforementioned uncle. Today, we thought we'd post an additional passage concerning "sociopathy," which may or may not exist.

Does sociopathy really exist? If so, what does the term really mean? And what should we think about the moral agency of a person who can be diagnosed in some such way?

Our high-end press corps has agreed that such questions must be disappeared. But just for the record, we'll offer one more passage from Mary Trump's widely bowdlerized book.

This passage concerns her paternal grandparents, Fred and Mary Trump. In this passage, she ends up describing the reported prevalence of sociopathy in much the way we (once again) did on Thursday:

MARY TRUMP (pages 23-24): Mary and Fred were problematic parents from the very beginning. My grandmother rarely spoke to me about her own parents or childhood, so I can only speculate, but she was the youngest of ten children...and she grew up in an unhospitable environment [on an island off the coast of Scotland] in the early 1910s. Whether her own needs weren't sufficiently met when she was a child or for some other reason, she was the kind of mother who used her children to comfort herself rather than comforting them...

[,,,]

Whereas Mary was needy, Fred seemed to have no emotional needs at all. In fact, he was a high-functioning sociopath. Although uncommon, sociopathy is not rare, afflicting as much as 3 percent of the population. Seventy-five percent of those diagnosed are men. Symptoms of sociopathy include a lack of empathy, a facility for lying, an indifference to right and wrong, abusive behavior, and a lack of interest in the rights of others. Having a sociopath as a parent, especially if there is no one else around to mitigate the effects, all but guarantees severe disruption in how children understand themselves, regulate their emotions, and engage with the world.

Some of what Mary Trump writes in that passage is described as speculation. Much of what she writes in her book seems to have come from direct observation, or from conversations with Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald Trump's older sister.

Her statements about the reported prevalence of sociopathy have an objective basis, as we (again) noted on Thursday. She puts the overall prevalence of the condition at "as much as 3 percent," with a substantially higher prevalence in the case of men.

Matters like this can't be discussed within the current rules of our political journalism. Despite the flattering way we highly educated Americans tend to regard ourselves, our public discourse is too immature to permit such discussion.

That said, interesting questions arise as Mary Trump describes this condition. Are sociopaths "afflicted by" this condition, as her language has it?  If so, how should we regard the moral agency of such people as they proceed through the world, behaving in the destructive ways Mary Trump describes?

No such discussions will complicate our political discourse! Our journalists went to the finest schools, but they aren't prepared to handle such topics. As one twentieth-century anthropologist memorably stated:

Where I come from, we only talk so long. After that, we start to hit.