On this, our nation's Thanksgiving Eve...

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2023

...what's up with Donald J. Trump? When we were kids, Thanksgiving morning was all about the Winchester-Woburn game.

The game began at 11 a.m. On his way to winning the Heisman Trophy at the Naval Academy, Joe Bellino was the star of the hometown Winchester team.

(One of the players on the team—his nickname was "The Wit"—was our babysitter's boyfriend. We asked him once what the players do when they go in the locker room at halftime. "We lay on our backs and drink beer," the boyfriend convincingly said.)

This very day, on Thanksgiving Eve, Kevin Drum quotes a passage from Thomas Edsall's assessment of Donald J. Trump's mental health. 

In the main, we don't agree with the specific framework Kevin builds around the quoted assessment. But the assessment reminds us of this passage from Maureen Dowd's column last Sunday:

DOWD (11/19/23): Like other pols, Biden has a healthy ego and like all presidents, he’s truculent about not getting the credit he thinks he deserves for his accomplishments. And it must be infuriating that most of the age qualms are about him, when Trump is only a few years younger.

No doubt the president is having a hard time wrapping his mind around the idea that the 77-year-old Mar-a-Lago Dracula has risen from his gilded coffin even though he’s albatrossed with legal woes and seems more deranged than ever, referring to Democrats with the fascist-favored term “vermin” and plotting a second-term revengefest. Trump’s campaign slogan should be, “There will be blood.” 

[...]

It’s a perfect playing field for the maleficent Trump: He learned in the 2016 race that physical and rhetorical violence could rev up his base. He told me at the time it helped get him to No. 1 and he said he found violence at his rallies exciting.

He has no idea why making fun of Paul Pelosi’s injuries at the hands of one of his acolytes is subhuman, any more than he understood how repellent it was in 2015 when he mocked a disabled Times reporter. He gets barbaric laughs somehow, and that’s all he cares about. In an interview with Jonathan Karl, Trump gloated about how his audience on Jan. 6 was “the biggest crowd I’ve ever spoken in front of by far.”

Never mind that it was one of the most dangerous, shameful days in our history. To Trump, it was glorious.

Absent a fuller context, Trump's comment about that "biggest crowd" strikes us as perhaps innocuous. Also, we think people are totally missing the point when they keep saying that Trump "is only a few years younger."

That said:

Dowd says that Trump, who she has interviewed various times, "seems more deranged than ever." She says that his campaign slogan should be, "There will be blood."

With striking specificity, she says that Trump has no idea why his jokes about Paul Pelosi are inhuman. In Dowd's view, he has no idea why people think that. All he cares about is the fact that he gets laughs.

Intentionally or otherwise, she seems to be describing a victim of "antisocial personality disorder"—colloquially, a sociopath. According to the largest studies, a surprising percentage of adult men could be so diagnosed.

In his short post, Drum notes Trump's apparent ongoing loss of impulse control. "Hardly anyone seems willing to say it," Kevin says, "even though it's become more and more obvious over the past year."

We'll only restate this point:

Our journalists have agreed on a sixty-year-old rule which flatly forbids such discussion. They continue to be shocked, shocked—perhaps more correctly, surprised, surprised—by the downward spiral in Trump's public statements and public behavior.

When Bandy X. Lee assembled her best-selling book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, she explicitly said that Trump's condition would inevitably get worse. To their dying days, our high-end journalists will all agree that they must never discuss such matters—that they must never interview carefully selected medical specialists who can speak to such points of concern.

We aren't saying they're right in adopting that rule. We aren't saying they're wrong. 

We're merely telling you what they're doing. They've agreed that this potentially dangerous situation must never be discussed.

Bellino was a decent guy. Everyone was back then!