BATTLES: The warfare is everywhere all at once!

TUESDAY, MARCH 17, 2026

Hollywood nails it again: At the start of last evening's Last Word, Lawrence O'Donnell returned to a familiar assessment. As you can see at the Last Word website, here's how his monologue started:

O'DONNELL (3/16/26): Well, Donald Trump has never been able to convincingly express sympathy or sorrow for anyone other than himself. That is the mark of a sociopath, of course—the inability to feel sorry for someone.

Many sociopaths are capable of saying "I'm sorry for your loss" if someone in your family die, but they are incapable of actually feeling sorry for your loss. They just know they're supposed to say those words—those well-rehearsed words.

[...]

Last night, at 9:17 p.m., with the cameras rolling, Donald Trump's mind and feelings appeared to be in apparent sociopathic lockdown, possibly, when he was asked about the six Air Force personnel on a refueling plane that crashed in Donald Trump's new war zone.

And so on from there.

As we've noted in the past, the term "sociopath" isn't a clinical diagnostic term. It's a colloquial term which tends to be associated with a diagnosis of "antisocial personality disorder," a "mental disorder" which can apparently be diagnosed in something like 5-6 percent of adult American men.

(In fairness, the colloquial term may lose some of its punch when the apparent sociopathic lockdown only appears to possibly be in effect, as was the case last night.)

To his credit, O'Donnell is no stranger to this type of assessment. To see an unvarnished assessment from April 2020, you can just click here. For a return to the days when O'Donnell would occasionally interview medical specialists about the possibility in play here, you can just click this. 

O'Donnell used to go there! That sort of thing was permitted back then. Today, possibly not.

Today, he rarely offers that type of diagnosis. The change represents one of the problems Blue America has faced in trying to understand the behavior of the sitting president, who may (or may not) be afflicted with the various "psychopathologies" attributed to him by his niece, the clinical therapist, in her 2020 best-seller, Too Much and Never Enough. 

Quickly, we'll say it again! We're going to suggest that people gripped with a "mental illness" almost surely didn't choose to be so afflicted—didn't choose to be "mentally ill" (whatever that term means). 

That said, our society has a severely limited grasp of the conceptual complexities involved in the realm of "mental illness." That limitation has kept us from exploring one source of the many battles in which we Americans are currently involved. 

Lawrence O'Donnell is very sharp, and he's widely experienced. He spent one term of duty in Hollywood—and Sunday night, Tinseltown got it right all over again, as it so typically does. 

Last year's Best Picture, the academy said, was One Battle After Another, an "American black comedy action-thriller" which underperformed at the box office but managed to capture, right there in its title, the current state of play across the American landscape.

Hollywood rarely misses! At present, it's battles everywhere all at once in this, our clownishly troubled nation—and a good deal of that fury comes from the sitting president. Today, in a front-page White House Memo, the New York Times' Peter Baker captures some of the fury which is generated, on an almost hourly basis, by the sitting commander in chief:

WHITE HOUSE MEMO
In Choosing ‘Epic Fury,’ Trump Names a War and Defines His Presidency

[...]

This is in a way the Anger Presidency. Anger defines Mr. Trump’s decade on the political stage. Anger at foreigners who come to this country and change its nature. Anger at allies who take advantage of America. Anger at Democrats who cross him. Anger at Republicans who cross him. Anger at appointees he deems insufficiently loyal. Anger at prosecutors, F.B.I. agents, judges, journalists, law firms, elite universities, cultural figures, corporate leaders, pollsters, central bankers and the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

His rally speeches, news conferences and social media feed are suffused with anger. In the past week, he attacked the “truly sick and demented people” in the news media, the “Radical Left Democrats,” the “Cognitive Mess” governor of California, a “COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER” Republican congressman from Kentucky and a “misfit” Harvard professor, not even counting the “deranged scumbags” in Iran.

Stewing over recent losses in court, he spent Sunday night posting a series of rambling rants assailing the “completely inept and embarrassing” Supreme Court, the “Deranged” former special counsel, the “absolutely terrible” chair of the Federal Reserve, the “grossly incompetent” former President Joseph R. Biden Jr., journalists who “should be brought up on Charges for TREASON” and “a Wacky, Nasty, Crooked, and totally Out of Control Judge” who ruled against him. 

Is something "wrong" with this freaking guy? We've asked the question again and again. As part of our nation's current dilemma, Blue America has never managed to find a way to explore that fairly obvious question. 

Baker is a highly skilled synthesizer, but even he has only scratched the surface of the battles which rage, this very day, as the president with the possible problem which can't be named continues to storm on the moors.  

Over at Mediaite, headlines contain the word "rage" again and again and again. Meanwhile, in his White House Memo, Baker included this paragraph about a top Trump aide:

And White House officials, using official government accounts, seem to be in a pit-bull contest to be the nastiest on any given day, upbraiding anyone perceived to be an adversary: “Total hack and loser.” “Wrong again, numbnuts.” “A sad and pathetic excuse for a human being.” “An entitled prick.” “A known liar and fraud.” And that was just from one of them over just one week.

Needless to say, that unnamed official is Steven Cheung, the White House Communications Director. Sic semper "the several types of dog believed to have descended from bull and terriers," as someone most likely once said.

Red America has plenty to criticize about Blue America's performance over the past however many years. What we find striking—on Fox News Channel programs, for instance—is the inability to regulate anger, a shortcoming which is rarely far away inside Silo Red. 

The name-calling fury which spills from that silo has helped create the state of play in David French's new column for the Times:

"We Have Reached End-Stage Polarization," the headline on his column says. Of us battling Reds and Blues, the columnist says this:

"Both sides hate each other so much that it’s almost meaningless to ask who hates whom the most."

We're not sure we agree with that assessment. In the next few days, we'll show you one of the ways in which the members of one of our two major tribes are shoved along, night after night, toward something resembling hatred.

Last night, O'Donnell said "sociopath" again. We'd like to see him take that discussion further, with the anger and the battling possibly left behind.

Tomorrow: War without end, amen