Tag: Trump

The person who knows and understands Trump the best isn’t a psychologist: + 300 excellent comments

The person who knows and understands Trump the best isn’t a psychologist. It is Tony Schwartz who wrote “The Art of the Deal” and spent many hours with Trump over a year and a half. He was on “AM Joy” today and said that if Trump had the power of a true dictator he would be as murderous as Kim.

He said Trump is a mix of paranoia, grandiosity, and cruelty.

He said, “his cruelty is a way of punishing people who he thinks are his enemies.” He went on to say that the things Trump said about Kim demonstrate that Trump has no conscience.

Schwartz emphasized that Trump has no empathy, no heart, and no soul. He said that he grew up with a deep inner emptiness.

“Trump isn’t in the business of empathy, he’s in the business of Trump.”

Schwartz is not a trained mental health professional. However, as a layperson, he has an excellent understanding of psychopathology. He doesn’t make a precise psychiatric diagnosis beyond saying Trump is acting out a severe personality disorder marked by dangerous & pathological narcissism, grandiosity, and paranoia.

The person who knows and understands Trump the best isn’t a psychologist: + 300 excellent comments

Trump’s Legacy: Damaged Brains – The New York Times

The pesticide, which belongs to a class of chemicals developed as a nerve gas made by Nazi Germany, is now found in food, air and drinking water. Human and animal studies show that it damages the brain and reduces I.Q.s while causing tremors among children. It has also been linked to lung cancer and Parkinson’s disease in adults.

The colored parts of the image above, prepared by Columbia University scientists, indicate where a child’s brain is physically altered after exposure to this pesticide.

This chemical, chlorpyrifos, is hard to pronounce, so let’s just call it Dow Chemical Company’s Nerve Gas Pesticide. Even if you haven’t heard of it, it may be inside you: One 2012 study found that it was in the umbilical cord blood of 87 percent of newborn babies tested.

And now the Trump administration is embracing it, overturning a planned ban that had been in the works for many years.

Trump’s Legacy: Damaged Brains – The New York Times

What if Trump is actually a master of empathy? | Richard Friedman | Opinion | The Guardian

Many Americans see President Trump’s preoccupation with the protesting NFL athletes – and his near silence on the unfolding humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico – as evidence that Trump has no empathy. Wrong.

Actually, Trump is a master of empathy. Most people confuse empathy with sympathy and don’t understand the nature – or power – of empathy. There is nothing necessarily nice about empathy, which is essentially the ability to imagine and intuit how other people think and feel.

It has nothing to do with genuinely identifying with others or actually feeling their pain; that would be sympathy. Instead, empathy is really about having an accurate theory of mind of other people – and getting under their skin.

Trump has lots of empathy. What he doesn’t have is sympathy – he doesn’t really feel badly for other people. He is not using his considerable empathy skills for Puerto Rico for a simple reason: they are not his base and he has little interest in them.

What if Trump is actually a master of empathy? | Richard Friedman | Opinion | The Guardian: “”

(Via .)

Rebecca Solnit: The Loneliness of Donald Trump | Literary Hub

Once upon a time, a child was born into wealth and wanted for nothing, but he was possessed by bottomless, endless, grating, grasping wanting, and wanted more, and got it, and more after that, and always more. He was a pair of ragged orange claws upon the ocean floor, forever scuttling, pinching, reaching for more, a carrion crab, a lobster and a boiling lobster pot in one, a termite, a tyrant over his own little empires. He got a boost at the beginning from the wealth handed him and then moved among grifters and mobsters who cut him slack as long as he was useful, or maybe there’s slack in arenas where people live by personal loyalty until they betray, and not by rules, and certainly not by the law or the book. So for seven decades, he fed his appetites and exercised his license to lie, cheat, steal, and stiff working people of their wages, made messes, left them behind, grabbed more baubles, and left them in ruin.

He was supposed to be a great maker of things, but he was mostly a breaker. He acquired buildings and women and enterprises and treated them all alike, promoting and deserting them, running into bankruptcies and divorces, treading on lawsuits the way a lumberjack of old walked across the logs floating on their way to the mill, but as long as he moved in his underworld of dealmakers the rules were wobbly and the enforcement was wobblier and he could stay afloat. But his appetite was endless, and he wanted more, and he gambled to become the most powerful man in the world, and won, careless of what he wished for.

Rebecca Solnit: The Loneliness of Donald Trump | Literary Hub

Talkspace online therapy grew 80 percent faster since Trump elected

Business has been booming for online counseling start-up Talkspace ever since President Donald Trump was elected.

Talkspace, which launched in 2012, has been growing 70 to 80 percent faster than projected since November 2016, according to CEO and co-founder Oren Frank. Most of the callers have been millennials, with an average age of 33 to 34.

On Election Day itself, the company had five to seven times more customers than usual, and it had three times the normal volume on January 20, Inauguration Day.

“There’s been a lot of anxiety and stress, which may have been there before,” Frank said. “But it’s definitely been triggered by Election Night and the Inauguration.”

Talkspace lets people work with mental health professionals over the internet. Plans — which start at $32 a week and don’t take insurance — allow customers to select a therapist who they correspond with online.

Talkspace online therapy grew 80 percent faster since Trump elected

When the World Is Led by a Child – The New York Times

At certain times Donald Trump has seemed like a budding authoritarian, a corrupt Nixon, a rabble-rousing populist or a big business corporatist.

But as Trump has settled into his White House role, he has given a series of long interviews, and when you study the transcripts it becomes clear that fundamentally he is none of these things.

At base, Trump is an infantalist. There are three tasks that most mature adults have sort of figured out by the time they hit 25. Trump has mastered none of them. Immaturity is becoming the dominant note of his presidency, lack of self-control his leitmotif.

When the World Is Led by a Child – The New York Times

The geography of climate confusion: a visual guide – CNN.com

Climate change may seem like a complicated issue, but it’s actually simple if you understand five key facts, according to Edward Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. 

They are: 1. It’s real. 2. It’s us. 3. Scientists agree. 4. It’s bad. And: 5. There’s hope.
Yet, far too few Americans get it.
That became more painfully apparent to me this week when Yale University researchers released data and maps that detail American attitudes on climate change. The data, which are based on surveys and modeling by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, do show there is broad agreement in the American public on the solutions needed to fight climate change and usher in the clean-energy era. The most striking example: majorities of people in every single congressional district support setting strict limits on carbon dioxide pollution from existing coal-fired power plants, according to the research. And this despite the fact that many Republicans and US President Donald Trump say they want to ax an Obama-era regulation — the Clean Power Plan — that aims to do just that. 
Still, there remain big pockets of climate confusion — perhaps denial — across the country, especially when it comes to climate science. Narrowing this info gap is particularly critical now since President Trump has denied the science of climate change and has promised to enact policies that can be expected to dirty the air and intensify warming. 
To that end, here is a geographic look at five key climate facts.

 

The geography of climate confusion: a visual guide – CNN.com: “”

(Via.)

When Scientists Hate Science

With Donald Trump’s recent picks to head the Environmental Protection Agency (Scott Pruitt) and the Energy Department (Rick Perry), it appears that science denialism has now been institutionalized. Pruitt, Perry, and Trump deny the fact that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the environment have trapped heat, causing an increase in the Earth’s surface temperature (“the greenhouse effect”), and consequent climate disruption. Although climate change is undeniable, the current administration has managed to deny it. 

Climate change denialists couldn’t take their anti-science stance without the support of certain scientists. Although the overwhelming consensus among environmental scientists is that global warming is a real and present threat, a few disagree. Sadly, throughout history, science-denying scientists haven’t been hard to find.

Daily Beast

The Psychological Research That Helps Explain The Election

At the end of most years, I’m typically asked to write about the best psychology papers of the past twelve months. This year, though, is not your typical year. And so, instead of the usual “best of,” I’ve decided to create a list of classic psychology papers and findings that can explain not just the rise of Donald Trump in the U.S. but also the rising polarization and extremism that seem to have permeated the world. To do this, I solicited the opinion of many leading psychologists, asking them to nominate a paper or two, with a brief explanation for their choice. (Then I nominated some stories myself.) And so, as 2016 draws to a close, here’s a partial collection of the insights that psychology can bring to bear on what the year has brought about, arranged in chronological order.

New Yorker