PERRY: The lunacy behind Trump’s impossible endurance is actually sad, not sadistic

It’s not the heat, the rain, the new wobble of the planet or Mars exiting retrograde.

Like most folks, I’m forever looking to heap answers onto the perennial questions that spring eternal from my yard and from government types all over.

My tomatoes look like crap because of the long, cold, rainy, cloudy, haily spring. I’m sure of it. Except the one I fertilized to death the first week I got it. Handfuls of dried blood and nitrogen pellets. What a way to go.

I blame the new weird noises emanating from my car on Mars retrograding through my Gemini space. I was warned about weird mechanical angst.

But Donald Trump and the rest of the GOP oddities who have turned the elephant in the room into a circus of stars defy explanation.

There is hardly an hour that goes by without Trump, or an army of trolls with entirely too much time on their hands, launching some media bomb that 10 years ago America never dreamed could really happen.

Trump has evolved from being a skeezy, lying, racist into a clearly criminal skeezy, lying, racist.

None of that is hyperbole. 

The lie-o-meters created by the NY Times and a handful of other trusted news sources look like the gas-pump “pay this amount” blur of rolling numbers when gas rolls around at $5 a gallon. Trump’s recorded, documented lies are in the tens of thousands.

Even before Trump rolled out on the national political stage, his exploits as being a pervy creep were not just well-founded, they were even recorded on video tape.

Trump has been indicted for a hush-money scandal that became criminal because he allegedly used campaign funds, rather than his own, to pay off a porn actress he had sex with and then lied about.

Now, in another recently recorded caper, Trump is holding the smoking gun he pointed at his own foot in 2021 by bragging to virtual strangers — long after he was run out of the White House and lost his Jan. 6 coup attempt.  He was boasting about having a pile of top-secret, classified docs on his desk. He said he never declassified the stuff, which included a detailed, classified attack plan against Iran.

This is a guy so clearly mentally ill that national psych magazines publicly entertained theories about just what kind of mental illness Trump suffers and just how seriously.

“Some mental health professionals have publicly stated their view that Trump’s behavior aligns with the criteria for narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, and paranoid personality disorder, according to the DSM-5,” Psychology Today editors wrote in 2020.

Some psychiatric experts call his obsession with believing his own lies “solipsistic,” a fancy word for intensely selfish.

“Trump makes things up, comes to believe partially in his lies, exploits those lies in his assault on truth, and viciously attacks those who question them,” doctors Jay Lifton and Nancy L. Rosenblum wrote last year for Psychology Today. “He makes broad threats of violence that are sometimes carried out by a righteous subculture of white supremacy groups. Not only are individual lives destroyed but there is a constant aura of political violence.”

Nice. Sound like presidential material to you?

It does to 6-out-of-10 Republicans, according to constant polling.

Despite suffering two criminal indictments recently, Trump far out-polls runner-up Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has staked his own claim to a campaign based on hate and intolerance.

Focused on the fact that it’s the government charging Trump with his crimes, because nobody else can, according to the U.S. Constitution, a lot of people claiming to be Republicans not only like Trump’s gaslighting missives, they throw hundreds of millions of dollars of their hard-earned money at it.

“The Biden Department of Justice tried to JAIL its leading opponent – me – as an innocent man,” Trump said in an email to anyone who will listen. “Disloyal Republicans devised a $300 MILLION PLOT to try and stop us and replace me with a nominee who will make nice with the Deep State.”

Those “disloyalists” would be the four-out-of-10 Republicans who draw the line at lying, hateful, despicable, intolerant bigots.

The vast and unquenched mystery here is, how does Trump do it? 

He’s a parody of himself: crass, orange, sadistic and dull. Why would anyone pay any attention to someone like Trump, who so obviously and prolifically lies?

Experts say narcissists can be pathological liars, simply because they don’t care about the truth. They care about power and control, and if deception delivers what they want, bingo.

If it seems that Trump is then turning perfectly normal conservatives into people just like himself, that’s not the case, experts say. 

In a 2021 conversation with NPR about a study into who supports Trump and why, John Hopkins University Professor Lilliana Mason said that Trump didn’t create hatred and animus toward so many marginalized groups of people, he simply harvests what’s out there.

“So this was a latent faction of Americans that had just — that had already been sitting there and had already existed.”

It isn’t that Trump’s supporters like that he’s a proven liar, enveloped in his own brand of debauchery, it’s just that it’s unimportant in light of the empowerment he brings them.

When you look at it like that, it’s not outrageous. It’s really very sad and pathetic.

Meanwhile, other Republicans began to fear Trump’s supporters, first assuaging them and, now, acquiescing them — at least in public.

Here in Colorado, where Trump’s acolytes can do nothing but drink in Fox News and howl on Twitter, it’s just exhausting. But in blood-red states and Washington, it’s dangerous.

It’s good to understand conundrums like this, but it would be even better to understand how to fix it.

Follow @EditorDavePerry on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook  or reach him at 303-750-7555 or  dperry@SentinelColorado.com