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The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel
Donald Trump’s Sham Patriotism
Frank Bruni
In his bid for the White House, Donald Trump is playing many roles: law-and-order strongman, sky’s-the-limit builder, dealmaker extraordinaire. But perhaps none is more emphatic than all-American patriot.
His blood pumps red, white and blue, or so he assures us. In his dreams and decisions, he sees his country above all else. “The most important difference between our plan and that of our opponent,” he told Republicans in Cleveland on Thursday night, “is that our plan will put America first.”
But this lavishly professed love is a largely semantic affair. It’s fickle. It’s reckless. Under its guise, he’s apparently prepared to jettison values that really do make America great and alliances that really do keep America safer. His patriotism brims with grievances.
It sulks. Last week he suggested to The Times’s David Sanger and Maggie Haberman that if Russia invaded a NATO ally that wasn’t pulling its weight financially, he might not rise to its defense.
His patriotism doesn’t add up. On one hand, it leads him to echo conservatives’ longstanding charge that President Obama belittles our country by apologizing too much for it. On the other, Trump told Sanger and Haberman that he’d refrain from reprimanding allies with poor records on civil liberties because the United States is no paragon.
“I don’t think we have a right to lecture,” he said. “Look at what is happening in our country. How are we going to lecture when people are shooting policemen in cold blood?”
That’s a shocking statement in the context of Republican complaints that Democrats fail to appreciate and celebrate American exceptionalism. But it’s not so surprising from Trump, who excused Vladimir Putin’s criminality by saying that we Americans aren’t ones to talk.
He was on “Morning Joe.” He’d been praising Putin’s strength. And when Joe Scarborough pointed out that Putin “kills journalists that don’t agree with him,” Trump responded: “Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe.”
Plenty of Killing: That could have been the title of Trump’s convention speech, a pitch-black warning about a country soaked in blood. While it’s customary for politicians who are arguing for change to describe a troubled nation with an unsustainable status quo, Trump evoked a dystopia out of “The Hunger Games,” a land damned near unlovable.
None of the people I call patriots see America that darkly or take such an incendiary tack. But his political strategy, like so much else in his life, is about what he deems best for Trump. It’s self that he salutes, not any flag. And while he harnessed his egoism somewhat during that speech, it raged anew on Friday, when he destroyed any momentum his remarks might have given him with a rambling, ranting, unnecessary news conference.
“It was the summer of Trump,” he said, complimenting the success of his campaign. “It was the autumn of Trump. It was the Christmas of Trump. It was everything.” And he attacked Ted Cruz anew, again mentioning the National Enquirer story that linked Cruz’s father to John F. Kennedy’s assassination and saying that the Enquirer deserves more respect than it gets.
There’s no easy way to judge patriotism, and I’m suspicious of two of the most commonly used yardsticks. But by both of those measures — a readiness to serve in the military and a devotion to domestically made goods — Trump isn’t much of a patriot.
During the Vietnam War, he used his status as a college student to receive four draft deferments. Then he got a medical exemption — something foot-related. The malady couldn’t have been all that crippling, because when he was asked about it last year, he vaguely mentioned a bone spur but failed to recall whether it was in his right or left heel.
“You’ll have to look it up,” he told reporters.
His supposed regard for the military is often lip service. If it were any match for his schoolyard nastiness, it would have stopped him from dismissing John McCain’s five and a half years as a prisoner of war by saying, “I like people who weren’t captured.” And if it were any match for his situational stinginess, he would have given that big charitable donation to veterans that he’d promised before journalists had to shame him into making good on his pledge.
His current vow to punish American companies that outsource jobs and to prevent them from using undocumented immigrants here in the United States rewrites his own business history, one of “putting profits, rather than America, first,” wrote The Times’s Alan Rappeport last month.
“Most of his line of suits, ties and cuff links bear a ‘Made in China’ label,” Rappeport noted. “Some also come from factories in Bangladesh, Mexico and Vietnam.”
Furniture in the Trump Home collection was manufactured in Turkey, and Trump Home crystal was made in Slovenia.
Moreover, undocumented immigrants have worked on the construction of properties bearing (and blaring) Trump’s name.
You didn’t hear any of that at the convention on Wednesday night, when the theme was in fact “Make America First Again,” a nod to Trump’s call for trade agreements with better terms for America and a foreign policy more narrowly tailored to American interests.
That call has been central to his political success, as the conservative columnist Peggy Noonan observed in a column last spring. She noted that Trump’s proclamations “radiate the idea that he’s not at all interested in ideology, only in making America great again.”
“He’s saying he’s on America’s side, period,” Noonan wrote, adding that neither Obama nor George W. Bush communicated that message as persuasively. Her column had the headline: “Simple Patriotism Trumps Ideology.”
But there’s nothing simple about a patriotism that allows someone to brag, as Trump has done, about paying as little in taxes as he can possibly get away with, and that permits him to flout an important political tradition of candidates’ releasing their tax returns.
There’s nothing simple about a patriotism that advocates torture, as Trump has also done, when our conduct in waging war is ideally what sets us apart from less principled countries and earns us the respect of the world.
And there’s nothing simple about a patriotism that’s really an amalgam of nativism, racism, isolationism and xenophobia and that denies this country’s distinction as a land of fresh starts, its arms open to a diverse world. Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigrants wasn’t patriotic, nor was the Star of David in that offensive tweet.
“Patriotism,” the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson once said, “is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” It’s also a convenient cloak for a narcissist. Trump wears it shamelessly, but not so well that you can’t see through it.
We live in a time in which decent and otherwise sensible people are surrendering too easily to the hectoring of morons or extremists.
- tennyson
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Re: The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel
A Parrtiot NOT !
"Do not confuse motion and progress, A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress"
- tennyson
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Re: The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel
A Patriot NOT !
"Do not confuse motion and progress, A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress"
- Rongone
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Re: The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel
Does this remind you of anyone?
What is NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder)?
The Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD, 301.81) has been recognized as a separate mental health disorder since the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual (DSM), 1980.
It is described as an all-pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration or adulation and lack of empathy. It usually begins by early adulthood and is present in various contexts. Five (or more) of the following criteria must be met (all quotes are from Dr. Sam Vaknin’s Malignant Self Love: Narcissism Revisited):
1. Feels grandiose and self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents to the point of lying, demands to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements);
“The narcissist is prone to magical thinking. He thinks about himself in terms of ‘being chosen’ or of ‘having a destiny’. …He believes that his life is of such momentous importance, that it is micro-managed by God. …In short, narcissism and religion go well together, because religion allows the narcissist to feel unique.”
“God is everything the narcissist ever wants to be: omniscient, omnipresent, admired, much discussed, and awe inspiring. God is the narcissist’s wet dream, his ultimate grandiose fantasy.”
2. Is obsessed with fantasies of unlimited success, fame, fearsome power or omnipotence, unequalled brilliance (the cerebral narcissist), bodily beauty or sexual performance (the somatic narcissist), or ideal, everlasting, all-conquering love or passion;
“The narcissist is haunted by the feeling that he is possessed of a mission, of a destiny, that he is a part of fate, of history. He is convinced that his uniqueness is purposeful, that he is meant to lead, chart new ways, to innovate to modernize, to reform, to set precedents, to create. Every act is significant, every writing of momentous consequences, every thought of revolutionary calibre. He feels part of a grand design, a world plan and the frame of affiliation, the group, of which he is a member, must be commensurately grand.”
3. Firmly convinced that he or she is unique and, being special, can only be understood by, should only be treated by, or associate with, other special or unique, or high-status people (or institutions);
“The narcissist despises the very people who sustain his Ego boundaries and functions. He cannot respect people so expressly and clearly inferior to him, yet he can never associate with evidently on his level or superior to him, the risk of narcissistic injury in such associations being too great.”
4. Requires excessive admiration, adulation, attention and affirmation – or, failing that, wishes to be feared and to be notorious (Narcissistic Supply);
“A common error is to think that ‘narcissistic supply’ consists only of admiration, adulation and positive feedback. Actually, being feared, or derided is also supply. The main element is ATTENTION.”
“He feeds of other people, who hurl back at him an image that he projects to them. This is their sole function in his world: to reflect, to admire, to admire, to applaud, to detest – in a word, to assure him that he exists.”
“In short: the group must magnify the narcissist, echo and amplify his life, his views, his knowledge, his history…”
5. Feels entitled. Expects unreasonable or special and favorable priority treatment. Demands automatic and full compliance with his or her expectations;
“He considers his very existence as sufficiently nourishing and sustaining (of others). He feels entitled to the best others can offer without investing in maintaining relationships or in catering to the well-being of his ‘suppliers’.”
6. Is “interpersonally exploitative”, i.e., uses others to achieve his or her own ends;
“He will not hesitate to put people’s lives or fortunes at risk. He will preserve his sense of infallibility in the face of his mistakes and misjudgments by distorting the facts, by evoking mitigating or attenuating circumstances, by repressing the memories, or simply lying.”
7. Devoid of empathy. Is unable or unwilling to identify with or acknowledge the feelings and needs of others;
“But the narcissist does not care. Unable to empathize, he does not fully experience the outcomes of his deeds and decision. For him, humans are dispensable, rechargeable, reusable. They are there to fulfill a function: to supply him with Narcissistic Supply (adoration, admiration, approval, affirmation, etc.). They do not have an existence apart from the carrying out of their duty.”
8. Constantly envious of others or believes that they feel the same about him or her;
“First there is pathological envy. The narcissist is constantly envious of other people: their successes, their property, their character, their education, their children, their ideas, the fact that they can feel, their good mood, their past, their present, their spouses, their mistresses or lovers, their location.”
9. Arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes coupled with rage when frustrated, contradicted, or confronted.
“That which has cosmic implications calls for cosmic reactions. A person with an inflated sense of self-import, reacts in an exaggerated manner to threats, greatly inflated by his imagination and by the application of his personal myth.”
“Narcissists live in a state of constant rage, repressed aggression, envy and hatred. They firmly believe that everyone is like them. As a result, they are paranoid, suspicious, scared and erratic.”
Conclusion:
“NPD is a pernicious, vile and tortuous disease, which affects not only the narcissist. It affects and forever changes people who are in daily contact with the narcissist.”
“Sooner, or later, everyone around the narcissist is bound to become his victim. People are sucked, voluntarily or involuntarily, into the turbulence that constitutes his life, into the black hole that is his personality, into the whirlwind which makes up his interpersonal relationships. Different people are hurt by different aspects of the narcissist’s life and psychological make-up. Some trust him and rely on him, only to be bitterly disappointed. Others love him and discover that he cannot reciprocate. Yet others are forced to live vicariously, through him.”
From my perspective, this description pretty much encapsulates Drumpf and why a Drumpf presidency would be so disastrous to the United States of America both domestically and our international relationships. This personality type is extremely dangerous in any position of responsibility. His personal wants and needs will supersede those of the vast majority of our citizens to the detriment of all others.
- Rongone
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Re: The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel
So much for the promise to "protect and defend" the constitution.
Drumpf says "no" to freedom of the press.
Washington Post: Reporter barred from entering Pence event
WAUKESHA, Wis. (AP) — The Washington Post says one of its reporters was barred from entering a campaign rally for Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence near Milwaukee.
The newspaper says Post reporter Jose DelReal was turned down for a credential before the rally and tried to enter through general admission. The Post reports DelReal was stopped by private security who said he couldn't enter with his laptop and cellphone. The Post says the Waukesha County Sheriff's Department verified DelReal had no phone after patting him down, but DelReal still was denied entry.
Trump banned the Post from being credentialed for campaign events last month.
Post executive editor Martin Baron says DelReal was subjected to "bullying treatment that no ordinary citizen has to endure."
Pence spokesman Marc Lotter tells the The Associated Press, "Our events are open to everyone and we are looking into the alleged incident."
Voters have to seriously consider what life will be like under a guy like Drumpf who will pick and choose which laws he will abide by depending on his personal whims.
- tennyson
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Re: The Last Refuge of a Scoundrel
Rongone wrote:
So much for the promise to "protect and defend" the constitution.
Drumpf says "no" to freedom of the press.
Washington Post: Reporter barred from entering Pence event
WAUKESHA, Wis. (AP) — The Washington Post says one of its reporters was barred from entering a campaign rally for Republican vice presidential nominee Mike Pence near Milwaukee.
The newspaper says Post reporter Jose DelReal was turned down for a credential before the rally and tried to enter through general admission. The Post reports DelReal was stopped by private security who said he couldn't enter with his laptop and cellphone. The Post says the Waukesha County Sheriff's Department verified DelReal had no phone after patting him down, but DelReal still was denied entry.
Trump banned the Post from being credentialed for campaign events last month.
Post executive editor Martin Baron says DelReal was subjected to "bullying treatment that no ordinary citizen has to endure."
Pence spokesman Marc Lotter tells the The Associated Press, "Our events are open to everyone and we are looking into the alleged incident."
Voters have to seriously consider what life will be like under a guy like Drumpf who will pick and choose which laws he will abide by depending on his personal whims.
You only honor the First Amendment when you want to ! 
"Do not confuse motion and progress, A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress"