Please allow me to explain.
When a woman came forward last week to say that Trump’s
nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, had attempted to rape her
in the 1980s, Trump took what, for him, amounted to the high road. He made
statements suggesting that the alleged victim, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford,
should be heard by the Senate Judiciary Committee and that Kavanaugh should be
allowed to respond, and then the chips should fall where they may.
Political pundits generally applauded Trump’s comments,
political as they might have been, and some suggested he even seemed marginally
presidential. For once, when a woman claimed to be the victim of sexual
misconduct, the faux-president with a shady past himself seemed willing to step
back from the controversy and let the system play itself out.
But true to form, Trump’s “presidential-ness” didn’t last
long:
“President
Trump cast doubt Friday on the credibility of the woman who has accused Brett
M. Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers,” the Washington
Post reported today, “escalating tensions
over the Supreme Court nomination, as Senate negotiations over whether she will
tell her story at a public hearing slipped into the weekend.
“By
attacking California professor Christine Blasey Ford, Trump abandoned the
self-restraint he had showed for days and pushed Kavanaugh’s nomination deeper
into turmoil. Democrats, key Republican senators and advocates for victims of
sexual assault swiftly rebuked the president.”
In other words, he just couldn’t help himself.
The man who has been accused of forcing sexual advances on
more than a dozen women, had sex with a porn star, cheated on all of his wives,
had an affair with a Playboy model and bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy”
because he was a star just could not stop his impulse to lash out at another
alleged victim of sexual assault – without knowing the actual facts – because she
stands between Trump and his next big “win,” getting Kavanaugh confirmed to the
Supreme Court.
“I
have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges
would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by
either her or her loving parents,” Trump tweeted on Friday. “I ask that she
bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!”
Impulse Control Disorder (yes, it’s a thing) is defined as “a
class of psychiatric disorders characterized by impulsivity – failure to resist
a temptation, an urge, an impulse, or the inability to not speak on a thought.”
If you look it up in the dictionary, there's probably a photo of Donald Trump.
Please note two words in the paragraph above: “psychiatric
disorders.” I’m not a psychiatrist nor do I play one on TV, but I know what I
see and hear and for my money, Trump frequently and consistently demonstrates
the symptoms of an impulse control disease. You see it in his speeches, at his
rallies, in the impromptu press conferences he holds on the driveway outside
the White House on his way to a helicopter and in the aisles of Air Force One
when reporters throw questions at him.
He lives for conflict and always needs an enemy to pick on, and
if one isn’t handy he goes looking for one. When he finds him or her, he goes
out of his way to harass, embarrass, mock, manipulate, degrade, diminish or intimidate
his victim until he achieves the appropriate level of self-satisfaction. Whatever
passes through his mind falls out of his mouth (or his Twitter finger) without
regard for the consequences.
Sometimes he walks it back later, but the damage has already
been done. To borrow some trite expressions, you can’t un-ring the bell,
un-hear the comments or put the proverbial toothpaste back into the tube.
After the name of Dr. Ford became public, I can just imagine
Trump sitting around the White House with his phone in his hand for four days, wanting
so badly to strike out at her and boiling over because his handlers had told
him not to do it. Like a volcano starting to generate lava, I can see him getting
hotter and hotter until finally, the volcano erupted into a molten tweet like the
one on Friday which mocked her for keeping quiet about a painful event in her life.
This disorder is bad enough when the president is lashing
out at war heroes, Gold Star families, Democrats, disabled reporters and sexual
assault victims, but just imagine if his lack of impulse control rose up during
a tense negotiation with a foreign country or, say, an unstable authoritarian
regime that controls nuclear weapons.
Oh, I know, there are people and procedures that could stop Trump
from starting World War III because he was having a bad day, and I don't expect that to ever happen, but isn’t it
frightening to know that such a man has the theoretical power to end the
world in less than a week?
Tell that to a Trump supporter and they’ll laugh it off as
fake news or liberal propaganda or “Trump derangement syndrome,” or they’ll
blame it all on Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or the so-called “deep state.” The
President of the United States clearly suffers from one or more psychiatric disorders,
and the red hats don’t seem to care…and that’s what’s really frightening.
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