What's happening has been the plan.

Stated early on.

Shutter the government. Empty out the agencies; fail to appoint and replace critical jobs. Appoint others who are unqualified or even antithetical to the mission and task. Ruin the economy with tariffs and taxes. Kill regulations that protect the planet and its people. Weaken America and weaken the Western Alliance. Keep one third of the people in thrall to the clown circus. Need I continue?

It is all of a piece. A plot.

Wake up, America. Wake up.

He's just the barker, the tool.

And it's not just Trump's cabal, the entire GOP has been at this for decades.

Or he was.

But when he starts falling, he shouldn't be naive enough to thing Putin will help him in any way.

will change their tune because they aren’t true believers like his lemming base who will happily march over the cliff for him.

McConnell is facing elections in 2020. Maybe that’s why he’s so quiet.

Regardless of this crisis, he'll sail to victory in 2020. Whether he remains in charge is the question.

He could keep doing this for pure personal enjoyment.

There have been many posts over the past few days about his current level of sanity. He is a more dangerous person to the country at this point. His narcissism and sociopathic tendencies are going into overdrive.

It is 3 days before a "new moon" each month. If you go to #Bind Trump you can see the author's reminders about him. I don't use Twitter but I can still Google it.

This is what it said...

"2019 is the year our #BindTrump mass ritual will accomplish its goal—driving Trump from office.
But now is NOT the time to get complacent!
Pleaser join us, witches and magical people, at 11:59pm on January 2nd as we do it again!
A Spell to Bind Donald Trump and All Those Who Abet Him: January 2nd Mass Ritual
extranewsfeed.com"

I got put my 2019 calendar that shows the phases of the moon just now and marked each month. Here they are...
Feb 1, March 3, April 2, May 1, May 31, June 29, July 28, Aug 27, Sept 25, Oct 24, Nov 23, and Dec 23.

I've calendared all these dates. I will look up the ritual.

It is what I do each month. One of the orange candles was just unearthed from where I buried it outside during our last rain. You need a tarot deck or The Tower card if you know anyone with a deck. I usually post it the day of each ritual if I remember to. It is under the Ancient Wisdom and Pagan Spirituality Forum.

https://extranewsfeed.com/a-spell-to-bind-donald-trump-and-all-those-who-abet-him-february-24th-mass-ritual-51f3d94f62f4

That mentally, morally and intellectually deficient resident in our WH is doomed to failure. His numbers are peeling away slower than I would like but a steady drip, drip of failure is observable and will grow into a torrent of disapproval and removal, one way or another. imo

I turn the channel if rumpy is speaking. I mute the radio on NPR if they cover 45. The narcissist delights in any mention of his name, click bait is his specialty.

Trump's day to day antics have made us immune to his craziness. He has lost touch with reality, lost his ability to make good judgments and is a danger to the USA. He needs to be removed before he creates a major war or incident that gets lots of people get killed.

But IMO as a mental health professional, Trump is not Psychotic.

Definitely a Narcissistic PD, possible early Dementia, but not psychotic.

He is seeing things that are not there and seeing things that are there as the opposite of what they are. I would not have used the word before today but what I saw today is a person who has lost all contact with reality, not as a persuasion strategy but as an emotional self-coping mechanism.

A skilled propagandist - which I think Trump has been most of his life - would realize that he had taken it too far, but Trump is seeing loss as gain and defeat as victory and martingaling on his losses. I checked a few online definitions and they agreed that this is pretty much the definition of the phrase "psychotic break." In this case it's not so much that the break is a symptom of an underlying, otherwise diagnosable psychosis; it's more that the break is the psychosis, triggered by stress or some other type of chemical imbalance. In this case I think we can probably all agree stress is a big possibility.

He’s not claiming that Lincoln is sitting next to him, he’s just a pathological liar with a personality disorder.

The out of work government employees are his biggest fans.

Usually when Trump lies you can see what he is trying to accomplish with the lie. But in this case, it is so absurd and counterproductive that there is no positive reason, by any kind of analysis, for him to say it. If he thinks opening the government without his wall would "make him look foolish", as he said yesterday, how the hell does he think this is supposed to work?

Not all breaks with reality consist of a giant bunny rabbit or President Lincoln talking to you. In the past it has seemed that Trump was perhaps calculating and evil, maybe going a little soft in the memory department because he can't keep his lies straight, but not this head-on off the edge of the real world. This feels different.

And yes, people do develop psychosis at any age; even as an amateur I know that. All kinds of things can cause a chemical imbalance in the nervous system which causes the brain to work wrong, with simple stress being one of the big ones; and your resistance to these external influences is one of the things that gets weaker as you age and it gets harder for your body to maintain its chemical equilibria. That's not even to mention drugs, and did you hear the one about "snorting lines of adderall?"

Psychosis can be induced by a number of factors other than natural occurrence, and I'm pretty sure this is what we're seeing here.

One blood pressure pill and she was normal. They doubled her blood pressure pills and she was telling me to stop hiding in the curtains.

Drug or Adderall induced psychosis - and we have no idea what drugs he is combining. It could be coming and going according to what and how much he is taking.

Seems like there are lots of facilities online for treating Adderall induced psychosis.

But not schizophrenia- there's a big difference.

If Trump is indeed snorting rails of Adderall, then he could show the erratic agitation and paranoia that results, just as Hitler did from abusing amphetamines (which is what Adderal essentially is) towards the end of WWll.

He said that some former presidents told him the wall was a good idea. This cannot be true.

Is it normal for a person to make up conversations that never happened?

Voices in your head is phychosis

Then yes, that’s psychosis.

But he was just lying, like he always does. Even if he believes the lies, that’s not
Psychosis.

Just more lies

What if the folks who believe this liar tho....could they be crazy?

The problem is, one of the ways you become a skilled liar is that you convince yourself the lies you are telling are true, so that you project that belief. There is a danger in that of falling through your own looking glass though. I don't think you tell the one about the furloughed employees being your biggest fans unless you really have convinced yourself that that is true, because if you were just projecting that to tell an effective lie, you'd figure out that that might not be such an effective lie.

Trump used to be a pretty effective liar, but he's losing it beause he's fallen into his own world of bullshit.

Confabulation perhaps, more likely just more habitual, pathological lying to protect his fragile, narcissistic ego.

Diagnostic nitpicking aside, he's a sick puppy who isn't fit to hold the office.

Yeah, he's a long time habitual liar. But he comes across now as actually believing his lies rather than just flinging them for effect. Whatever you want to call it that's a phase change from what he was doing previously, and a very dangerous one. He won't stop the shutdown not because he doesn't care about the workers but because he has convinced himself that they are really not hurting. In the past reality has occasionally intruded into his self-created reality, but he was projecting very strongly that that's no longer possible.

An anology: If lies were water, the lies Trump is telling now have frozen into ice. It makes a difference -- just ask anyone who sailed on the Titanic.

While there have been leaks of Trump's irascibility and ignorance, I haven't read of any insider disclosures regarding Trump actually believing his lies, in fact there is much evidence to the contrary, including in his flip flopping tweets that take opposite positions, or his changes in opinion/position when there is blowback from things like Helsinki, etc. These flip flops are to protect his ego from what Freud called "Narcissistic injury" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_rage_and_narcissistic_injury). If he was truly delusional, he would continue to insist these lies were true, in public and in private.

What he truly believes in his cold heart and empty mind in private aren't clearly known to the public, however, decades of his public statements and behavior have provided clear evidence of malignant Narcisstic Personality Disorder, with the possibility of additional symptoms of amphetamine abuse.

I think we both agree he is unfit to hold the office. If his companies were publicly held, he would have been fired as CEO long ago.

His father had it, and I'm betting his son has it as well. I have read more than once about how "Trump isn't the person he used to be."

Although he's always been an asshole.

He's evil but he also seems crazy to me - like his mind is totally disordered.

You're giving Cheeto far too much credit.

for the past two years. He's the same nucking futs that he's been all along.

You keep hearing things like this every few weeks because his grip on reality has been steadily deteriorating, though. It started out as what I myself called skilled propaganda, but it's gotten less skilled and more cray-cray particularly through his second year in office. Every week has brought a new low. For me, this is the particular thing that seems to represent a phase change though. Others will have seen it sooner or might not see it until later, which is why you get the steady drip of posts like this. But hey, I just realied the guy really isn't just evil and narcissistic and a liar; he really has convinced himself of his own lies and is living in his own private Idaho where his lies are the truth and all evidence supports them.

Or the presser after Charlottesville? Stockholm? His little dance with Kim? I think he's too crazy to remember from week to week how crazy he is.

In the past he has tended to focus on points, and lie or act weird about those points while maintaining some contact with the outside world otherwise. Lately the outside world thing has been getting thinner though and the outrageous lies more widespread and numerous. Now he seems to have abandoned all pretense that the outside universe exists; there is literally not way for him to get less grounded in reality than he was this afternoon. There was no recognition of external reality in anything he said. It's not the same; there has been a progression, particularly through the second year, and it's hard to see where it goes now except into Gotham Season 5.

Whether or not that's too narrow a definition for psychosis, it nevertheless poses a grave existential threat to the life of our democracy, and thus, a threat to life of PEOPLE.

The American president's number one job is to PROTECT THE PEOPLE. 45, as a virtual Russian operative and a full-time wannabe dictator, has left the entire country exposed to further attack by hostile foreign powers, and a lack of adequate domestic health services.

The man is an absolute menace to all American citizens, especially those at risk. If he were president of a corporation or public institution, he would have been long-gone by now. New laws are desperately needed to prevent this from ever happening again. (Assuming the country survives the current unfolding catastrophe.)

Link to tweet

Else, the "blue flu" that struck the TSA workers will only get worse. The rank-and-file don't make much, and will move on to a different career at some point reasonably soon. Which will devastate airline travel, which will devastate businesses and tourism, as the lines become longer and longer... which will frustrate the remaining TSA workers.

Plus, can you imagine the parks and monuments closed during summer tourism season?