Both groups are pathological.

His career was ruined, but Benedict Donald went on to steal the election.

I bet he would love to confirm it was real!

to an unsolicited crotchgrab brag-a-thon from Donald Trump resulted in a far bigger penalty for said listener than did the outright admissions of sexual assault. Given the election result favoring Trump a month later, one might say "what penalty"? The consequential playing field for "locker room talk" is certainly an uneven one.

That's pretty funny considering that he previously apologized and dismissed it as "locker room talk."

along with his prior admission now wishes to be retroactively disregarded. Indeed, the "apology" must have been a fake perpretrated by an imposter, aided and abetted by the fake news. There, see, it never even happened!

Sometimes I feel like I am about to lose my mind.

It is negotiated and different people have different perspectives. However, there are evidence and facts, and there are lies and fiction which lie outside the area of negotiation. This is where Trump, and much of the right wing media operates.

Donald Trump simply lies and creates narratives that advance his views but he does so in a very sloppy way that would be easily laid bare if the media was not making money off of their coverage of him.

I actually feel more frustration than anything else. Having been in some form of behavioral health services for the last 23 years, you see patterns of behavior and you can tell when someone is being consistent with their views. I mean, people can certainly change (that is what behavioral health services are predicated upon) but the incentive and internal motivation for change have to be strong enough to drive the change. For Trump, there has not been incentive to cause him to deviate from his pattern of behavior for 70 years. We have seen Trump since the 1970's and 80's and he has always shown us who he is. What he does and says, does not surprise me or give me pause because that is who he has been since he began his public life.

What frustrates me is how gullible people are, how craven the media is, and how detached most people are from a situation where the institutions of our civil society are being eroded.

If it didn't stop the idiot racist fuckheads from prostrating themselves before him on election day, it sure as shit won't compromise his divinity in their eyes now.

Trump may be testing what he read in Mein Kampf and what he learned from Roy Cohen. Are people (not his followers because he already knows that he has them in his pocket) really gullible or disinterested enough to actually buy into, or at least not care, about such a blatant lie? Can I really get away with this nonsense?

Of course there is another reason the Trump is saying this right now. Simply put, he has so little personal insight and introspection, that he can convince himself that he is telling the truth. The human mind is capable of great, beneficial, and creative thought. It is also capable of some bizarre and damaging things. Trump may simply be so pathologically inclined to lying that he cannot separate fact from lie.

Either of those options is kind of terrifying...

I don't think that Trump has the intellect or the stability of character to be the President. I foresee him having some kind of mental health crisis as the pressure continues to mount.

If you look back to photographs of Presidents (especially two term Presidents) when they took office and when they left, you will see that the position ages you dramatically. You have to be mentally strong to balance the position. We saw Nixon become so paranoid that he was keeping record of conversations which did him in. We saw Reagan drift into dementia. We saw Clinton balloon in weight, then become frail, then go up again. We saw W. Bush gray out and we see the odd behavior that he has exhibited in recent years suggesting some aging related illness or possibly that he relapsed into substance use. We see how President Obama aged and the stress lines, although he seems to have been the most resilient, probably because of his background and because he has a stable and loving support system in his family.

Trump has no support network and in my opinion, little psychological resilience. I think that he will crack under the pressure before his first term ends and have some sort of health crisis or mental health episode that ends his term.