Narcissocracy

If you think it was bad, it was worse than you think. That's the chief takeaway from last night's hearing in Washington. Eugene Robinson writes:

However outrageous or irresponsible or treasonous you thought President Donald Trump’s behavior might have been on Jan. 6, 2021, it was actually worse. Much worse.

That was the message hammered home by the House select committee’s prime-time hearing on Thursday night. According to testimony presented by the committee, for nearly three long hours, as a violent mob smashed its way into the Capitol and hunted Vice President Mike Pence with homicidal intent, the president sat in his private White House dining room and watched the chaos unfold on a television tuned to Fox News.

He made phone calls, but not to the Pentagon or the Department of Homeland Security or anyone who could help put down the riot. Instead, he called Republican senators and lobbied then to object to final certification of the electoral college vote.

Trump -- as always -- was completely self-absorbed and not concerned about the violence at the Capitol:

The committee highlighted the tweet Trump posted at 2:24 p.m., when he knew the mob had already breached the Capitol’s defenses. Instead of trying to calm his followers, he incited them — and put a target on his own vice president’s back.

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify,” Trump tweeted. “USA demands the truth!”

A witness involved with White House security — whose identity the committee obscured, out of concern for the individual’s safety — testified that members of Pence’s Secret Service detail perceived the situation at the Capitol as so desperate, they feared for their lives and sent goodbye messages to their families.

When Trump ran for president in 2016, a group of twenty-seven psychiatrists warned that Trump's "malignant narcissism" was extraordinarily dangerous.

Last night. the hearing showed just how accurate those psychiatrists' diagnosis of Trump was. 

Image: Imgflip

Magical Economics

This week, Donald Trump called himself "The Chosen One" and "The King of Israel." He appears to  believe that -- because he has been divinely anointed -- his economic policy is infallible. But, Paul Krugman writes, Trumponomics is just warmed over voodoo economics:

Voodoo economics isn’t just a doctrine based on magical thinking. It’s the ultimate policy zombie, a belief that seemingly can’t be killed by evidence. It has failed every time its proponents have tried to put it into practice, but it just keeps shambling along. In fact, at this point it has eaten the brains of every significant figure in the Republican Party. Even Susan Collins, the least right-wing G.O.P. senator (although that isn’t saying much), insisted that the 2017 tax cut would actually reduce the deficit.

And every time voodoo economics has failed, its proponents concoct magical explanations:

My favorite until now came from Art Laffer, the original voodoo economist and recent recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Why did George W. Bush’s tax-cutting presidency end not with a boom, but with the worst economic slump since the Great Depression? According to Laffer, blame rests with Barack Obama, even though the recession began more than a year before Obama took office. You see, according to Laffer, everyone lost confidence upon realizing that Obama might win the 2008 election.

Krugman writes "until now," because Trump has gone Laffer one better:

Trump has invented ever more creative ways to blame other people. In particular, he’s now claiming that the promised boom hasn’t arrived because his opponents are hexing the economy with bad thoughts: “The Democrats are trying to ‘will’ the Economy to be bad for purposes of the 2020 Election.”

His failed economics are writing "DEFEAT" across Trumpian skies; and Trump's fragile psyche is imploding. That's why he is even more dangerous now than he has been -- to his country and to the world.

Image: Democracy Journal