THE CHAINSAW MASSACRES OF ARGENTINA AND THE US

Argentine President Javier Milei with signature chainsaw

 Many Argentines cringed in shame this past week as they watched their president make a clownish spectacle of himself by showing up in the US, to obsequiously and gratuitously pander to his personal heroes, Donald Trump and Elon Musk. This time, he made the pilgrimage to Washington—where he was also courting the IMF to see if he can land an eleven-billion-dollar credit to shore up his faltering economic program—to present Musk with the signature symbol of his own populist regime. Namely, a custom-designed chainsaw.

Musk, who is basically a filthy rich, unelected appointee, with no real political standing—a sort of high-end bureaucrat, if you will—magnanimously granted Javier “Baby Trump” Milei, a head of State, a forty-five-minute audience, in which the visibly excited Argentine president, giddy as a kid at Christmastime, presented Elonius Rex with the prize saw, a gleaming red and chrome machine with Milei’s favorite slogan emblazoned on the blade: ¡Viva la Libertad, carajo! (Which roughly translates as “Long live liberty, damn it!”).

Musk with his new saw, Milei with his bro-crush

It’s a motto with which the far-right libertarian ends even his most formal of speeches,  and which he utters in a guttural, if reedy growl. It is the Mileian equivalent of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again”. And, when it comes down to what both those phrases mean to those they are inflicted on, they are rendered Orwellian in terms of their consequences.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of making George Orwell’s acquaintance, an example of what I mean is that, for instance, in his dystopian novel 1984—which is far more relevant today than it was when it was written—the author’s fictitious country boasts four main ministries: the Ministry of Truth is ostensibly in charge of media, entertainment, education, and the arts, but is actually the creator and purveyor of political lies, propaganda and spin. The Ministry of Peace’s apparent mission is to broker and keep the peace, but it is actually devoted to sparking and incrementing violence. The Ministry of Love is supposedly charged with justice and order, and creating a pleasant climate for all, but its true main mission is torture, punishment and “re-education”. And the Ministry of Plenty is officially at the center of the regime’s allegedly plentiful economy, but is actually the entity in charge of supply rationing and distribution.

Similarly, while both Trump and Milei’s favorite slogans might sound inspiring and rosy, the actions behind them are having contrary effects for just about everyone but the rich and powerful. The actions Donald Trump took during his first term from 2016 to 2020, bolstered the power of the presidency and initiated a sharp decline in the influence of the other two branches of government. His economic policies provided tax breaks to the already vastly undertaxed wealthy, and put additional economic pressures on the middle and lower classes—as reflected in the estimated seven trillion dollars that his administration added to the deficit. He showed contempt for democratic institutions and disdain for the rule of law, but was, in the end, held in final check by the other two branches when he sought to, basically, overthrow democracy and remain in office after losing an election. His legacy was division and chaos, and now, after a four-year hiatus, he is back to finish the job, this time with the indispensable help of the richest man in the world. Fitting, since he was and is the president of the wealthy, who, in Orwellian style, bills himself as “the president of the people.”

Milei has made no bones about being an avid admirer of Donald Trump’s. But he had the initial disadvantage over Trump of following, not a highly popular and highly democratic administration like Barack Obama’s, but rather, the weak, corrupt presidency of Alberto Fernández, which was consumed with party infighting and crippling economic woes.

Like Trump, Milei is fond of puerile displays of showy bravado. Hence, his choice of the chainsaw during his campaign and beyond, as the symbol of his promise to “destroy the government from within”—which, without saying it in so many words, is what Trump and Musk (or Musk and Trump, depending on your point of view) are bent on doing as well.

Milei at one of his Trump-like rallies

The Argentine president is every bit as disdaining of anyone who opposes his most extreme measures, and of those he perceives as his political enemies, referring consistently and publicly to anyone left of the center right as “zurdos de mierda” (fucking leftists). And when numerous governors from Argentina’s twenty-three provinces opposed cuts in federal aid at the beginning of his term, he angrily vowed that he was going to “piss on the governors”.

He also suddenly turns on those who dare criticize him, very much in the dismissive style of Trump, who has dissed his former political allies that have failed to accompany him to some of the extremes to which he has taken his policies and personal misdeeds: Generals John Kelly, James Mattis and H.R. McMaster, as well as former Trump attorney Michael Cohen and former Vice President Mike Pence spring to mind, but there are countless other examples. In Milei’s case, for example, early on he expressed praise and admiration for former Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo, the architect of the late President Carlos Menem’s convertibility and privatization policies, which marked a ten-year neo-conservative era in Argentina. When he was first elected, Milei touted Cavallo as “the best Economy Minister in Argentine history.” Until just a few months ago, he was still referring to Cavallo as “a hero” and saying he hoped to emulate him.

But in his personal blog, Cavallo recently issued a warning to Milei about the dangers of a falsely appreciating peso. The Harvard-educated economist said that since Milei took office, a little more than a year ago, his economic policies had caused the peso to appreciate by twenty percent in real terms. Cavallo said that this was a similar trend to the one witnessed in the last three years of convertibility, leading to the crash of 2001 (the Corralito Crisis).

The former economy minister pointed out that real appreciation had led to “a very costly deflation, because it transformed the recession that had begun in 1998 into a true economic depression.” Cavallo counseled Milei to lift exchange rate restrictions within the next three months before the effects of a (falsely) “strong peso” started affecting domestic industries and discouraging export investment.

Echoing the sort of capricious flipflops Americans have come to expect from Trump, Milei suddenly referred to Cavallo as “a disgrace”, and as “unpresentable”. And in another Trumpesque move, within hours of reacting to Cavallo’s blog, the Argentine president fired the economist’s daughter, Sonia Cavallo, who, until then, had been posted as Argentina’s delegate to the Organization of American States. He justified the vengeance move by saying “Her father is constantly sabotaging the economic program, and you can’t have your cake and eat it. You’re either on one side or the other.”

The grotesque posturing of Milei and Musk on the far-right CPAC stage with a shiny new chainsaw this past week was chillingly symbolic. Tens of thousands of federal workers turned out into the street in Argentina, and thousands so far given the axe by Musk in just one month of the new Trump regime speaks to just how chilling. Milei is fond of crowing to his far-right supporters that the US “is taking its cue from Argentina.” And his presentation of the fashion-designer saw to Musk is an apparent attempt to underscore that exaggeration. But Trump’s first term precedes Milei, so it’s pretty clear who is taking his cue from whom.

The parallel he strikes, however, is worthy of consideration. What I mean by that is, if Americans want a preview of what the Musk-Trump duo’s policies will likely lead to, they need only look to the almost caricaturesque example of Argentina. For one thing, while Milei boasts about his policies reining in hyperinflation, peso inflation in his first year in office has still soared at 117 percent in 2024. But worse still, the consequences of his crawling peg exchange rate policy have also caused prices to explode in dollar terms.

When Milei came to office, it was, in part, on a promise to “dollarize” the economy, since he described the peso as a “shit” currency. But since taking office in December of 2023, he has only “dollarized” in the sense that Argentina has become the most expensive country in dollars in all of Latin America, while he has at the same time “revalued” the peso by removing a lot of local currency from the market, artificially driving its value upward.

No example could be better than my own experience, living here in Argentina’s Patagonian region, to illustrate the consequences to middle and lower class residents of these and other policies imposed under the Milei government. For instance, until December of 2023, my wife and I were paying about two hundred fifty dollars a month for excellent private health care—uphill for two retirees in Argentina, where the standard of living is nowhere near as high as in the US—but doable. Furthermore, it kept us independent from the pensioners’ health care plan paid for, in large part, by the State, since the amount paid into the health plan by pensioners is minimal.

One of the first things Milei did on taking office was completely deregulate private health insurance—and just about every other commercial activity in the country. The result was that, within his first three months in office, our health insurance costs had gone from two hundred fifty dollars a month to six hundred fifty-eight. It became impossible for us to continue to pay, and we ended up on the State retirement health care rolls.

Milei’s own brand of “moving fast and breaking things” also removed all restrictions on price gouging—an even more common practice here in Argentina—especially in remote Patagonia—than in the US, while de-subsidizing all services. Between the artificially bolstered peso and the removal of all restrictions, then, our grocery bills here in Argentina have doubled in dollars, going from between seventy and ninety dollars a week when he took office, to about one hundred fifty to one hundred eighty dollars after his first year in office. And the prices of just about everything else have risen accordingly, especially in areas like clothing, new car sales and electronics, in which local industry is heavily protected.

A noonday luncheon special in downtown Buenos Aires now runs an average of eighteen dollars—more than a minimum wage worker makes in a day—while in other major Latin American capitals, research shows a comparative average of seven dollars. A cup of coffee averages thirty percent more there than in São Paulo (Brazil) or Santiago (Chile) and more than twice as much as in Bogotá (Colombia). Meanwhile, Argentina’s minimum wage is higher than on Brazil’s depressed job market, but considerably lower than minimum wage levels for either Chile or Mexico.  Moreover, forty-five percent of Argentina’s workforce works off the books, with no minimum wage guarantees or benefits of any kind.  

As with the Trump administration, Milei’s regime is doing nothing to address these inequalities. On the contrary, he is, like the Musk-Trump duo, slashing social services wherever he can get away with it, and seeking to break the country’s once powerful Peronist labor unions. He is also, like Trump in his first term, jockeying to try and get himself a more malleable Supreme Court.  

Nor have vital services been spared: fuel prices rose one hundred eighteen percent in Milei’s first year in office, while de-subsidized natural gas services rose by more than five hundred percent. Water was up more than three hundred percent for the year, and electric power services increased more than two hundred sixty percent.

Milei, like Trump, promotes himself as a political outsider, bent on dismantling the “political caste”, which, according to him, has led to the country’s economic decline. Also like Trump, however, he is seeking to replace that “political caste” (i.e., elected representatives of the people), with a corporate elite, seeking a country where a place at the international business table is sought using the average Argentina’s impoverishment as a stepping stone.

While Trump and Milei’s ideologies strongly overlap—Milei was a guest at Trump’s latest victory celebration and got a shout-out from the then president-elect as “a true MAGA guy”—the political and economic contexts in which they govern differ substantially. The US economy under Trump was the world’s largest and still relatively stable, despite challenges, mostly of Trump’s own making. In Argentina, however, Milei came to office already struggling with high inflation, widespread poverty, and significant public debt. This fundamental difference in starting conditions means that while Trump’s policies could often be masked or justified by a booming economy, Milei faces the much more immediate consequences of severe economic disarray.

Both Trump and Milei’s governments have been criticized for their exacerbation of social polarization. Trump’s rise has been  marked by deep divisions within American society, particularly on issues of race, immigration, and cultural identity. His inflammatory rhetoric and policies have often targeted minority groups, including immigrants and African Americans. His current campaign to forcibly eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion by decree in the US is only deepening the divide.

Milei’s rise to power in Argentina has similarly highlighted the nation’s profound political divide. While he has framed himself as a defender of individual liberty and economic freedom, his rhetoric, like Trump’s, often smacks of authoritarianism, with frequent attacks on the media, the judiciary, and his political opponents. His presidency has already seen increased protests from various sectors of society, particularly labor unions and public sector workers who fear the consequences of his austerity measures. Milei’s confrontational approach to governance, much like Trump’s, risks further fracturing of the social fabric of Argentina, deepening divisions between those who support his vision and those who see his policies as an existential threat to their livelihoods.

While Milei has managed to get fairly good international press from business media and multi-lateral organizations such as the IMF and World Bank, none of these are known for being concerned about the social devastation wreaked by the kind of cruelly radical  neo-conservative programs being implemented by Milei and his Economy Minister Luis Caputo to wipe out a decades-long deficit overnight. All these sectors care about is hammering developing nations into good credit customers who pay their debts in timely fashion—unlike major economies like the US which, despite admonishing the developing world to be good citizens and keep their debts in check  if they want aid, are the world’s biggest debtors (as of last year the US had eight trillion dollars in foreign debt, or a little more than a fifth of the country’s entire federal debt).

Multiple studies have shown over the decades that IMF and World Bank ultra-conservative economic prescriptions in regions like Latin America have bolstered the international profiles of neo-conservative governments at the expense of the common people’s well-being. This was true of the military dictatorship that ruled the country with an iron fist and at the point of a gun from the mid-seventies through the early eighties, and that is certainly the current case of Milei’s Argentina.

Despite being the darling of the MAGA crowd in Washington, however, Milei may find his forward momentum stalled on his quest “to move fast and break things.” Back from his meetings with the IMF and Trump in Washington, and his clown show with Musk at the CPAC extravaganza, the Argentine president begins work Monday in the face of a scandal sparked—also not unlike Trump—by a blunder on social media that cost local investors big-time. It’s being called “Cryptogate”, and it promises to haunt the president’s government.

A week ago in his social media feed, Milei, a self-styled “anarcho-capitalist”, touted a cryptocurrency meme coin known as $LIBRA. Sharing information about its launching on his feed, the president wrote, “This private project will be dedicated to encouraging the growth of Argentina’s economy.” The local currency market reaction to the post was immediate, with the coin’s value surging to five dollars almost immediately, only to plummet by ninety percent two hours later.

The practical result of the meme coin fiasco was that Argentine investors lost approximately two hundred fifty million dollars in the blink of an eye.  Milei immediately took his post down and claimed he really hadn’t had all the details of the deal. Worse still, he tried to foist blame off on the investors who had followed his cue, saying that they knew the risks, just as they would if they went to a casino to gamble.

Investors aren’t buying it. Both at home and abroad, he is facing accusations of crypto-fraud, and lawsuits are being filed against him in both Argentina and the US. Opposition members of Congress, meanwhile, are calling for his impeachment, and although they don’t yet have the votes necessary, the fact that Milei has consistently referred to Congress as “a rat’s nest” is unlikely to garner a lot of sympathy.

At best, Milei will have to try and convince people that he was duped by some of his acquaintances involved in the scheme, in which case he will look like a guileless fool. At worst, he will face multiple legal actions, and the possibility of more opponents climbing onto the impeachment train.

Time will tell.

 

THE VIEW FROM TRUMPWORLD

 

For many educated Americans with even a passing knowledge of US foreign relations, President Donald Trump’s latest machinations on the world  stage are very likely baffling.  If we are baffled, however, it is because we are failing to understand that Trump doesn’t see the world from the point of view of a world-class leader, but rather, from that of a mobster.

A lot of us were shocked and infuriated during his first term when he dissed our Western allies, while embracing every murderous dictator he had ever longed to meet. It was clear that these were “his people”, and that it mattered little to him what the people of the United States had sacrificed in the past to help democracy and freedom ring throughout every Western nation, following the worst war in the history of the world.

We watched him disrespect the memories of men and women sacrificed from our fathers’ and grandfathers’ generations, and belittle the pain, hardship and suffering endured by those like my father (and yours), who put their lives on hold to fight fascism and the expansive imperialism of a madman in Europe, and survived. He belittled that cause and our elders, calling them “losers and suckers” and asking rhetorically “what was in it for them.” Those brave people, the ones who understood the value of defending the free world, and who continued to support that cause, when the Soviet Union crushed the freedom of Eastern Europeans following World War II, back when US presidents understood that Russian tyrants were our enemies.

We witnessed too, his denigration of the noble institution of NATO, which he dismissed as being over and of no importance to the US—that great alliance which has been the mortar holding together Western peace and democracy for the past seventy-five years. An all-for-one-and-one-for-all pact in which the US earned its leading role with the blood we spilled on European soil in two world wars. A role which has been almost totally responsible for launching the US to world leadership status on the global stage.

Trump shocked patriotic and democratic Americans in those first four years by speaking in disparaging and arrogant terms to those previously highly respected Western allies, while at the same time referring in the most glowing of terms to murdering despots like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un (with whom he said he had “fallen in love”), and like China’s Chairman Xi (whom he admired for becoming leader for life and suggested perhaps the US should follow suit with him). He preferred Russian talking points to US intelligence, revealed things to Putin that the Kremlin never should have known, and mishandled a treasure trove of classified documents putting American lives in danger.

And then he threw the country into chaos by, for the first time in history, refusing to participate in the peaceful transfer of power, after losing an election, and created further chaos by inciting an insurrection designed to halt certification of the election he had lost, apparently bent on remaining in office as an ad hoc authoritarian ruler.

The majority of Americans breathed a sigh of relief when he was finally gone, and talked about how our democracy had dodged a bullet. It had been a close call but democracy was intact and we could all sleep easy.

But then, something utterly insane happened. Slightly more than half of voters who actually voted in the 2024 election put this despot back into office, not caring that he was a convicted felon, a court certified rapist, a man indicted on charges of election tampering, inciting an insurrection, and gross mishandling of America’s secrets. None of that mattered because people were worried about eggs being more expensive than when he was in office, and about whether they would be able to keep affording fuel for their gas-guzzling SUVs and giant pick-up trucks.

Trump ran on that. But anyone who was even half-awake during his first term was at least vaguely cognizant of the fact that, if Trump’s lips are moving, he’s lying. That is, except when he talks about using the power of State to destroy his personal enemies, or when he talks of dismantling any part of American democracy that keeps him from doing exactly what he pleases with no consequences. Those are promises—vendettas—that he is serious about keeping.

How all of that is affecting democracy at home is becoming more shockingly evident by the day. Adding insult to injury for every small-d democrat in the nation,  Trump is already, after only a month in office, describing himself in monarchic terms on Truth Social, where, referring to himself,  he wrote LONG LIVE THE KING!  That message was repeated under the White House’s official X handle captioning a Time-style fake cover with an illustration of Trump wearing a crown. In the same flurry of narcissistic, self-congratulatory messages, Trump also quoted—without saying he was quoting him—Napoleon Bonaparte saying,   “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Napoleon was, of course, also a narcissist, an emperor and a despot.

The consequences of Trump’s dictatorial actions on the home front will even shortly begin to become evident to his most fanatical followers when they start to understand that what he does will negatively affect them as well where the rubber meets the road. Especially when the high prices they were so worried about and that were a decisive factor in his re-election, are not going down. On the contrary, thanks to the president’s reduction in taxes on the rich and soaring tariffs on international trade, prices can only be expected to rise.

But they’ll also start to feel the pain of their decision to return him to office when their Social Security and health care benefits are affected, when the cost of their medication rises, when their farming subsidies are cut, when their flights are canceled because of a hamstrung Federal Aviation Agency, and when every government office they must deal with is rendered totally ineffective because it has been stripped to its bare bones.

Returning to the foreign relations front, just because common everyday people have no idea of the importance of America’s status on the global stage doesn’t mean that it is unimportant, since our leadership in that arena is what defines US power and its ability to continue to shape democracies abroad and to influence the world through its allies. Trump clearly doesn’t care about that. He thinks of the US as a big business to be run as ruthlessly as he and Elon Musk have always run their own. His attempt to turn US relations with Ukraine into a protection racket in which he conditions aid—already earmarked by Congress—on President Zelensky’s signing over half of the country’s wealth of natural resources to him, should make every American feel ashamed. Every American but him, of course, because if there’s something we can be assured of, it’s that Donald Trump has no shame. And it’s not a first by any means because he already sought to blackmail Zelensky during the earlier Trump administration, by withholding vital defense aid unless the Ukrainian president dug up dirt on the son of his political rival, Joe Biden.

Worse still, he is now blaming the victim for causing the crime. (If you’ve been paying attention to his take on sexual assaults and molestations he and his cronies are accused of, you’ll understand that this stance is nothing new for him). Let’s be clear: The reality, the unvarnished facts, are that Russia, an imperialist power, run by a dictator, and a natural enemy of the United States, invaded Ukraine, a sovereign, democratic nation, unprovoked, and based on the sole self-justification that Ukraine was seeking closer ties to the West, and that it had cast off a puppet government put in place by the Kremlin. Any other interpretation is political spin and an out-and-out lie.

Yet, Trump now insists that Ukraine “never should have started” the war of Russian aggression against it. And that, instead of fighting tooth and nail against that invasion, it should have rolled over and “made the deal” that Putin offered. Which for any sovereign nation, was no deal at all, but rather capitulation to Russian dominance.

Ukraine is not, of course, the only place where the US stands to lose ground in the world due to the ham-handed fashion in which the new US thugocracy is mishandling international relations. Eastern European leaders are already on alert, since, with the US (actually Donald Trump, not the US as such) taking the side of Vladimir Putin and accepting Russian propaganda talking points as truth, if Ukraine falls, there is no way an emboldened Putin will stop there, or until all of Eastern Europe is once again under Russian dominance.

Meanwhile, Western European leaders have been left scrambling and are holding emergency meetings to decide how to approach this new reality. After reestablishing firm US-European and NATO ties during the four years that Joe Biden sought to pick up the pieces of American diplomacy shattered under Trump’s earlier four years, they find themselves back at square one after the unthinkable happened and Americans brought a convicted felon back to office again. Clearly, they have to be thinking that, no matter what happens next, the US is no longer a reliable ally. As such, they are now discussing ways in which Europe can disengage from US dominance and start fending for itself in the face of new threats of Russian expansionism.

But I am concentrating on the Ukraine situation because it is a case in point for how Donald Trump views the world. And as I said at the beginning of this essay, his viewpoint is not that of a world leader, but of a mobster.

Let me explain: Trump sees the world not as the sophisticated strategic game that it is, in which strong alliances are vital to the mutual defense of democratic nations. First of all, Trump is not a believer in democracy—not that he is above using the democratic process to gain access to power. It’s just that once in power, he no longer plays by democratic rules. So for Trump, organizations like NATO, the UN, the Organization of American States, and any agency within the government he heads designed to halt corruption or to place checks and balances on the powers that be, are meaningless.

On the contrary, Trump is incapable of complex thinking. Things for him are quite simple. As simple as they are for any mob boss—it’s no coincidence that Trump has more than once expressed his admiration for 20^th-century bootleg mob boss Al Capone (clearly and conveniently ignoring the fact that “Scarface” died in prison on a federal rap). Capone embodied everything Trump admires: raw power backed by violence, accumulation of a vast fortune through any means necessary, lawlessness, and accountability to no one but himself.

Trump, then, doesn’t identify with his predecessors. He doesn’t see himself as the elected leader of a free and democratic nation, guided by an ironclad Constitution and controlled in his actions by the checks and balances of a carefully created three-branch system. He sees himself simply as the head of the greatest military power on earth, and as such, as the Boss, the capo dei capi, the Boss of all bosses.

It follows, then, that he has little or no respect for any of the “minor bosses”—the European leaders, for instance, who, throughout post-war history, have been our friends and allies. If he is the Boss, then they are beholden to him, and, in his simple mind, are worthy only of his contempt and his vengeance if they fail to toe his line.

That means that he sees the world as being divided, much like the mob, into “families”, each with its own turf and its capo dei capi, and it is only for the other Bosses that he reserves his respect. For Trump, there are three “families”. America, Russia and China. Their bosses, Putin and Xi, are, if not his friends, then at least his colleagues, his equals, and he respects their “businesses”, like they respect his, even if, as in the case of China, he exacts certain payments for allowing their businesses to overlap. Business, after all, is business. But they keep their territories clearly marked and try their best to keep out of each other’s way, at the expense of the minor bosses, whom they see as their underlings. Because a turf war between the three families would be “bad for business”.

This is why I’m using Ukraine as my example. Because in Trumpworld, Ukraine doesn’t count. And the only sovereignty it has is because the Boss on its turf allows it to have it. And it can only have it if the Boss is happy with its performance. For Trump, Ukraine, and, very likely, all of Eastern Europe, belongs to the Russia Boss. Asia belongs to the China Boss. And the West belongs to the US Boss. The Middle East is something of a no-man’s-land, but the three are careful not to step on each other’s toes there either—hence Trump’s abandoning of Syria to its Russian regime oppressors during his first term. The fact that it all backfired under Biden is Putin’s problem, but it wasn’t the America Boss standing in the Russia Boss’s way, and the people of Syria be damned. Same goes for the Ukrainians in the simple black and white rules of mobster ethics.

You might say, then, that Trump, a mobster dolt looking to set up a thugocracy, with nobody really doing much to stop him, thinks he’s playing checkers on the world game board. Xi and Putin, meanwhile are playing chess, and Putin has just put Trump in a check move that leaves America’s king in danger of capture.

 

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

 

The first major government agency Elon Musk attacked in his unvetted ad hoc auditor's post was USAID, one of America's most consequential foreign policy tools, and a major factor in giving the US an edge over China and Russia around the world. That agency has basically been gutted and Musk has been dancing on its shallow grave.

Meanwhile, only months prior to Musk's talking President Trump into turning him loose with a machete to hack the US state to pieces, the Inspector General at USAID--the post in charge of keeping the agency honest--had apparently launched an investigation into USAID's contractual ties with Starlink.

Starlink, as you might be aware, is billionaire Elon Musk's satellite communications firm.

I'll let you do the math.

CONSERVATISM DEFINED

 Definition of a conservative: Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values.

NOTE TO MAGA: Stop calling yourselves "conservatives". Your leader is a far-right populist autocrat who is systematically trampling every tradition, institution, custom and value that the US stands for.

Thanks in advance.

 

WHAT IS A PSYCHOPATH?

Recent events—in the past few months since November—have led me to engage in a layman’s study of what is known as ASPD (antisocial personality disorder). It seems that ASPD is a somewhat broad classification of specific mental illnesses that may include sociopathy, borderline personality disorder and psychopathy. It is supposed to be more politically correct today, from our American POV, to use scientific-sounding initials to describe garden-variety behavioral aberrations, hence, ASPD, AvPD (avoidant personality disorder), BPD (borderline personality disorder), DPD (dependent personality disorder), HPD (histrionic personality disorder), NPD (narcissistic personality disorder), OCPD (obsessive-compulsive personality disorder), PAPD (passive-aggressive personality disorder), PPD (paranoid personality disorder), SzPD (schizoid personality disorder), etc.

But sometimes nothing but the hard, unvarnished, naked word will suffice. In  this case, the word is: psychopath. 

So what—or perhaps I should say who—is a psychopath? A psychopath is defined as:
Someone with a personality disorder that involves a lack of empathy and remorse, and a tendency toward antisocial behavior. Psychopaths may also be impulsive, manipulative, and exploitative. 

Principal Characteristics 

-         Impulsivity: Psychopaths may act in risky ways.

-         Lack of empathy: Psychopaths may not care about other people's feelings.

-         Manipulation: Psychopaths may be charismatic and exploitative.

-         Egocentrism: Psychopaths may be self-centered.

-         Disregard for rules: Psychopaths may not follow rules, norms, or the law.

-         Physical aggression: Psychopaths may be violent or cruel to others.

-         Lack of remorse: Psychopaths may not feel sorry for their actions.

Psychopathy has been associated with amorality—an absence of, indifference towards, or disregard for moral beliefs. More specifically, Robert D. Hare, a renowned Canadian forensic psychologist credited with having created a definitive  “psychopath checklist” in the 1970s that is still the psychopathy gold standard test used today by forensic psychologists, writes that “Psychopaths have a narcissistic and incredibly inflated view of their own importance and self-worth. They have huge egos. They’re self-centered to an incredible degree.” According to Hare, psychopaths have “a truly astounding egocentricity and sense of entitlement, and see themselves as the center of the universe, justified in living according to their own rules.”

Another clue to psychopathy, according to Hare, is that while psychopaths love to talk about huge goals, “they typically have no idea of what it takes to achieve them.” And, he indicates, they definitely don’t have a plan for how to achieve them.

Everybody seeks rewards. Rewards drive a lot of our behavior. Even people who have spent their whole lives giving generously to others are at least somewhat focused on the rewarding experience of giving, and seeing the results that it brings.  But psychopaths are obsessively focused on the prize and have no moral, ethical or legal boundaries or compunction when it comes to achieving it. They are incapable of taking a step back and weighing the consequences of what they do, because they are wired to achieve their personal goals no matter what the cost, especially to others, might be. They are almost literally blind to anything other than their own personal goals.

I’ve been looking into these issues, in the interest of journalistic integrity, to ensure that I’m not talking out of turn when I’m tempted to refer to the current president of the United States as “a madman”. The more I research, the harder I’m finding it not to say the words out loud, because it’s not name-calling (something MAGA types seem to be very concerned about…unless it is they who are calling the names) when it is an unavoidable conclusion.

I submit that our country is, regardless of how many people voted for him, being run by a madman. And we should be worried.  

For instance, what sort of a man, in the face of a national tragedy, twists the facts to blame a totally unrelated policy of the previous administration for that tragedy simply because expunging that policy is what he happens to be obsessing on at this very moment? And then too, because the catastrophe in question caused attention to be taken off of him in the news cycle. According to the president, the worst American air tragedy in six decades was caused by policies aimed at promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in American society—which in any logical, human and socially healthy mind should be viewed as a plus in American society. But regardless of one’s feelings about (initials again) DEI, blaming a horrifying air tragedy on it is simply insane. (And was, by the way, repeated by the president’s surrogate lunatic Elon Musk on X, his social media platform).

More evidence of the president’s profound lack of empathy and humanity: When asked by a reporter, in the face of such a tragedy, with the families of the sixty-seven people who died still in shock, if he would go to the crash site, the president responded, “I have a plan to visit, not the site. Because you tell me, what’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?”

So let’s examine that rhetorical question of mine about what sort of man would do that. The answers have been right under our noses for nearly a decade. And yet, here we are again!

The answer is:

The sort of man who said, just hours before the US surpassed two hundred thousand COVID-19 deaths (headed for a million deaths of people of all ages before it was all over),  “Now we know it. It affects elderly people. Elderly people with heart problems and other problems. But they have other problems, that's what it really affects, that's it…But it affects virtually nobody. It's an amazing thing.”

The sort of man who, speaking of one of the most iconic military heroes of the Vietnam War, says, “He's not a war hero…He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured, okay? I hate to tell you.” He was talking about Senator John McCain, a former naval aviator, who,  during Operation Rolling Thunder in  the Vietnam War, was shot down over the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, was refused medical attention by the enemy for wounds sustained in the crash, was repeatedly tortured and beaten, and remained a prisoner of war from 1967 to 1973. During that time, since his father was a renowned admiral, the Vietcong sought to negotiate a deal for his release, early on in his captivity. McCain refused any such effort as long as his fellow US prisoners remained POWs. The man saying McCain wasn’t a hero, the man who is now president and commander-in-chief, himself acquired five college deferments and eventually managed to finagle a medical deferment for “bone spurs” in his heels, in order to avoid being drafted into the military.

The kind of man who, as commander-in-chief, stands on the hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery with a retired four-star Marine general—who, himself, has lost a son in combat seven years earlier in the Middle East—looks out over the vast sea of crosses of America’s war dead and says, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Because, clearly, he can’t even imagine doing anything in which there isn’t something in it for him, and certainly can’t imagine making the supreme sacrifice for something as unrelated to his personal priorities as his nation.

The kind of man who refuses to have US combat amputees present at a White House military event because their presence “doesn’t look good for me.”

The kind of man who publicly belittles the parents of Humayun Khan, a US Army captain, a Gold Star recipient, and a Muslim killed in Iraq, after they dared to criticize him for his anti-Muslim rhetoric.

The kind of man who, as US president and commander-in-chief, didn’t want to waste his precious time visiting a cemetery in France devoted to American soldiers who fought and died on French soil during World War I, because he considered them “suckers and losers.”

The kind of man who says he’s entitled to force unwanted kisses on women—“I just start kissing them…I don’t even wait”— or to “grab them by the pussy” because he’s “a star”.

The kind of man (monster) who sexually assaults a woman in a department store dressing room. And then slanders her publicly and calls her a liar.

The kind of man, the kind of leader,  who incites his most radical supporters to “fight like hell” to halt certification of an election in which he was definitively beaten, and then calmly sits back to watch the violence unfold on TV for three hours without lifting a finger to stop it.

The kind of man, the kind of president, who, after more than sixty courts and his own attorney general have ruled out his charges of election fraud, tries to steal the election anyway by pressuring officials to falsify the results.

The kind of man who still can’t move on from that loss, even though he has again been elected to office, and who is now dividing the nation and wasting time and national treasure in mounting a widespread witch-hunt to fire, smear, sue and discredit anyone and everyone who rightly and justly took part in prosecution of the perpetrators of the violent post-2020 election uprising, which he incited.

The kind of man who makes no secret of his admiration for dictators and famous gangsters, and even less of a secret of his disdain for democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law.

The kind of man who, in all the time that we, the people, have known him, has consistently and famously and provably lied about, well, just about everything you can imagine—thirty thousand lies (count them, fact-checkers did) just in his first term—a man who seems to have no concept of facts or truth, no grip on reality, a man driven only by his personal ambitions, his vendettas, and, more importantly, by his personal hatred, with which he charismatically infects his base.

Last year, forensic psychologist Dr. Vince Greenwood developed a scientific study of the current president’s background and past behavior in an attempt to establish whether the populist GOP leader is, indeed, a psychopath. He used the well-established Hare Psychopathy Checklist as the basis for his study.   According to his results, the president scored thirty-three.  The usual cutoff point for clinical psychopathy is thirty. Greenwood writes,  “For each item (on the checklist), the diagnostician is asked to give a rating on the pervasiveness of the trait. The guidelines to diagnose psychopathy are straightforward, but the demands on the diagnostician are rigorous.” The test is so rigorous, in fact, that professionals administering it have to undergo specialized training before being cleared to give it.

The doctor’s conclusion? That the president is “a garden-variety example of a particular and precisely delineated psychiatric condition.” Dr. Greenwood goes on to say that “he is, sadly for him and dangerously for the rest of us, a prisoner of his psychopathology, a puppet on the strings of a set of destructive personality traits that dictate his behavior. He is at the mercy of those traits, and, by extension, so are we.”

So what does that score of thirty-three signify on a comparative basis? According to Dr. Greenwood’s study, “The average score for individuals in a maximum security prison setting is 22. I mention that because the typical cutoff to get a formal diagnosis of psychopathy is 30. It’s a high bar that even most serious criminals don’t meet.” 

As to criteria and sources used in the study, Dr. Greenwood writes, “He (the president) is arguably the most well-chronicled candidate in history. A partial list of informational sources would include 13 autobiographical efforts as well as his social media posts, 71 biographies, many of which are richly sourced, and hundreds of interviews from print, radio, and television. A clinical interview is not necessary to diagnose the (then) former president for this condition. Indeed, there is research to indicate that the interview can detract from the assessment of a psychopath because of their facility for lying.”

This was what the president’s psychopathy scorecard looked like:

1. Glibness/superficial charm — 2

2.Egocentricity/grandiose sense of self-worth — 2
3.Proneness to boredom/need for stimulation — 2
4. Pathological lying and deception/gaslighting — 2
5. Conning/lack of sincerity — 2
6. Lack of remorse or guilt — 2
7. Shallow affect — 2
8. Callous/lack of empathy — 2
9. Parasitic lifestyle — 0
10. Poor behavioral controls — 2
11. Promiscuous sexual behavior — 2
12. Early behavior problems — 2
13. Lack of realistic long-term goals — 1
14. Impulsivity — 2
15. Irresponsibility — 2
16. Failure to accept responsibility for own actions — 2
17. Many short-term marital relationships — 1
18. Juvenile delinquency — 1
19. Revocation of parole — 0
20. Criminal versatility — 2
Total = 33

And this is not the only study that has arrived at the same conclusion since the president burst onto the political scene a decade ago. Indeed, two hundred thirty American psychiatrists last year signed an open letter affirming their belief that the man currently occupying the White House is far too mentally unstable to be president.

Also, during the current president’s former term in office, twenty-seven psychiatrists collaborated on a book entitled The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, in which they agreed that, although a diagnosis should not be made without formal examination of the patient, dangerousness may be assessed from observed behavior. And their unanimous conclusion was that this man was a clear and present danger to the US and to the world. One particularly chilling passage concludes that the president “is now the most powerful head of state in the world,” but is also “one of the most impulsive, arrogant, ignorant, disorganized, chaotic, nihilistic, self-contradictory, self-important, and self-serving” of world leaders. It goes on to warn that it is tremendously dangerous, considering the president’s mental state, for him to have “his finger on the triggers of a thousand or more of the most powerful thermonuclear weapons in the world. That means he could kill more people in a few seconds than any dictator in past history has been able to kill during his entire years in power.” It is worth recalling that when the president first entered office in 2017, one of the first questions he asked was, if the US has nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them?

The book also points to the effect the president’s mental pathology has had on society as a whole, creating a “malignant normality” in which “what was previously considered unthinkable becomes the norm. Some therapists have seen patients suffering from trauma and re-trauma resulting from the president’s actions, which mimic those of an aggressive abuser.” 

So if I say that a lawless madman is running the country, it’s not hyperbole. It is a stark scientific and medical reality. The country, the world, all of us, are at the mercy of the whims of a diagnosed psychopath. And half the country has apparently fallen under his lunatic spell.

We should all, in the interest of self-preservation, be worried about that. The whole country. The whole world. It’s a monkey-with-a-razor moment in the most militarily powerful nation on earth, and we—Americans and humankind as a whole—are all potential victims of it.