lpetrich
Contributor
Updating Authoritarian Nightmare – The Authoritarians - October 8, 2020
Referring to the book that BA wrote with John W. Dean: "Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers"
BA then compares his book to four then-recent books.
Mary L Trump’s Book, Too Much and Never Enough
Referring to the book that BA wrote with John W. Dean: "Authoritarian Nightmare: Trump and His Followers"
"Then we’ll face the dark, dark problem of what might happen after November 3rd." - we have now seen it.As well, Donald Trump keeps doing things that test the durability and depth of my explanation. For example, on that late-June day when we put the book “to bed,” Trump reprised his absurd impersonation of someone who cares about the law and issued an executive order promising severe punishment for defacing public statues and monuments. The following day he laid down a Tweet bombardment aimed at Obamacare and the mainstream media. The next day he (falsely) insisted no one had told him Russia was paying Taliban fighters a bounty for killing American soldiers in Afghanistan.
BA then compares his book to four then-recent books.
Mary L Trump’s Book, Too Much and Never Enough
That can also explain why many anti-Trump politicians became belligerent Trumpies.Mary L. Trump thinks the president’s admiration of dictators and his obsequious desire to be their friend—as well as his own powerful dictatorial impulses—are based upon this searing experience with the dominating authoritarian in his life, his father.
...
Mary Trump’s book also offers insight into the president’s lack of empathy for anybody, including the people whose suffering he has directly caused. ... Donald Trump grew up unloved and quite unprepared to love others. He tried to solve the first problem with narcissism. There is no evidence he ever tried to solve, or even was bothered, by the second.
One wonders why the other Trump children so uniformly and quietly went along with the Trump Family Plan to dishonestly accumulate mountains of wealth. The same question arose when their father set out to destroy Freddy, one of their own. The simple answer according to Mary L.’s book: They all had too much to gain by playing along.