Trump’s Murderous Mind Set
White House staff were reportedly “visibly shaken” by Trump’s “enthusiasm” while watching the riot and reported that he had to be strong-armed by his Cabinet with threats of an invocation of the 25th Amendment to finally issue a statement condemning his followers’ violence. GOP Sen. Ben Sasse claimed that as Trump was watching his supporters storm the Capitol, he “was walking around the White House confused about why other people on his team weren’t as excited as he was as you had rioters pushing against Capitol Police trying to get into the building.”
“That was happening. He was delighted,” the Republican senator said.
One Congresswoman was rushed to a crowded secure location in the Capitol but there were enough Republic representatives who still, even in these circumstances, refused to wear a mask, that she removed to a less secure, less crowded location and made do with piling furniture up against the doors and grabbing objects to use as a body shield. There are so many Republicans in high office who continue to find ways to threaten the lives of those around them. On Thursday, on the so recently violated Senate floor, Rep. Matt Gaetz and other GOP politicians baselessly suggested ‘Antifa’ was to blame for pro-Trump mob rioting into the Capitol, that the people on camera were actually Antifa terrorists in disguise as MAGA people.
Who, after the transparently Trump-supporting terror attack upon democratic functioning, would listen to this dangerous and transparent bullshit without pelting the offender with offal and jeering him out of office?
The so-called ‘protesters’ (anti-democratic insurgents) marched to the Capitol directly from Trump’s rally, in response to him telling them to do so. As other GOP members of Congress — including Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Georgia) — tried to distance themselves afterward from the rioters’ anti-democratic mission, Staten Island’s GOP Rep. Malliotakis continued to stand with the 147 GOP House members who voted to overturn election results. A day before rioters invaded the Capitol, Malliotakis had tweeted about “rooting out fraud” in the election results — echoing the president’s false claims, which are blamed for helping incite the violence. Even after the attempted coup she voted against the certification of the election. At the time of this writing, a large, peaceful, but very vocal crowd is standing outside her offices, loudly demanding her resignation.
The death toll from Wednesday’s domestic terror assault upon the government core stands at 5, one more than from the terror attack on Bengazi, with plots uncovered that involved a public hanging, abductions and murders of key government officials. Some of President Donald Trump’s supporters apparently intended to kidnap Vice President Mike Pence and execute him if he didn’t overturn their election loss. Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol as Pence presided over the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election win, and video captured some of them threatening to execute the vice president — who Trump had singled out in a speech just minutes before they burst into the building. “Hang Mike Pence, hang Mike Pence,” the crowd chanted as alarms sounded after the mob broke into the Capitol. To this end, a gallows and hanging rope had been erected by the mob, right outside the Capitol building.
And there were other sinister plots uncovered: ‘Amid the photos that flooded social media during Wednesday’s riot at the Capitol — shirtless jokers in horned helmets, dudes pointing at their nuts, dumbasses carrying away souvenirs — the images of the zip-tie guys were quieter, less exuberant, more chilling. And we’d better not forget what they almost managed to do. The guys were carrying flex cuffs, the plastic double restraints often used by police in mass arrest situations. They walked through the Senate chamber with a sense of purpose. They were not dressed in silly costumes but kitted out in full paramilitary regalia: helmets, armor, camo, holsters with sidearms. At least one had a semi-automatic rifle and 11 Molotov cocktails. At least one, unlike nearly every other right-wing rioter photographed that day, wore a mask that obscured his face.
‘These are the same guys who, when the windows of the Capitol were broken and entry secured, went in first with what I’d call military-ish precision. They moved with purpose, to the offices of major figures like Nancy Pelosi and then to the Senate floor. What was that purpose? It wasn’t to pose for photos. It was to use those flex cuffs on someone….They went into the Capitol, as Congress was counting electoral votes, equipped to take hostages — to physically seize officials, and presumably to take lives…
‘Today, we’re hearing more about the violence that accompanied the buffoonery: the Capitol Police officer killed with a fire extinguisher, the AP photographer dragged away by goons, the New York Times photographer thrown to the floor who feared for her life. No doubt we’ll hear even more as more stories come out. But it could have been much, much worse. If the rioters had been a little quicker through the doors; if senators and representatives hadn’t just moved from their joint session into separate chambers to debate the Arizona challenge and had instead still been packed into one harder-to-evacuate room; if any number of things had happened differently, the three people next in the line of succession for the presidency might have been face to face with those zip-tie guys. And then: Who knows.” (Dan Kois, ‘They Were Out for Blood: The men who carried zip ties as they stormed the Capitol weren’t clowning around,’ Slate, January 8, 2021)
I think the bulk of the Capitol marauders had no real plan but vaguely thought they could force Pence, the Congress and electors to reverse the ratification of the vote, reverse the people’s choice, by taking them hostage (with the zip ties), threatening them with torture and execution like the Michigan governor (Pence and Pelosi) and just dominating, terrorizing and intimidating them generally. They actually thought they could do that and that it would be OK.
Why did they think it would be OK? Because Trump thought it was OK, and they have ceded their cognitive functions to his domination of their thoughts, their values, their emotions and responses, their adulation and their attention. Trump’s apprehension of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ is so primitive that he adjudicates anything he thinks benefits him (often erroneously) as ‘good,’ and anything he thinks goes against his interests as ‘bad.’ It’s really just that childlike in the murderous mind set of Trump — that arrested. When that mindset is lionized and shared among legions of brainwashed followers and rapturous fans, besides evidencing severe cognitive dissonance, the mass forfeit of sovereign selves unto Trump’s primitive, sociopathic dicta is pathological. Any ideology or theology that sponsors and promotes the abject surrender of the sovereign self to external, other-identified direction and control, whether it be religious, political, or epistemological, is pathological.
In the course of Wednesday’s attempted coup, journalists were also attacked: “Murder the media,” was written on a door of the Capitol while terrorists took over and attacked a group of reporters. In one incident John Minchillo, a photographer of the Associated Press, was attacked by a mob of Trump supporters outside the Capitol building. The violent incident was captured on video and shared by another photographer on Twitter. As Lucas Jackson wrote on Twitter: “My friend @johnminchillo of AP being assaulted outside the capitol yesterday. The words spewing from Trump’s mouth about the press as “enemies of the state”leads directly to this. Anyone who supports or repeats his bile about the press is complicit.”
The style of this domestic terror assault on the U.S. government and its most hallowed democratic function of certifying the People’s choice had already been carried out on a smaller scale — the dress rehearsal in Michigan — armed Trump supporters holding the capitol hostage, waving automatic weapons around inside the legislative chambers in that open-carry state, with absolutely no law enforcement opposition whatsoever, but actual support shown for the domestic terrorists, with the plot to abduct, torture and murder the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, uncovered in its wake. The threatened governor, herself, issued multiple warnings after receiving scores of credible death threats. What does it take?
DC officials should have talked to the Michigan governor; these armed rioters were nothing like the BLM demonstrators who were tear-gassed and brutalized by the National Guard and unidentified militia in DC for Trump’s Bible abusing photo op in front of the church, and it was a mistake to confuse the two factions. It was an even greater mistake to confuse how any and all American policing forces would respond to a violent, armed, White, Trump supporting mob versus how they have historically responded to peaceful, progressive-liberal Black Lives Matter demonstrators of any race or ethnicity, with the greater savagery visited upon Black and Brown participants. As Felix Jay has described: ‘A Black friend’s daughter wrote: “We’re not asking you to shoot them like you shoot us. We’re asking you to not shoot us like you don’t shoot them.”’
The reason the Capitol Police, D.C. law enforcement, the FBI and other government policing agencies claimed that there had been no indications that there would be violence or terrorism attending the certification process in Congress beyond what they could easily contain with local forces — despite QAnon, Proud Boys, and numbers of other Right-Wing militia groups and Trump supporters plainly advertising their plans for exactly those activities on social media, having already perpetrated armed mob violence in Oregon, Michigan and elsewhere, and despite actually, very blatantly, doing their seditious organizing right online — is because of a toxic combination of racism and religious bias. They simply could not conceptually wrap their minds around the possibility of loudly Christian White People representing a threat to their American way of life — even armed — even spouting deranged conspiracy theories — even plainly brainwashed and dangerous.
Congressional staffers were horrified to discover that supporters of President Donald Trump defecated on the floors of the Capitol building and then tracked their faeces around with them into offices. Sources within Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) office tell the New York Daily News that Trump fans who ransacked the Capitol on Wednesday “smeared their extremist excrement around the building” and left behind brown “footprints” that were later discovered by disgusted staffers. “It looked like they [purposely] tracked it around,” one of the Daily News’ sources explained.
Basically, Trump had sent them, saying “I’ll be with you” (to wild, adoring cheers), telling them to “walk down there” and “go wild,” even telling them what route to take, then hightailing it in the opposite direction, back to the White House, where the ‘viewing party’ was all set up, with monitors and guests already assembled, prearranged to watch the mayhem like it was a victory party. In the ill-advised video of the pre-rally party, shot and shared on social media by the idiot elder son, you can see Trump’s whole being, his entire attention avidly fixed on the monitors, intently watching the crowd, anticipating the action going down exactly as he desired, while idiot son’s deranged girlfriend yucks it up, actually dancing for the camera like a mincing, blood-thirsty coquet.
On Thursday, the day after he told his supporters “we love you,” and “you’re special,” adding their murderous numbers to mass murderer, Kim Jong Un, with whom, by his own account, he is also “in love,” President Trump condemned them in a statement that called for a ‘seamless transition of power.’’ At this moment, as I write, The draft of an article of impeachment against Donald Trump, drawn up by Democratic Congressmen Jamie Raskin Ted Lieu, and David Cicilline, is released. Democrats are setting up a possible vote to impeach Donald Trump for a second time by the middle of next week.
Meanwhile, the Evangelical Christian religious faith groups who have for so long unquestioningly supported him and even hailed him as having been ‘sent by God,’ are starting to regain some semblance of sanity about the man and their own, former, cultic adherence to him. Faith groups, immigrant rights activists and Democratic organizations issued a statement on Wednesday night (Jan. 6) calling for President Donald Trump’s impeachment, removal and prosecution after a mob of his supporters violently occupied the U.S. Capitol. “Every moment that he remains in office is a severe danger to our country,” the statement read. And after many years of abusing it, Trump has been permanently deprived of his major bully pulpit, the instrument by which he multiple times daily spewed his uncountable lies, his unfathomable malice, his smear campaigns, his pathological insanity, ‘official decrees,’ public firings, and fatal Covid-19 disinformation. But information about how close this deranged man may have brought the world to its knees continues to come out.
Several days ago, an American bomber was on its way to Iran and was turned around in mid-air to return to base on the Persian Gulf. Had lame-duck Trump, in the frenzy of his defeat, ordered a strike against Iran? Against Iranian nuclear facilities? Did wiser heads prevail and abort the mission? Were we, in fact, unbeknownst to most of us, on the brink of a nuclear conflagration?
There were disturbing reports about Donald Trump’s mental state coming out of the White House after his supporters attempted their violent coup at the U.S. Capitol. CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta reported that Trump is “traumatized” and “out of his mind” over failing to overturn the election results. “I talked to a source, a GOP source close to the president who speaks with him regularly, and I take no pleasure in reporting this, but this source tells me that he believes the president is out of his mind. The direct quote of this source is, ‘he is out of his mind,” Acosta reported. “And the source says the president is so traumatized by his loss in the election it is all he can talk about, it is all he can think about, it’s all-consuming for him. And in this source’s opinion he is out of his mind.”
