For the Record: Psychopathy

Via obviously psychopathic expert guy.

I felt we got somewhere interesting in the following:

It's the psychopathy. He's not cognitively incapacitated but can only think about something to the extent it immediately pains or gratifies him. What he learns about "issues" is what it takes to get the rubes to applaud or get a rise out of us.

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 28, 2018

That's easier. The expert's doing all the work, he just has to make a serious face and the expert feels understood.

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 28, 2018

Well, sure, but I don't think he's doing it to please the person, he's doing it to display to the next person that he has an interesting opinion. "A lot of people don't know this, but..."

— Phony Cloud That Doesn't Exist (@Yastreblyansky) April 28, 2018

You bet. One thing I still don't get is, people (and T himself) say he wants people to "like" him. And yet he is easily the most despised person on the planet. Maybe that desire to be liked is rooted in psychopathy, with appropriate results.

— Ellis Weiner (@EllisWeiner) April 28, 2018

As it happens, I ran across something relevant in an old thing, from The New York Times's David Sanger, from November 2016, on Trump's campaign interview with Haberman and Sanger the previous March:

To Mr. Trump, the Iran deal was not only misguided, but also badly negotiated. “They should’ve walked,” he said of Secretary of State John Kerry and his negotiating team. Mr. Trump said he would have left the negotiating room, doubled down on sanctions, and never agreed to give back billions of dollars, money that belonged to Iran and was frozen in American financial institutions.

But when pressed, he struggled to name any part of the deal he would have walked out of the negotiations to alter. With some prompting, he finally settled on a common critique: that after 15 years, Iran will be free to enrich uranium and reprocess plutonium again, in any quantity.

(My bold.) That's so Trumpy. He's got the crowd-pleasing condemnation of the JCPOA, which he's going to stick to, but no knowledge of what the JCPOA is or what it's supposed to accomplish to explain what it is he objects to, and he gets Sanger and Haberman to feed him a reasonable-sounding answer, giving Sanger a quote he's still working six or seven months later.  Not cunning enough that Sanger doesn't notice it, but enough that Sanger will just hint at it, with Church-of-the-Savvy obliqueness, not risking his access.