How Trump Won the 2020 Election. In His Brain.

 

Image via.

His grasp on reality is very weak. I think he has a problem with object permanence, and always hopes he can convince the facts to change. He's talking more to himself than to the interviewer.

— Yas You Like It (@Yastreblyansky) June 20, 2023

Object permanence—the understanding that if you're playing peek-a-boo with him and you hide his toy behind your back while his eyes are closed that the toy didn't really cease to exist—isn't really the right concept. Practically everybody gets that by the time they're 18 to 24 months old, and there's no reason to think Trump didn't. What I was after turns out to be something related, in a kind of metaphorical plane, "object constancy", the recognition that a thing remains the same thing under transformations. That a tree seen at a distance is the same as the one you see up close, not a different, smaller tree, in the simplest type of case. 

In the discussion of personality disorders of the kind I think of Trump as suffering from—Borderline Personality Disorder or Narcissistic Personality Disorder—object constancy is generally the recognition that a person remains the same person under what you might call a moral transformation. We've all experienced the feeling in a fight with someone we love that we don't "recognize" them, or they don't "recognize" us ("Honestly, I don't even recognize you!")—that's a metaphor for our or our partner's distress, but for the person with BPD or NPD it can be literally true.

Pre-operational postscript

And I would have gotten away with it too, if not for those meddling scientists. Via.

Or putting it another way (from Jonathan Swan's Axios interview of Trump, to which I'll be returning, as transcribed in news.com.au):

Trump: “Many of those tests are now obsolete, because you know, it’s called science, and all of a sudden something’s better. But because we tested so many people, 55-60 million people, very soon, we get cases. You test, some kid has even just a little runny nose, it’s a case. And then you report many cases. So we look like we have more cases than massive countries, like China – which by the way, doesn’t report, as you know.”

The test makes it a Covid-19 case, as Trump sees it. Sure the kid has the sniffles, but it's not "a case" unless some meddling functionary goes and tests for it, so it shouldn't count. It's not fair to count it, not fair to Trump.

That is, in the White House it's OK to test everybody that might come in the president's breathing range, because that's important stuff involving the president's health. But out there in the world, it's not about a virus that a kid with a runny nose might communicate to teachers or grandparents, possibly killing them the way Mrs. Miller or Robert O'Brien or one of those Secret Service guys could have killed the president (and Trump never shows any awareness that asymptomatic cases exist as well), it's about keeping score of the administration in his competition with the other Leaders. Not that he's trying to say it isn't really Covid, but how's he supposed to win if our own refs are so nitpicky all the time, calling a foul when the virus hardly even brushed against the guy?

It's not just that he has a different standard for events outside his own body, it's that he doesn't accord the same reality to things happening outside his body, and he sincerely expects his audience (all projections of the only mind whose full existence he can recognize, his own) to accept that.

And in that way it's perhaps not so much that he hasn't reached the concrete operational stage at all as that he can't make the required effort to extend it beyond his immediate purview into the bodies he doesn't occupy. And not so much, as I was trying to say, that testing magically creates Covid infections as that the infections couldn't happen without the malignant forces arrayed against him, which are somehow connected to testing, though he's not going to (can't) inquire too closely into how it works.

Cross-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.

Hi It's Stupid: Preoperational

Illustration by Andrew Couts via Daily Dot.

.....Our massive testing capability, rather than being praised, is used by the Lamestream Media and their partner, the Do Nothing Radical Left Democrats, as a point of scorn. This testing, and what we have so quickly done, is used as a Fake News weapon. Sad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 31, 2020

We have more Cases because we do more Testing. It’s Lamestream Media Gold!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 1, 2020

For the Record: Miscellany

Twitter is like an intellectual equivalent of the southeastern Australian coast right now, deadly brush fires everywhere you turn demanding your attention so you don't know where to focus.

Why are these Democrats complaining about lawyer lawsuits? We have lawyer lawsuits all the time! You can't FILE a lawsuit without a lawyer!

Oh, FOIA lawsuits?

Never mind https://t.co/oDQGAN880e

— Dopes 'n' Babies (@Yastreblyansky) January 23, 2020

Trump doubling down on his belief that there were no US casualties in the Iranian raids on bases in Iraq, after the army announced that there were a number of cases of traumatic brain injury (TBI)

Self-Dunk

Via.

Required reading, the best thing I've ever seen on Trump's speech style and its relationship, if any, to his belief system, by David Roth for Deadspin:

It is a problem for President Donald Trump that it’s often impossible to tell what the hell he’s talking about. This is not one of those signature Trump defects that can readily be spun into a secret strength or as a subtle bit of advanced dealcraft that only experts and initiates can appreciate. His mind is a television that changes channels every three seconds and where every channel has an infomercial on it; it cycles day and night without ever quite cohering into a signal. There is plenty of noise, though, and because Trump so utterly lacks discernment he is constantly interrupting himself with some new bit or blurt. As a result, his average sentence is a parade of wild upstage moves in which whatever thought he’s had most recently is forever blundering into and past the one he had just begun to express—imagine one of those halftime shows at a NBA game in which people throw down wild dunks after leaping off trampolines except there’s a new guy jumping on the trampoline every second and there are frequent midair collisions. Trump also only knows about a hundred words, about a third of which refer to volume or size....

And much, much more.

The Plastic Brain

Via.

Neuroscientists finally grasping the human brain isn't hard-wired and that our cognition and linguistic ability are largely formed after we're born. https://t.co/MMGjoaAqV9

— Demented Words Of Violence And Death (@Yastreblyansky) August 9, 2018

I got kind of legitimately excited by this story from Northeastern University, the home of neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, who has come up with what sounds like an extremely well-supported hypothesis of a kind I've been waiting for for a very long time, for how the brain might go about organizing itself between birth and toddlerhood, with the necessary help of the people the child interacts with, like, I would say, a natural-selection system inside an ecosystem, constantly nourishing and reinforcing the adaptive neuronal connections and allowing the non-adaptive ones to die, in the general way described by the late Gerald Edelman in the 1980s and 1990s (here's a review of his most accessible book by the also late Oliver Sacks), but with a good deal more attention than Edelman gave to the importance of the child's social connections and a pretty simple biological concept of what the brain cells are looking for: Bill Ibelle, the Northeastern News science writer, explains,

Literary Corner: The Brain is Much More Important

Max Ernst, Saint Cecilia (Invisible Piano), 1923, via WikiArt. 

Elton has an organ

by Donald J. Trump

I. I have broken more Elton John records

He seems to have a lot of records.
And I, by the way, I don’t
have a musical instrument. I don’t
have a guitar or an organ.
No organ. Elton has an organ.
And lots of other people helping.
No we’ve broken a lot of records.
We’ve broken virtually every record.

II, Because you know, look

I only need this space.
They need much more room.
For basketball, for hockey and all
of the sports, they need a lot of room.
We don’t need it. We have people
in that space. So we break all
of these records. Really we do it
without like, the musical instruments.

III. This is the only musical: the mouth

And hopefully the brain attached
to the mouth. Right? The brain,
more important than the mouth, is the
brain. The brain is much more important.

A Man and His Brain

Former New York Times columnist David Brooks  ("Getting Trump Out of My Brain") introduces an interesting psychological theory you might call neo-Cartesian, in which he sees the human self as a disembodied thing lurking in the ether but the brain as a sort of self in its own right, and a difficult personality making for conflicts between the two of them:

Last week The Washington Post published transcripts of Donald Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders. A dear friend sent me an email suggesting I read them because they reveal how Trump’s mind works. But as I tried to click the link a Bartleby-like voice in my head said, “I would prefer not to.” I tried to click again and the voice said: “No thanks. I’m full.”

So poor Brooksy can't cognize anything because his brain's on strike. Here's a howdy-do!

Tough Love

Yes, I like this picture. Wanna make something of it?

I should have mentioned yesterday that that hilarious David Brooks column was drivel, but not pure drivel— actually about something, namely a new book by the education-beat journalist Paul Tough, which Brooks gets to in paragraph 8:

The good news is that attention is finally turning to the love lives of our students — to the psychic and emotional qualities they bring to the classroom. No one is better at chronicling this shift than Paul Tough, the author of “How Children Succeed” and now “Helping Children Succeed.” In his latest book, he asks how, concretely, can we improve students’ noncognitive skills. 

Snake on a plain

Vervet monkeys call out when they see a member of an enemy species, with different calls for different predators, so that their friends know what to do--for a leopard, get as high up a tree as you can; for an eagle, dive for cover. It is an instinctive response, however, not something the monkey learns to do, a language that can be changed from generation to generation.

Chimpanzees, on the other hand, our very close relatives, apparently think about it before making an alarm call--think about what it is they've seen and who needs to know, according to this report in the Guardian of a field experiment conducted in the Budongo forest, Uganda.