More Thoughts & Another Review of "Unfit" - the Documentary Warning About the Trump Presidency

I am really tired of Donald Trump, who I like to refer to as King Con Don.

Really, he seems to have absolutely dominated headlines around the world ever since 2015, when he infamously first descended the golden escalator and announced his White House run. He will almost assuredly be the 2024 Republican nominee, and win or lose, I am beginning to think that he will run in 2028, as well. 

That, despite having already lost in 2020, and then attempting a coup to keep in power. He advocated that his supporters interrupt the proceedings in Congress, which would validate Joe Biden's election win. Clearly, King Con Don is not a believer in democracy.

So as sick and tired of I am of hearing about him.

Yet, it worries me that he is currently far and away the frontrunner among Republicans for the White House. It is ridiculous to think that this man could be rewarded another term in office after all of the transparent bullshit that he was responsible for. The reality is, however, he actually does have a chance - and a real chance - at winning.

Below are some notes that I took while watching this movie this time around (and I recommend that you watch it as well, especially if you are not convinced that the man is unstable as many accuse him of being):

Malignant Narcissism:  

1.     Narcissism  

2.     Paranoia  

3.     Anti-Social Personality Disorder  

4.     Sadism  

The Tarasoff Rule – imposes a duty on a therapist to warn appropriate person(s) when a patient may present a risk of harm to a specific person or persons.     

Perhaps it's the distance of time, but on this viewing of "Unfit," I actually felt that Anthony Scaramucci, himself a former member of the Trump administration, made some of the best points in the movie. Don't get me wrong: I'm not really a fan of Scaramucci. Yet, he spoke bluntly, and made some very valid points. Among them was the reason, according to him, that Trump was elected in the first place. The below may not be an exact quote (these are largely the notes taken during this most recent viewing), but I think that it gives the main points of what Scaramucci was saying:

We went from an economically middle-class and lower middle-class, working class aspirational society to a desperational society in 35 years…left a very large group of people feeling very, very desperate about their economic aspirations and their well-being….anger based vote  People willing to vote for someone they don’t like, but not willing to vote for someone who dislikes them, citing Hillary Clinton calling Trump supporters “basket full of deplorables.”  

As for racism, a charge that has often been leveled at Trump, Scaramucci does not believe it. Yet, it was not exactly like he came to Trump's defense, either. This is how he summed Trump up:

"Not racist, he’s an asshole. He’s obviously an asshole.”     

As I said, Scaramucci does not pull any punches, and is very blunt.

And you know what? I suspect that he is right. Many of his detractors seem to put this up as the main thing to warn about when it comes to Trump, but I am not entirely convinced that Trump's alleged racism is as much of a threat as they sometimes claim. 

Maybe some people could be shocked by my saying this, but listen: it is not the central point that he is fixated on, as was the case with Adolf Hitler. Hitler was absolutely obsessed with the notion of Germans as the Aryan superior race, and the policies of Nazi Germany reflected this. 

Trump, by contrast, is an opportunist. I suspect that he does not shy away from being supported by racists, and uses them to his advantage, which itself is damning enough. Yes, I know, the evidence of his racism seems pretty overwhelming. He claims that he is not racist (according to him, he's the least racist person you could ever meet), yet he singled out Mexicans as criminals and rapists, he championed a ban on people from specifically Muslim nations, he had a difficult time condemning outright Nazis after those horrifying images of Nazi and white supremacists torchlight rally in Charlottesville shook the country, he derided literally dozens of countries in Africa and Latin America as "shithole nations," and during the 2020 presidential race, he posted a brief video of one of his supporters yelling "White Power!" before taking it down. More recently, he once again championed a ban on Muslims. All of this surely is evidence that racism is indeed a problem with Trump.

Yet, Scaramucci warns that people who dismiss Trump as a "moron" are guilty of underestimating him. In fact, Scaramucci says, Trump is smart, or he would not be able to manipulate so many people into not only supporting him, but doing so passionately. I think he has a point. And I have always thought that Trump's seeming racism felt specifically indirect enough to suit and thus woo the prejudices of some of his supporters, while also carefully towing the line and not being too blatantly racist that it would turn enough people off from him. Some people would suggest that there is no difference, but I suspect that there is a world of difference. And that means we need to understand those differences. 

One thing that troubled me regarding the opposition to Trump was the tendency to use humor to dismiss him and/or his supporters. Whatever the specifics of the joke, it always seemed that the unstated, yet obvious message was something to the effect of those people being too stupid to know better than to support a man like Trump. Yet, like it or not, enough people supported the man that he won the White House, even after some outlandish things had been unearthed about him and his ideas. Even after some seemingly racist comments, and after the whole "grab them by the pussy" thing, he still somehow managed to win. And to gain the adoration of masses, particularly in red states. And while he lost his bid for reelection in a landslide, we found out that he came closer to succeeding on January 6th than we had imagined. Any one of those things - racist and sexist statements that generated controversy, lying to such a degree and with such frequency that it is truly staggering, losing an election, and outright attempting a coup - would have ended almost anyone else's career. With Trump, somehow, it seems to earn even more adoration and loyalty to enough people that it should be very, very alarming. 

Indeed, our democracy itself is at risk. And this man is still around, and still dominating headlines and getting the lead story on the nightly news. Currently, he is far and away the favorite to emerge as the Republican nominee for the presidency next year. It bears repeating: he is still very much a threat to our democracy.

So another thing that Scaramucci said resonates about how most people mistakenly seem to view the Trump phenomena applies:

View it as a template and not a warning.

Yes, I am sick and tired of this man, and the circus act that surrounds and follows him. And this includes the media, which he claims to despise, but which like everything else, he manipulates and uses to his advantage (and by this point, like it or not, they feel complicit). Really, I don't want to write about this man. But it feels, once again, like the threat of him is very real and growing. In truth, I wish he would simply go away. Just disappear.

But he is not going anywhere. And the threat of him taking over again is very real. Please take an hour and a half or so to watch this movie, and understand better what we are up against.

Review of Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump

(originally published on November 2, 2020)

By now, many of us have seen some news reports or at least parts of television shows where there are warnings abut Donald Trump and all that he stands for. We have heard experts on radio and television warn us about him, or comment in horror about this or that action that he has taken, or some ridiculous thing that he has said. We have seen his supporters feel ever more emboldened, to the point where they are increasingly taking matters into their own hand, such as when far-right white nationalists, actually white supremacists, feel more legitimized and emboldened than ever before, or how a 17-year-old kid decides to take his gun and go to the site of riots, or when a group of men calling themselves the Proud Boys takes their arms to try and intimidate anti-Trump protesters, or when a group of right-wing radicals not only concocts, but actually acts on some half-baked plans to kidnap the sitting governor, and then to take her away and try her, with the predetermined judgement being the death sentence, which they apparently meant to act out on.  

One of the most informative, and frankly alarming, programs that I have seen on the current state of America right now is Frontline: America's Great Divide. It is a two-part series, and it is both incredibly depressing and terrifying regarding the direction that this country is headed in. Yet, despite it obviously being far from comfortable, it is something that I would recommend all Americans watching, if only to better understand exactly how the current polarization specifically came to materialize.  

Yet, this is one of actually many programs that have been warning about the marked change in direction that the country has taken under Donald Trump. His political rise has been virtually impossible to ignore. If you live in this country, you would have to have been living in a cave not to notice just how different the country is now with him. It is a departure from conventional political norms right from the moment when Trump descended from the escalator at Trump Tower back in 2015 to announce that he was running for president. Very recently, Trump made yet another video, where once again he is descending – this time from the sky, where the symbolism of Heaven is pretty clear – onto the White House lawn, and then we watch the helicopter rise to the sky again, and we see him on an illuminated balcony during the dusk as he takes his mask off. That one reminded me, frankly, of the imagery of Hitler flying above Nuremberg, with the symbolism of him descending from the skies (from Heaven, if you will) to come down and save Germany singlehandedly.  

A couple of years ago, Michael Moore also came out with an anti-Trump movie, which was a follow-up of sorts to Fahrenheit 911. This one was called Fahrenheit 11/9, and it also was revealing and alarming, with some clips that I was still surprised that Moore managed to get. Indeed, there have been plenty of movies and programs reviewing Trump and his presidency, and what this means for the country, and what kind of threat this might pose to it, and to our democratic traditions in particular.  

So, it cannot be surprising that there is another one out that has made some big waves lately. I already have mentioned the name of the film in the title, but I had not yet seen it. Finally, I recently decided to go ahead and part with the $4.99 to watch the movie, which was highly recommended and which I had not heard anything bad about. It featured psychologists unapologetically examining Trump’s behavior, and outright making comparisons with some of the worst tyrants in modern history particularly the examples of Benito Mussolini and, of course, Adolf Hitler. Comparisons between Trump and Hitler, in particular, have always made me a bit uncomfortable, because it is such an extreme example. After all, such comparisons are often far too lightly made. Remember when everyone was comparing Saddam Hussein to Hitler, with a former president even suggesting that he was the next Hitler? Saddam might have been bad, but he never had anywhere near the kind of power or posed the kind of serious and immediate threat to the entire world that Hitler did. After all, Hitler’s Germany never was defeated in war within weeks, or had a No Fly Zone imposed on it.

Trump is not normal. There is, in fact, nothing normal about this MAGAlomaniac. Nothing normal about his frankly now legendary levels of narcissism, or his clearly anti-democratic leanings, or his transparent lust for power and his obvious willingness to push democratic traditions aside in order to entrench his own power. There is nothing normal about an elected leader of what still remains, for the time being, the world's leading superpower, ranting against detractors with mean-spirited tweets anytime someone displeases him, sometimes at three in the morning. 

One aspect to Trump's rise that feels like it makes sense is that he was effectively a protest vote, in some respects, to the well-oiled machinery that was American politics prior to the 2016 election. That he was effectively a monkey wrench thrown into that machinery, and his rise to the Oval Office marked a clear departure from everything that came before. But one of the people in this movie sums up my own feelings about this. George Conway, the husband of Kelly Ann Conway, a prominent figure in the 2016 Trump campaign and the Trump administration, says in the movie:

"Donald Trump is like a practical joke that got out of hand." 

That feels like the gospel truth. And it is this spirit, or perhaps illusion, of he and his campaign being some kind of harmless practical joke that makes him so dangerous, and a threat to democracy itself. Witness the recent incident where some rabid Trump supporters in Texas, donning pro-Trump flags, went out to a highway and tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road. It seems like something Trump fans would enjoy, get a laugh out of. Almost like a practical joke. The tragedy of it is that this practical joke has become the normal, and this new normal has now become the most serious threat to American democracy and our very liberty and freedom that we as a nation have ever seen.

This movie should be seen by everyone before the election. That is why I feel it is such a shame that the film makers insisted on making sure everyone paid to see it. It is an important statement about just how "Unfit" Trump really is, and they should have somehow found a way to out profits aside in time to allow people to see it and get some exposure as to just how unfit Trump really is, because ultimately, American democracy should not be tripped up by some jokers with a warped sense of humor. The stakes are just too high.

Unfit (2020) | Donald Trump Documentary | Full Movie | Malcolm Nance | George Conway