Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "NowThis Impact" channel.

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  14. In her new book, Trump's niece says Trump was scarred by his father and developed habits of lying and self-deception that shadowed him into the White House. "This is far beyond garden-variety narcissism," Mary Trump writes in her book. "Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be," she writes. "In Donald's mind, even acknowledging an inevitable threat would indicate weakness. Taking responsibility would open him up to blame. Being a hero – being good – is impossible for him," she writes in the book. Mary Trump, a 55-year-old psychologist, blames Trump's father for giving Donald his bad habits. Fred Trump Sr was a cold and forbidding patriarch who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps – demanding Trump to follow less-than-scrupulous real estate practices and eventually propping him up if his own initiatives failed. "When things turned south in the late 1980s, Fred could no longer separate himself from his son's brutal ineptitude; the father had no choice but to stay invested," Mary Trump writes. "His monster had been set free." "The people with access to him are weaker than Donald is, more craven, but just as desperate. Their futures are directly dependent on his success and favor," she said. "Although more powerful people put Donald into the institutions that have shielded him since the very beginning, it's people weaker than he is who are keeping him there." Putin, Kim Jong Un and Mitch McConnell, "all whom bear more than a passing psychological resemblance to Fred," recognized after the election that Donald Trump's personal history and personality flaws made him vulnerable to manipulation, Mary Trump writes. "His pathologies have rendered him so simple-minded that it takes nothing more than repeating to him the things he says to and about himself dozens of times a day – he's the smartest, the greatest, the best – to get him to do whatever they want, whether it's imprisoning children in concentration camps, betraying allies, implementing economy-crushing tax cuts, or degrading every institution that's contributed to the United States' rise and the flourishing of liberal democracy." Trump's initial response to the coronavirus "underscores his need to minimize negativity at all costs," Mary Trump writes. "Fear – the equivalent of weakness in our family – is as unacceptable to him now as it was when he was three years old," she said. She points to Gov. Cuomo's response to his state's outbreak of COVID-19 cases as an example of "real leadership," further revealing the president as a "petty, pathetic little man – ignorant, incapable, out of his depth, and lost to his own delusional spin." At the end, Mary Trump writes "Donald isn't really the problem after all" – it is his enablers, from his father to the celebrity media to the congressional Republicans who acquitted him of impeachment. "This is the end result of Donald's having continually been given a pass and rewarded not just for his failures but for his transgressions – against tradition, against decency, against the law, and against fellow human beings," she writes.
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  24. "I have a chapter in the book on malignant narcissism as a characteristic of destructive cult leaders. These are people who have a deep need for grandiosity, to be the center of attention, who need to control others, and who lack empathy and lie without hesitation. These are psychological traits perfectly attuned to manipulation and projection. But the malignant part is about sociopathic tendencies. Almost every cult leader thinks he’s above the law, which is why he’s allowed to persecute and harass or harm anyone he wants. When someone really believes this, they can rationalize all kinds of destructive behavior. I began this book with the assumption that Trump is a malignant narcissist. Actually, watching him and listening to him reminded me of Sun Myung Moon, the leader of the cult I joined in college, in that both have a kind of God complex where they’re the only one with the answers, the only one who can fix things. Moon was going to create a theocracy and Trump was going to “drain the swamp.” But the way they carry themselves is similar. But what really made me think of Trump as a cult was the way the groups who supported him were behaving, especially religious groups who believed that God had chosen Trump or was using Trump. There are actual pro-Trump religious groups, like the New Apostolic Reformation, whose leaders were saying, “We’re of God. The rest of the world is of Satan, and we need to follow our chosen leaders who are connected to God.” There was this blind-faith aspect to the whole thing and an unwillingness to look at any inconvenient facts. That’s all very cult-like. The bottom line is that I see very sophisticated mind-control techniques being used through the media, through religious broadcasters and radio talk-show hosts. It’s a black-and-white, all-or-nothing, good-versus-evil, authoritarian view of reality that is mostly fear-based. And there’s a deliberate focus on denying facts in order to protect the image of the leader." --Steven Hassan, The Cult of Trump
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  26. Republican campaign finance reports, which are, available to the public, show connections between a group of wealthy donors with ties to Russia and their political contributions to Trump and a number of top Republican leaders. And thanks to changes in campaign finance laws, the political contributions are legal. Bottom line,  our campaign finance laws are now a threat to our country... Len Blavatnik, is a dual U.S.-U.K. citizen and one of the largest donors to GOP political action committees in the 2015-16 election cycle. Blavatnik's family emigrated to the U.S. in the late '70s from the the Soviet Union and he returned to Russia when the Soviet Union began to collapse in the late '80s. In 2015-16, Blavatnik's political contributions soared as he pumped $6.35 million into GOP political action committees, with millions of dollars going to top Republican leaders including Moscow Mitch, Rubio and Lindsey "Two-faced" Graham. Oleg Deripaska is said to be one of Putin's favorite oligarchs, and he is founder and majority shareholder of Russia's Rusal, the second-largest aluminum company in the world. Blavatnik holds a stake in Rusal with a business partner. Nearly 4% of Deripaska's stake in Rusal is owned by Putin's state-controlled bank, VTB, which is currently under U.S. sanctions. VTB was exposed in the Panama Papers in 2016 for facilitating the flow of billions of dollars to offshore companies linked to Putin. We already know that Manafort, Trump's former campaign manager, began collecting $10 million a year in 2006 from Deripaska to advance Putin's interests with Western governments. Deripaska's name turned up again in an email handed over to Mueller's team by Manafort's attorneys. In the email dated July 7, 2016, just two weeks before Trump accepted the Republican nomination, Manafort asked an overseas intermediary to pass a message on to Deripaska: "If he Deripaska needs private briefings, tell him we can accommodate." Viktor Vekselberg is one of the 10 richest men in Russia. He and long-time business partner Blavatnik hold a 20.5 percent stake in Rusal. Vekselberg has connections to at least two Americans who made significant GOP campaign contributions during the last cycle.  Andrew Intrater, is Vekselberg's cousin. He is also chief executive of Columbus Nova, Renova's U.S. investment arm located in NY.  in January 2017 he contributed $250,000 to Trump's Inaugural Committee. His six-figure gift bought him special access to a dinner billed as "an intimate policy discussion with select cabinet appointees,"  Simon Kukes is an oil magnate who has something in common with Intrater. From 1998 to 2003, he worked for Vekselberg and Blavatnik as chief executive of TNK. In 2016, Kukes contributed a total of $283,000, much of it to the Trump Victory Fund.  In total, Blavatnik, Intrater, and Kukes made $10.4 million in political contributions from the start of the 2015-16 election cycle through September 2017, and 99 percent of their contributions went to Republicans. The common denominator that connects the men is their association with Vekselberg. Moscow Mitch knew from receiving intelligence briefings in 2016 that our electoral process was under attack by the Russians. Two weeks after the Dept of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement in October 2016 that the Russian government had directed the effort to interfere in our electoral process, Moscow Mitch's PAC accepted a $1 million donation from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings. The PAC took another $1 million from Blavatnik's AI-Altep Holdings on March 30, 2017, just 10 days after Comey publicly testified before the House Intelligence Committee about Russia's interference in the election. It's safe to say that Trump and the GOP have been bought and paid for with Russian money. It's why repubicans are fighting so hard to defend him instead of the Constitution. It's also why Republicans have been repeating the exact same lies and propaganda of the Russian government and Russian security services like the GRU.
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  37. When it comes to Trump, I'll take the word of Trump's own sister, who has known him his entire life?  She knows him better, and longer, than anyone alive today. And if she wouldn't support him as president, why on earth should anyone else? In the released audio of Trump’s sister Maryanne Trump Barry, she describes Trump as being among other things, unprepared, a brat, and cruel.  “It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel,” Barry told her niece. “All he wants to do is appeal to his base,” Barry said. “He has no principles. None. None. And his base, I mean my God, if you were a religious person, you want to help people. Not do this.”  Trump's sister was aghast at how he operated as president. “His god-d tweets and lying, oh my God,” she said. “I’m talking too freely, but you know. The change of stories. The lack of preparation. The lying. Holy s***. What they’re doing with kids at the border." Trump's sister also explained how ”She didn’t know of anything Donald had ever accomplished on his own, but noted that “he has five bankruptcies” which he achieved all by himself."  “You CAN'T trust him,” she added. She also made it clear that she was still upset by how Trump chose to celebrate himself at their father’s funeral in 1999. "During that ceremony, Donald spoke more about his own accomplishments than his father’s life," Maryanne said.. “Donald was the only one who didn’t speak about Dad,” she said. She told Mary that “I don’t want any of my siblings to speak at my funeral. And that’s all about Donald and what he did at Dad’s funeral. I don’t know. It was all about him.” Only a f○○l would ignore what Trump's own sister says about him.
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