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LYIN’ DON TRUMP explained [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-21
Following is a deep drill into the mind of the President. I know that getting inside LYIN’ DON’s head is a nauseating concept for you. You’ve probably tried it and came out gagging. But I’m going to ask you to do it again. The reason is simple. Knowing the enemy makes him predictable:
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
Sun Tzu
I’ll turn soon to how these insights can be used.
This personality analysis comes from Dan P. McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern. It’s unique. McAdams acknowledges LYIN’ DON’s narcissism and authoritarianism. But he uncovers a deeper, more bizarre characteristic that explains LYIN’ DON TRUMP in a much more fundamental way than before.
According to McAdams, the assumption of psychological research, from Freud to the present, “… is that people create narrative identities for their lives during their adult years—internalized and evolving stories that explain who they are and how they have come to be the unique persons they are becoming.”
“Adults move through life, therefore, with a storied understanding of the reconstructed past and the imagined future. They feel that they are living within the story (as a protagonist) and constructing the story as they live in it (as a narrator, or author). The life story they construct, encompassing many different scenes and plotlines, is part and parcel of who they are.”
But LYIN’ DON TRUMP has NO NARRATIVE IDENTITY.
Again, per McAdams: “He is the episodic man—living forever in the combative moment, striving to win each moment, moment by moment, episode by discrete episode.”
People are puzzled because they believe that the long term effects of Trump’s actions are going to be harmful to the country and even HARMFUL TO HIS OWN LONGTERM INTERESTS. Don’t be fooled. LYIN’ DON TRUMP doesn’t think long term. The future does not exist to him. Nor does the past. His consciousness is confined to NOW and RIGHT NOW.
His life is a series of episodes. He has no inner story.
Trump said on the morning of June 18 that he hadn't yet decided whether to bomb Iran.
“I may do it. I may not do it,” he told reporters. “Nobody knows what I'm going to do.” It may be the truest statement he ever made in his life. Nobody CAN KNOW what he might do at any given time, because, for him, the future does not exist.
What are the implications of LYIN’ DON TRUMP’s episodic personality?
His supporters believe every word he utters.
“Trump’s total embrace of the moment has always worked to his advantage, both in business and politics. For instance, his episodic nature gives him tremendous authenticity in the eyes of his millions of devoted fans. When they encounter Trump at a rally or watch him at a news conference, they know that he is ALL HERE NOW. He is not hiding anything. He is not planning the future or trying to stay consistent with the past. Even if every sentence that comes out of his mouth is a falsehood, he is telling it the way it is right now, in the moment…”
His episodic life, with no future and no past, PREVENTS LIES. Neither the past nor the future are real. How can you lie about the past if it doesn’t exist, and if there’s no future that will check up on you? “…for Trump, truth is episodic, as is life more generally.”
My editorial comment: For Lyin’ Don, THE WHOLE CONCEPT OF TRUTH ITSELF DOESN’T EXIST. It’s the difference between an empty box and no box at all. Truth for him consists only of what he can convince you to swallow.
Take-away: We have to make him pay for his lies. When Lyin’ Don Trump lies, call him out! He has no idea what the truth is, but he understands his own best interest. His tweets, executive orders, and announcements are lies. They are NOT falsehoods, misstatements, or inaccuracies. CALL THEM LIES. And hold the media accountable, too. Tell your politicians to call him out, as well
His relationships are all transactional. If you’re standing in front of LYIN’ DON, you exist only in the here and now. Whatever deal you strike makes no sense to him unless it benefits him now.
Take-away: Leave behind all your experience with other people that each interaction builds your credibility and expertise as a platform for future relationships. For LYIN’ DON, it’s what he can extract out of you now. And he expects no more from you. For example, whatever Putin has on LYIN’ DON must still apply, because Lyin’ Don still sucks up to him.
LYIN’ DON has no “plan”. Since the episodic man has no past and no future, only the present exists. That’s not to say that the people around him don’t have plans. They certainly do, and each will try to influence him based upon their own vision of the future. But Trump will always make the final decision. And that decision will be based only on the present.
Take-away: Don’t waste time trying to figure out what his “long term plan” is.
LYIN’ DON is a “stable genius”. He has never made a mistake. He is perfect. Since every day is simply a repeat of the previous day’s struggle, improvement and learning are unnecessary.
“No one respects women more than me. No one reads the Bible more than me.”
“There’s nobody that’s done so much for equality as I have.”
“There’s nobody who feels more strongly about women’s health issues.”
“Nobody knows more about taxes than me, maybe in the history of the world.”
Take-away: Don’t expect him to learn from experience.
Rule of law does not exist for LYIN’ DON. For the rest of us, the very concept of rule-of-law depends on continuity. Laws are constant over time until they are changed. And there is even a law that governs how laws are changed. For the episodic man there is only the here and now. Law cannot exist in a universe that starts from scratch every day.
Take-away: The episodic man has no use for the predictability that laws provide. For him, laws just get in the way. Expect him to strip away all laws, because for him, the law is what he says it is today.
LYIN’ DON never makes any sense. He’s 79 years old, fat, and stumbles around. Is he getting senile? McAdams: “This is not about dementia, for Trump has always lived his life this way…”
Take-away: When he says crazy things, don’t attribute it to dementia. His universe is completely different than yours; always has been. Get used to the fact that we are going to have to beat him at the polls.
At this point in their careers, most presidents begin to think about their legacy. They implement policies for which they will be remembered and revered long into the future.
Take-away: For LYIN’ DON TRUMP, the future does not exist. He will never plan for his legacy.
Failure can triumph. Trump’s deportation plan is a failure. Obama deported far more, and yet MAGA still loves LYIN’ DON.
Take-away: Don’t wallow in glee when LYIN’ DON’s initiatives fail. He doesn’t care whether his actions actually deliver on his stated goals in the FUTURE. He cares only about perceptions of the goal NOW. Even if the goals are not achieved, his real goal (making his base believe that he’s fighting for them) is achieved NOW.
Now you know why LYIN’ DON lies endlessly and what to do when he lies; why his speeches consist of nothing but disconnected thoughts and not to wait for dementia to rob him of logic; why laws just get in his way and to expect even less respect in the future; why his incompetence prevails despite failures... His appearance on the outside is simply a reflection of his internal construction.
Don’t spend any effort searching for hidden subtlety within LYIN’ DON TRUMP. It does not exist. And he CANNOT EVER CHANGE. But his episodic brain gives him a hard-wired connection to the emotions of his supporters. Don’t underestimate him.
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