Friends of Padre Steve’s World,
I’ve been back in the United States for a bit over three full days. Over the past two weeks I kept up with events in the United States while traveling in Germany and was spared the real time 24-7 coverage of the the soullessness, callousness, and incompetence of President Trump and his administration to real world crises.
However, over the weekend I was blown away by the President’s response to the desperation of the people of Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands, all American citizens, following Hurricane Irma and then Maria. As I have seen the President deal with the crisis I can only hope that Otto Von Bismarck was right when he said “God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America.” If he doesn’t then we are doomed because the sociopathic soullessness and incompetence of the President is unmatched by any of his 44 predecessors. Even the most sociopathic of them like Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk were hard working and competent, while the most incompetent Presidents had at least some redeemable qualities. But President Trump appears to be not only a sociopath, but lazy and incompetent too.
For the first time in his nine months in office we have seen this President deal with a crisis not of his making in real time, and it has not been pretty. In fact it is terrifying. As the storm hit the President went golfing at took to twitter to chastise NFL players and team owners about kneeling during the national anthem. For four days after declaring a state of emergency the President and the administration did nothing.
Not only did the administration not proactively prepare for a disaster that they knew was coming, they delayed the response by days as the President praised his supposed actions to help while doing nothing. When the Mayor of San Juan confronted him the President went on the attack because how dare she criticize him. The President blamed he government and people of Puerto Rico for what was going on even though the island is devastated, 90% of the island is without electricity, 90% of people have no cell-phone service, fuel is running out, over half of the island has no potable water; ports and airports are heavily damaged, many people have no homes left standing, while many roads, bridges, and other are critical infrastructure are damaged or destroyed. Army National Guardsmen and Reservists mobilized to help are in terrible shape. Not only are their families struggling, but the storm means that their bases and armories are damaged, they lack fuel for their vehicles, they are dealing with knocked out communications networks, and have little support from any higher echelons.
Likewise, the are few supplies, or equipment for the people devastated by the storm to even begin a recovery operation, even as the President demeans them and their political officials from the safety of his golf course while imputing to them motives which make him the victim while saying that Puerto Ricans are not doing enough for themselves. From his golf course the President tweeted: “They want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort.” Frankly, they are doing everything they can for themselves, but they don’t have what they need to do it, the island is in ruins, the infrastructure devastated, and supplies in short supply.
The President shows no concern for the millions of people struggling amid the ruins of their community, without much outside help, following a massive natural disaster which hat it hit anywhere on the American East Coast or Gulf Coast would be getting far more attention from the government and the media. The problem for Puerto Rico is that most of its citizens, though Americans, are not White.
Likewise, while this was going on it was revealed that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was communicating directly with North Korea in order to avert a potential nuclear war, to which the President took to twitter to shame his chief diplomat saying that Tillerson was “wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man.” And “Save your energy, Rex, we’ll do what has to be done.” Of course this signaling to all that the President either thinks that threats of war will force Kim Jung Un to back down or that he really wants a war with North Korea. Sadly, regardless of whether the President is using the threat of force as a tool to enforce his will on North Korea, or whether he really wants war, the end result will likely be a war that devastates much of the region, causes millions of casualties, including thousands or even tens of thousands American lives, and possibly even the nuclear destruction of American cities.
Sadly, this is the behavior of a sociopath. The President demonstrates on a daily basis the characteristics of a sociopath listed in the DSM-V. The President, a sociopath feels no empathy, no emotion. He is unencumbered by feelings such as fear, anxiety, stress, depression, remorse, guilt, caring, and love. Gustave Gilbert, who served as an U.S. Army Psychologist to the major Nazi War Criminals at Nuremberg noted:
“In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trails 1945-1949) I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
Yes, the response of the administration is not merely incompetent, but it is sociopathic, and being directed by a man who exhibits enough of the clinical clinical criteria to be judged the Sociopath in Chief. We can only hope that the Iron Chancellor was right about the providence that protects this country, because if he wasn’t right we are in big trouble.
So until tomorrow,
Peace,
Padre Steve+
The Inglorius Padre Steve's World 