It’s been a one-two punch of John Bolton’s blockbuster tell-all book released last week highlighting incredible stories about Donald Trump’s ineptitude and crazed handling of internal policy matters now combined with the release to the media this week of niece Mary Trump’s even more damning account of life growing up around her deranged and cruel uncle.

These have been highlighted by Trump’s angry, strident defense of the Confederacy’s pro-slavery insurgency against the United States and even more stunning defense of the deadly Covid-19 coronavirus that, due to his insanity, has cost the lives of over 130,000 U.S. citizens under his watch.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been right calling Trump a “co-conspirator” with the virus in its surging assault on the U.S. population far exceeding anything happening elsewhere in the world. Trump’s lunatic insistence that the virus be ignored in favor of restarting the economy is not only foolish on its face (the more the virus spreads, the less likely anyone will be inclined to step out to fuel a recovery), but conspires with the virus to kill and maim Americans by the hundreds of thousands.

The concept of hell was developed for people like Donald Trump. His self-obsessed cruelty and indifference to the suffering of those under his non-care will assure, if there is any justice in this universe (and there most certainly is), the worst of outcomes for this tortured soul. Since he apparently doesn’t sleep like the rest of us, he doesn’t have the benefit of the ghastly ghosts from Dickens’ Christmas Carol to stun him into repentance, either. His only hope is to never die elst his wailing soul be trapped in a most horrid place to grievously suffer forever.

Tens of thousands of copies of niece Mary Trump’s book, “Too Much — Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” were overnighted to journalists across America this week. The best reporters among them, like Rachel Maddow of MSNBC, having read it from cover to cover before devoting her one-hour show to its contents Tuesday, have already painted a landscape of horror for millions of us concerning the matters that took place in the Trump home in Queens, New York, known as The House, where the author grew up with the sorry current President.
Sad to say that far too much of the reporting about this book, crafted as it was with the help of top-drawer New York Times reporters and the author herself being a trained and certified expert in matters psychological, has already been pigeonholed into discrete facts, like Trump’s getting someone else to take his SATs for him and patterns of cheating on real estate deals and the undervaluation of his father’s estate.

This kind of reporting misses by so much the giant proverbial “elephant in the room,” and can be blamed a lot for how Trump got elected in the first place, how the Mueller Report was buried, and how Trump could get re-elected. It throws out discrete foils that Trump can then elevate and tamp down one by one, reducing the entire thing into a useless and frustrating “Yes you did,” “No I didn’t” debate.

The big picture on this is the entirety of the book taken as a whole, inclusive of its author and settings.

That picture speaks to the fact that this man is totally insane. He is stark raving mad not in a political or partisan sense, but clinically. He should be locked away in an insane asylum, if such things still exist, in a padded cell.
Works like Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” have denigrated the value of protecting society from the truly insane in this postmodern, post-truth age, and we see it in the repudiation of science and truth that’s contributed so much to the current state of affairs.

Trump is a clinically-ill sociopath. His condition is described in detail in the professional psychiatric literature, and it is a frightening diagnosis. There is very little chance for a cure, the literature shows. Such persons who lie, cheat, hurt others and totally lack empathy can only be contained, not cured.

Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com.