Trump pissed off a lot of musicians.

Quite a few bands whose music has been used along Donald Trump’s campaign trail have made their unhappiness very public: The O’Jays. The surviving members of Queen. George Harrison‘s estate. Adele. Earth, Wind & Fire. REM’s Michael Stipe. The Turtles. Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler (though he said his objection was financial, not ideological). Neil Young (though he, like Tyler, eventually said he was concerned about money and permission). And perhaps most famously now, The Rolling Stones — more on them later.

Legally, however, the GOP and the Trump campaign can use all those songs, as Melinda Newman (a former colleague of mine at Billboard) explained in Forbes this week, as long as the rights holders are paid: “The sad truth is for many artists, they can not keep their songs from being used in this context even if they vehemently disagree with the politician who is using the song.”

They can keep their music out of paid political advertising, but this is not that.

As the balloons and confetti (eventually) began to rain down last night at the Quicken Loans arena, however, rock ‘n’ roll had the last word on Trump — or maybe exactly the inverse happened. The evening’s last musical selection was the Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Commenters on Twitter last night made hay of the seeming disconnects in meaning between the song and the convention’s spectacle of unity. But Trump has long used that tune in particular as one of his campaign’s anthems, despite the band’s fury and a request the band sent to the GOP candidate’s team earlier this year to stop using it.

No one from the Trump campaign has explained exactly why “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” has become such a staple selection at his events — at one rally in Carmel, Ind. back in May, for example, the song was played at least four times at that single campaign stop.

He’s probably taunting us. We want a world where Trump is just a loud, vulgar real-estate profiteer. We’re Losers, and he’s taunting us.

James Hamblin at the Atlantic has more details about Trump the man. I figure everybody should keep recycling them non-stop so that nobody will forget them.

Hamblin focuses on the question whether Trump is really a psychopath, and says let’s talk about NPD instead.

One psychologist, Ben Michaelis, called Trump “textbook Narcissistic Personality Disorder.” Psychologist George Simon called Trump “so classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example of his characteristics.”

Then he says no actually let’s talk about Antisocial Personality Disorder.

According to the DSM, Antisocial Personality Disorder should be diagnosed in a person who meets two criteria about the way they function in the world, and criteria about their personal traits. In the realm of the latter, the person must also demonstrate two other traits: antagonism and disinhibition.

That certainly fits Trump well, doesn’t it. That is in fact why he’s such a terrifying candidate.

As one recent example, Fox News debate moderator Megyn Kelly said that she “may have overestimated his anger management skills” when, in response to perceived unfair questioning, Trump called her a “bimbo” with “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

In a much more prolonged example, writer McKay Coppins wrote a profile of Trump in which he called Mar-a-Lago a “nice, if slightly dated, hotel,” and incurred years of backlash. “He had tweeted about me frequently in the weeks following its publication—often at odd hours, sometimes multiple times a day—denouncing me as a “dishonest slob” and “true garbage with no credibility,” Coppins recalls. “For two years, Trump continued to rant about how I’m a scumbag, or a loser, or ‘just another phony guy.’”

And that is what a lot of people want to see in the White House – a schoolyard bully writ large.

Then there’s lying, callousness, impulsivity, irresponsibility – all terrible qualities for a president, surely. He aces them all, according to Hamblin.

The other domain of Antisocial Personality Disorder is personality functioning, which involves two criteria. First, either one of the following:

Identity: Ego-centrism; self-esteem derived from personal gain, power, or pleasure.

Self-direction: Goal-setting based on personal gratification; absence of prosocial internal standards associated with failure to conform to lawful or culturally normative ethical behavior.

Trump is rather candid about these points. He is rich and powerful, and his business endeavors are primarily undertaken to achieve that end. “I don’t lose! I’ve never been a loser. I like to win!”

And that’s how he sees the world – as winners and losers, with the winners deserving all the spoils and the losers deserving poverty, contempt, and banishment.

Then there’s dominance.

Using dominance or intimidation to control others, though, shows up time and again in Trump’s history. He has done this particularly to journalists, and entire newspapers and magazines. In one incident, he sent The New York Times’ Gail Collins a copy of her column, having circled her photo and scrawled “The Face of a Dog!”

That should be all anyone needs to know about him. Socially he’s another Milo Yiannopoulos, and he shouldn’t be allowed within a thousand miles of any political office.

Evan Osnos at the New Yorker says the scary thing about the Republican convention is that the Republican party seems to have fallen into line behind this terrible terrible man.

Four years after the previous Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, told delegates that “we are a nation of immigrants,” Trump connected killings of police officers, misperceptions of immigration levels, and distorted anecdotes about crime in order to employ the classic technology of the demagogue: he created a grave national threat that only he can solve. His opponent, he said, promises “mass amnesty, mass immigration, and mass lawlessness. Her plan will overwhelm your schools, your hospitals.”

For moderate Republicans, the Convention cemented a bewildering transformation at the top of their Party. There was no clamorous showdown, as some had predicted. The Party slid gently into a new incarnation.

We’re doomed.

People with more determination to look straight at unpleasant things than I have watched Trump’s acceptance speech last night, and reported that it was pure fascism, which by that time surprised no one.

The Times says about it:

In the most consequential speech of his life, delivered 401 days into his improbable run for the White House, Mr. Trump sounded much like the unreflective man who had started it with an escalator ride in the lobby of Trump Tower: He conjured up chaos and promised overnight solutions.

To an electorate that remains anxious about his demeanor, his honesty and his character, Mr. Trump offered no acknowledgment, no rebuttal, no explanation.

His demeanor, his honesty, his character and his politics. Let’s not leave that part out, Times. He has a form of politics, and we remain “anxious” about it, which is the understatement of the decade. He has the politics of conjuring up chaos and promising overnight solutions – the politics of racism and hatred and fear, the politics of macho contempt for women and macho love of violent rhetoric.

Inside the Quicken Loans Arena, a thicket of American flags behind him, he portrayed himself, over and over, as an almost messianic figure prepared to rescue the country from the ills of urban crime, illegal immigration and global terrorism.

“I alone,” he said, “can fix it.”

The “Quicken Loans Arena” is a nice touch. Profit is everything, human needs are for losers.

“I alone,” he said, “can fix it.”

But Mr. Trump made no real case for his qualifications to lead the world’s largest economy and strongest military. He is, he said, a very successful man who knows how to make it all better.

Why would that be, exactly? Why would knowing how to gouge out staggering amounts of money from building super-expensive real estate mean he knows how to “fix” the things he identifies as problems or any other national problems? Bernie Madoff built himself a huge fortune too, until the Ponzi scheme collapsed; so what?

The rest of the Times piece is just the same stupid shit Adam Gopnik excoriated in the New Yorker: analysis of what bad campaign strategy it was.

John Cassidy at the New Yorker is not so interested in giving helpful advice to Trump on how to campaign better:

As all would-be authoritarians do, Trump sought to portray himself as the defender of the little guy. “I have visited the laid-off factory workers and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals,” he said. “These are people who work hard but no longer have a voice. I am your voice.” And again, toward the end, he used the same phrase after a riff on Clinton’s “I’m with her” slogan. “My pledge reads, ‘I’m with you, the American people. I am your voice,’ ” he said.

Right. The billionaire builder of expensive Manhattan towers is the voice of the working class. You bet.

I was standing next to the delegations from New York and Florida, both of which were Trump strongholds during the Republican primaries. The portions of the speech that received the loudest cheers were the most nativist and controversial bits. When he said, “We don’t want them in our country,” referring to people from Muslim nations with histories of terrorism problems, whom he would bar from the United States, he got perhaps the loudest cheer of the night. And when he said, “We are going to be considerate and compassionate to everyone, but my greatest compassion will be for our own struggling citizens,” the chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” were so vigorous that he joined in and gave the chanters a quick thumbs-up.

White people! White people!

Ultimately, Trump’s motivation doesn’t matter very much. The platform that he is running on is divisive and dangerous, and, despite the consensus in the media and political worlds that he is destined to be defeated, it still isn’t entirely clear that his strategy won’t work. After Trump had finished, I asked Congressman John Mica, who represents a district just north of Orlando, and who was standing with the Florida delegation, what he thought of the speech. “He ticked all the boxes,” Mica replied. “I thought he was great.” But weren’t Trump’s words perhaps too dark to appeal to the country at large? Mica thought not. “The emphasis on safety and security,” he said. “I think that is a message that will resonate.”

And if it does we’ll all be in deep deep shit.

Adam Gopnik pointed out a week ago how shockingly normalized Trump is being, by Republicans and by the media.

What is genuinely alarming is the urge, however human it may be, to normalize the abnormal by turning toward emotions and attitudes that are familiar. To their great credit, the editors of most of the leading conservative publications in America have recognized Trump for what he is, and have opposed his rise to power. Yet the habit of hatred is so ingrained in their psyches that even those who recognize at some level that Trump is a horror, when given the dangling bait of another chance to hate Hillary still leap at it, insisting on her “criminality” at the very moment when it’s officially rejected, and attempting to equate this normal politician with an abnormal threat to political life itself. They do this, in part, to placate their readership. In the so-called mainstream (call it liberal) media, meanwhile, the election is treated with blithe inconsequence, as another occasion for strategy-weighing. The Times, to take one example, ran a front-page analysis criticizing Trump for being insufficiently able to exploit a political opening given by the investigation into Clinton’s e-mail, with the complaint seeming to be that Trump just isn’t clever enough to give us a good fight—to be the fun opponent we want. If only he had some more skill at this! While the habits of hatred get the better of the right, the habits of self-approval through the fiction of being above it all contaminate the center.

Not to mention the center (and the media) passion for the political contest, as if it were another episode of MasterChef.

As I have written before, to call him a fascist of some variety is simply to use a historical label that fits. The arguments about whether he meets every point in some static fascism matrix show a misunderstanding of what that ideology involves. It is the essence of fascism to have no single fixed form—an attenuated form of nationalism in its basic nature, it naturally takes on the colors and practices of each nation it infects. In Italy, it is bombastic and neoclassical in form; in Spain, Catholic and religious; in Germany, violent and romantic. It took forms still crazier and more feverishly sinister, if one can imagine, in Romania, whereas under Oswald Mosley, in England, its manner was predictably paternalistic and aristocratic. It is no surprise that the American face of fascism would take on the forms of celebrity television and the casino greeter’s come-on, since that is as much our symbolic scene as nostalgic re-creations of Roman splendors once were Italy’s.

What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to its enemies, at home and abroad; the worship of power wherever it appears and whoever holds it; contempt for the rule of law and for reason; unashamed employment of repeated lies as a rhetorical strategy; and a promise of vengeance for those who feel themselves disempowered by history. It promises to turn back time and take no prisoners. That it can appeal to those who do not understand its consequences is doubtless true. But the first job of those who do understand is to state what those consequences invariably are. Those who think that the underlying institutions of American government are immunized against it fail to understand history. In every historical situation where a leader of Trump’s kind comes to power, normal safeguards collapse. Ours are older and therefore stronger? Watching the rapid collapse of the Republican Party is not an encouraging rehearsal. Donald Trump has a chance to seize power.

He’s succeeded this far – why should we think he won’t continue?

The guy who ghost-wrote Trump’s The Art of the Deal is regretting having done so. He regrets having helped shape the Trump image that has brought him so terrifyingly far.

But the prospect of President Trump terrified him. It wasn’t because of Trump’s ideology—Schwartz doubted that he had one. The problem was Trump’s personality, which he considered pathologically impulsive and self-centered.

Schwartz thought about publishing an article describing his reservations about Trump, but he hesitated, knowing that, since he’d cashed in on the flattering “Art of the Deal,” his credibility and his motives would be seen as suspect. Yet watching the campaign was excruciating. Schwartz decided that if he kept mum and Trump was elected he’d never forgive himself. In June, he agreed to break his silence and give his first candid interview about the Trump he got to know while acting as his Boswell.

“I put lipstick on a pig,” he said. “I feel a deep sense of remorse that I contributed to presenting Trump in a way that brought him wider attention and made him more appealing than he is.” He went on, “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.”

If he were writing “The Art of the Deal” today, Schwartz said, it would be a very different book with a very different title. Asked what he would call it, he answered, “The Sociopath.”

So, that’s cheerful.

He had qualms about doing the book, but he needed money.

The book turned out to be harder to write than he expected, because Trump has a tiny tiny tiny

attention span. He couldn’t talk about his childhood at any length because he got bored and twitchy.

Week after week, the pattern repeated itself. Schwartz tried to limit the sessions to smaller increments of time, but Trump’s contributions remained oddly truncated and superficial.

“Trump has been written about a thousand ways from Sunday, but this fundamental aspect of who he is doesn’t seem to be fully understood,” Schwartz told me. “It’s implicit in a lot of what people write, but it’s never explicit—or, at least, I haven’t seen it. And that is that it’s impossible to keep him focussed on any topic, other than his own self-aggrandizement, for more than a few minutes, and even then . . . ” Schwartz trailed off, shaking his head in amazement. He regards Trump’s inability to concentrate as alarming in a Presidential candidate. “If he had to be briefed on a crisis in the Situation Room, it’s impossible to imagine him paying attention over a long period of time,” he said.

Oh well. It’s only the planet.

This year, Schwartz has heard some argue that there must be a more thoughtful and nuanced version of Donald Trump that he is keeping in reserve for after the campaign. “There isn’t,” Schwartz insists. “There is no private Trump.” This is not a matter of hindsight. While working on “The Art of the Deal,” Schwartz kept a journal in which he expressed his amazement at Trump’s personality, writing that Trump seemed driven entirely by a need for public attention. “All he is is ‘stomp, stomp, stomp’—recognition from outside, bigger, more, a whole series of things that go nowhere in particular,” he observed, on October 21, 1986.

Then there’s a section about how much Trump lies, and how cheerful he is about it – which makes him a psychopath.

In his journal, Schwartz wrote, “Trump stands for many of the things I abhor: his willingness to run over people, the gaudy, tacky, gigantic obsessions, the absolute lack of interest in anything beyond power and money.” Looking back at the text now, Schwartz says, “I created a character far more winning than Trump actually is.” The first line of the book is an example. “I don’t do it for the money,” Trump declares. “I’ve got enough, much more than I’ll ever need. I do it to do it. Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” Schwartz now laughs at this depiction of Trump as a devoted artisan. “Of coursehe’s in it for the money,” he said. “One of the most deep and basic needs he has is to prove that ‘I’m richer than you.’ ” As for the idea that making deals is a form of poetry, Schwartz says, “He was incapable of saying something like that—it wouldn’t even be in his vocabulary.” He saw Trump as driven not by a pure love of dealmaking but by an insatiable hunger for “money, praise, and celebrity.” Often, after spending the day with Trump, and watching him pile one hugely expensive project atop the next, like a circus performer spinning plates, Schwartz would go home and tell his wife, “He’s a living black hole!”

No doubt the presidency thing is more of the same. I’ve never thought it was anything else.

Schwartz told me that Trump’s need for attention is “completely compulsive,” and that his bid for the Presidency is part of a continuum. “He’s managed to keep increasing the dose for forty years,” Schwartz said. After he’d spent decades as a tabloid titan, “the only thing left was running for President. If he could run for emperor of the world, he would.”

That’s what I mean.

Schwartz told me that he has decided to pledge all royalties from sales of “The Art of the Deal” in 2016 to pointedly chosen charities: the National Immigration Law Center, Human Rights Watch, the Center for the Victims of Torture, the National Immigration Forum, and the Tahirih Justice Center. He doesn’t feel that the gesture absolves him. “I’ll carry this until the end of my life,” he said. “There’s no righting it. But I like the idea that, the more copies that ‘The Art of the Deal’ sells, the more money I can donate to the people whose rights Trump seeks to abridge.”

Be careful what you ghost-write.