Trump the narcissist.

I recently spoke with former FBI agent Joe Navarro about Donald Trump. Navarro was one of the FBI’s top profilers, a founding member of their elite Behavioral Analysis Unit, and author of several books on human behavior, including Dangerous Personalities: An FBI Profiler Shows You How to Identify and Protect Yourself from Harmful People.

To be clear, at no time did Navarro diagnose Trump as having a narcissistic or predator personality. He says we should leave formal diagnoses to professionals …

Formal diagnoses, sure, but “narcissist” is also an ordinary vernacular descriptive word. Of course Trump is a narcissist in that sense.

Navarro’s book warns that if a “person has a preponderance of the

The Washington Post a couple of weeks ago noted the wholly unsurprising fact that it’s hard to find good writers to say friendly things about Donald Trump.

As they discovered during the long campaign season, the nation’s newspapers and major digital news sites — the dreaded mainstream media — are facing a shortage of people able, or more likely willing, to write opinion columns supportive of the president-elect.

Major newspapers, from The Washington Post to the New York Times, have struggled to find and publish pro-Trump columns for months. So have regional ones, such as the Des Moines Register and the Arizona Republic, which has a long history of supporting Republican candidates.

Well of course they have. Trump isn’t … Read the rest

Also amusing in Trump: his sweet baby Jesus wishes for us:

#MerryChristmas pic.twitter.com/5GgDmJrGMS

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 25, 2016

Isn’t that heartwarming? He brandishes his tiny fist at us as if he wants to punch us in the face. #MerryChristmas, he explains, festively and piously. #SameToYouDude. #HelloToJesusToo. #ForUntoUsYaddaYadda.… Read the rest

Charles Taylor doesn’t buy the story that’s being pushed, that we “elites” mustn’t judge people who voted for Trump on the grounds that “Trump voters are too disenfranchised or despised or dismissed to be held morally responsible for their choices.”

It’s just that they resent us, the story goes. It’s just that they hate us for looking down on them. We must sympathize with them, for the sake of having a dialogue.

Time was when battered women were told by police or by their priests that they must try not to antagonize their abusive husbands. That is exactly how Americans of color, gay Americans, undocumented immigrants, and women are now being addressed: They’re being told they must respect people

A guy in Florida made some Facebook comment threats against Trump, and got himself arrested.

“I’m just glad Obama didn’t take all our gunz! I see a good use for one now,” Krohn wrote online above a picture of Trump that read, “He’s not my president / He’s an enemy of the state,” agents wrote in court records.

Krohn posted his remarks in a thread of comments related to Trump’s holiday season stay at his Palm Beach home, according to court records.

It was in comments on a post, you see, not a post. They don’t say whether it was his post or not; it would be mildly interesting to know.

Agents said they were able to track Krohn

Is Trump looking to purge the State Department of people and policies that promote women’s rights globally? Or is his team just getting acquainted with those people and policies? Hard to say.

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s transition team asked the State Department this week to submit details of programs and jobs aimed at promoting gender equality, rattling State Department employees concerned that the incoming administration will roll back a cornerstone project of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The one-page memo, a copy of which was provided to The New York Times on Thursday, directed employees to outline “existing programs and activities to promote gender equality, such as ending gender-based violence, promoting women’s participation in economic and political

Trump isn’t so much filling cabinet posts as he is selecting beauty pageant contestants. It’s what he knows.

Donald Trump believes that those who aspire to the most visible spots in his administration should not just be able to do the job, but also look the part.

That’s ironic, isn’t it, because he so thoroughly doesn’t look the part himself. The brassy hair falling down over the jacket collar? The necktie practically reaching his crotch? The mystifying, ludicrous, distracting comb-over? The terrible dye-job? The orange skin? The constant blowfish face? The stupid puppety gestures? The scowls and pouts? He doesn’t look the part. He looks like The Joker.

But that’s not the point, of course. The point is…he should … Read the rest

Oh that whole drain the swamp thing? He didn’t mean it. Or he did, but now he’s bored with it. Or both. It was “cute” but now it’s over – which is just as well, since the swamp is full of mastodons.

Newt Gingrich said Wednesday that Donald Trump’s “drain the swamp” catch phrase was “cute” but that the President-elect now disclaims it.

During an interview with NPR’s “Morning Edition” Wednesday, host Rachel Martin asked if the former House speaker had been “working in the swamp, to use Donald Trump’s language.”

“I’m told he now just disclaims that. He now says it was cute, but he doesn’t want to use it anymore,” Gingrich said, referring to the phrase. “I’d

We were told during the campaign that there was a lot of bad stuff from Trump’s reality tv show The Apprentice, but also that nobody wanted to make it public because contracts and also because Trump is evil. Now we’re being told it again, with maybe a little bit more detail.

The actor Tom Arnold has claimed to have video of Donald Trump using racist language, obscenities and denigrating his own son in outtakes of The Apprentice.

[That is: using racist language and obscenities, and denigrating his own son]

“I have the outtakes to The Apprentice where he says every bad thing ever, every offensive, racist thing ever. It was him sitting in that chair saying the N-word, saying

It takes only seven minutes to turn Alec Baldwin into Donald Trump.

A dusting of Clinique Stay-Matte powder in honey. A hand-stitched wig. Eyebrows glued up into tiny peaks. The rest is left to Alec Baldwin: the puckered lips, a studied lumbering gait and a wariness of humanizing a man he reviles.

The transformation of Mr. Baldwin, an outspoken liberal, into the president-elect, Donald J. Trump, for his running parody on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” entails a tangerine hairpiece and a tricky tightrope walk. It means balancing a veteran actor’s determination to subsume his identity into a character, even as, in his offstage life, he is firm in his belief that the man about to

The Trumps still haven’t grasped the basic norm that they’re not supposed to use the presidency as an excellent chance to make money by selling access to their wonderful selves.

Last week, Eric Trump tried auctioning a coffee date with his sister Ivanka to raise money for a children’s hospital. Now, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. are named as part of a nonprofit venture that offered the chance to rub elbows with their father during inauguration weekend and go hunting or fishing with the sons in exchange for $1 million donations that would go to conservation charities.

It’s a wonder they haven’t set up a tent on 57th street selling lemonade and/or a chance to be grabbed by their daddy.… Read the rest

Another item to be filed under “Terrifying” –

[Part of me wants to turn my back, ignore the whole thing, maybe revert to being a literature nerd…but the rest of me feels the need to know the truth, if only for planning reasons. Stockpile? Find out the lethal dose of something? These questions don’t answer themselves.]

The White House is struggling to prevent a crippling exodus of foreign policy staffers eager to leave before the arrival of the Trump administration, according to current and former officials.

The top level officials in the National Security Council (NSC) are political appointees who have to submit resignations and leave in a normal transition. The rest of the 400 NSC staff are career civil

So another feature of Trump world is that he tweets shit that’s wrong, and that he would know was wrong if he took the security briefings he’s supposed to take. But it’s no biggy, because it’s only China.

Donald Trump launched his Twitter campaign against China’s seizure of a U.S. Navy research submersible last week to great fanfare ― and, as it turns out, hours after the crisis had already been defused.

It’s unclear whether the president-elect or his aides knew that fact ― it would have been included in the intelligence briefing available to him each morning ― before he sent out his misspelled missive of outrage at 7:30 a.m. Saturday.

“China steals United States Navy research drone in