One Sociopath Can Make a Difference

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari.)

"We stumble and we do not understand.

You only saw your future bigly planned,

And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,

And in each other's dearest ways we stand,

And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind." -Charles Hamilton Sorley, "To Germany"

As the ever scandal-hungry United States breathlessly awaits the next tell-all book about Putin's Vice President, the one written by Mary Trump (which promises to be a bit more than just the usual salacious bill of fare, as Dr. Trump is a psychologist who is uniquely positioned to psychoanalyze her own uncle), another one dropped just today. That would be NBC and MSNBC political journalist Jacob Soboroff's Separated: Inside an American Tragedy. Thanks to a big boost from Rachel Maddow last night, it debuted at four ticks beneath Dr. Trump's book which is already at number one on Amazon.

     Mr. Soboroff's book as you can tell by the title, is about the illegal child separation policy pursued in secret by the Trump administration and one of the overarching questions in this book is, If separating children from their parents just seeking asylum was supposed to be a deterrent to keep them from coming here, then why keep it a secret?

     The first paragraph in the foreword is,

In June 2018, Donald Trump’s most notorious decision as president had secretly been in effect for months before most Americans became aware of the astonishing inhumanity being perpetrated by their own government.

     Then, as now to any halfway keen student of history, comparisons had been swiftly drawn between the Trump administration keeping us in the dark of the family separation policy at the border (which pointedly ignored the Flores Rule) with Hitler and the Third Reich keeping from the German people outside the inner circle of the Nazi Party the reality that they were running death camps exterminating Jews and other so-called enemies in Eastern Europe in their name. Indeed, the German people were by and large shocked when the news came out in 1946 during the Nuremberg Trials.
    This is part and parcel to all authoritarian dictatorships and the United States of America, the cradle of democracy, the Great Experiment, had proved it was not immune to it as are any of us to the COVID-19 that Trump has strenuously and continues to strenuously ignore. This is what such dictatorships do. No matter how insane  such regimes may seem with the capricious lens of historical hindsight, more often than not they keep their most evil agendas out of the public eye because, even if they don't think they're committing evil, they nonetheless know that's what the popular perception will be.
     And authoritarian dictatorships loathe and fear the people and simply do not care what they think except for the occasional lone voice of support. But, even absent guilt, authoritarian governments are still sane and savvy enough to know what the vox populi is saying or will say about one policy or another and they take care and multi-layered steps to head off significant criticism to the point of hiding their agenda from those people.
     This alone would kill an insanity plea in a court of law The killer knowing they were doing something wrong and taking steps to hide the truth from others. That's legal sanity.

A Neo Confederacy of Sociopaths

In her broadcast last night, Maddow asked (at 27:52 in) what was the worst, most shameful moment of the Trump administration. That's akin to asking which part of a full septic tank is the filthiest part. She mentioned the disastrous response to Hurricane Maria, the utterly failed coronavirus response, the politicization of the Justice Department and Trump asking Russia for, and getting, help in "winning" the 2016 election. (Myself, I also would've thrown in Trump's typically lukewarm to non-existent response to the Russian bounties on the heads of our troops in Afghanistan, asking Ukraine to announce an investigation into the Bidens and pardoning Eddie Gallagher, but that's just me).
    Then Maddow finally advanced another possibility: The child separation policy at the southern border. This made for a smooth segue into shouting out her colleague's book, Separated. Soboroff had seen these detention facilities firsthand, heard the crying of these children, breathed in the stench coming from the children who weren't even allowed to bathe and had their medicine stolen from them. Sarah Fabian, a Trump lawyer, had even asked a federal judge panel if beds, soap and toothbrushes were even necessary.
    According to Soboroff. the man entrusted with compiling and keeping the list of separated children was Scott Lloyd, who was merely "irritated" to see his list make the front page of the NY Times, just below the fold, actually pitched the idea to his staff that perhaps the list ought to be destroyed. That list was more than crucial to keeping a record of which children were separated from which parents and would've been all but necessary in the interests of reuniting these children with their parents.
     But reuniting the children was never part of the plan. When asked why the list that had originally contained 700 names had swelled to 2500 and what the administration's plans were for reunification, then Chief of Staff John Kelly just shrugged his shoulders and said keeping track of these children floating through an opaque and Byzantine system wasn't our job.
     We'd seen Katie Miller's responses to Soboroff when he asked her about her response to the child migrant detentions. Soboroff had actually asked Katie Miller, just prior to her marriage to Stephen Miller, if she was a white nationalist and she said, "No" before asking why we need "Little Havana." Her dead-eyed husband is widely acknowledged as being the main if not the sole architect of a cruel policy that seems to exist solely to wallow and luxuriate in its own sadism.
     And even though we'd faithfully kept a list in secret of children torn from their parents' arms, often at gunpoint, we never had a reunification policy in place, making the careful tabulation of such a list akin to a serial killer keeping trophies of their conquests. And Trump championing the long-dead confederacy down to its monuments and the names of certain military bases named after those traitors, coupled with his increasingly strident rhetoric against Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters shows what a sadistic man he truly is.
     Mary Trump's book at one point discusses how with her uncle, there's often no other point to his making an executive decision unless there some cruelty involved, because there's no other point behind such decisions other than the cruelty. It's a revisiting of Adam Serwer's famous Atlantic article from last year about the cruelty being the point. And when you install in one way or another a sociopath into the highest office in the land, it only follows that he will install fellow sociopaths into lesser positions to implement his morally-crippled agenda.