“A populace that is chloroformed day and night by TV stations like Fox News could do with inoculation by poetry. Obviously, poetry can’t be administered like an injection, but it does constitute a boost to the capacity for discrimination and resistance.”

– Seamus Heaney

I gave up long ago on the utility of psychoanalyzing Trump. His pathologies seem so all-encompassing and theatrical as to defy interpretation, even by anti-analysts like RD Laing and Thomas Szasz. But watching Trump in quick succession at the Kirk memorial, the Tylenol press conference and the UN General Assembly, he seemed like a personality in the midst of physical and mental breakdown. Not a crackup, so much as a kind of psychological entropy that is finally beginning to splinter a subject that it’s pawed and scratched the surface of for decades.

The body slumps. The face sags. The loose skin of the throat droops over the collar and onto the tie. The voice speaks in unnatural cadences that don’t harmonize with the often slurred words it tries to pronounce. The volume rises and falls: a blurt, a grunt, a pneumatic whisper. Many of the sentences die out in mid-stream. Others don’t seem to end. More and more often, the thoughts refuse to connect and the voice ends up talking in circles or figure eights. Only the bluster still breaks through. Here’s a narcissist staring into a cracked mirror, no longer sure he’s still in love with the only thing he’s ever really loved: his own image. The mind seems frightened by shadows. Everything is conspiring against him: wife, escalator, Secret Service, teleprompter, ghost of Epstein. Of course, as the Pretenders sang, “It’s a thin line between love and hate.”

Hate is the dominant theme. It spreads through everything Trump says, like the venom of a pit viper. And not just the political hate for his enemies, who he sees behind every corner, that he bragged about at Kirk’s funeral or the person hate that he’s incubated all his life for immigrants, blacks, independent women, professors, Europeans, trans people and greens. But the deeper hate, the hate that is eating him up from the inside and is now showing in his face, his blackening hand, his bent posture, his precarious gait, his tremulous voice, his fraying memory, for the fact that he is only liked by people he hates and hated by the people whose approval he’s desired all his life. His hatred has become self-consuming.

Here’s an offering of some of Trump’s stranger riffs during his nearly hour-long rant before the UN General Assembly, with some annotations.

I don’t mind making the speech without a teleprompter, because the teleprompter is not working. I feel very happy to be up here with you, nevertheless, and that way you speak more from the heart. I can only say that whoever’s operating this teleprompter is in big trouble.

I recall in 1993, when Bill Clinton gave a speech on his (bad) health care plan to a joint session of Congress, someone loaded the wrong speech into the teleprompter. Clinton recognized it, whispered something to Al Gore and then ad-libbed his speech for the next 7 minutes with no one noticing except his speechwriters. Trump, however, skidded to a stop in mid-sentence and couldn’t proceed to read gems like this until it restarted: “I’m right about everything…You are destroying your countries. They are being destroyed. Europe is in serious trouble.” Or this one: “Environmentalists want to kill all of the cows.”

The teleprompter was controlled by Trump’s staff.

Under my leadership, energy costs are down, gasoline prices are down, grocery prices are down, mortgage rates are down, and inflation has been defeated.

Energy costs are up, gas prices are up, grocery prices are up, inflation is rising.

In just eight months since I took office, we have secured commitments and money already paid for $17 trillion.

Sheer fantasy. The entire US GDP is about $30 trillion.

In my first term, I built the greatest economy in the history of the world. We had the best economy ever, in the history of the world, and I’m doing the same thing again, but this time it’s actually much bigger and even better. The numbers far surpass my record-setting first term.

The first Trump term ended in a recession and record unemployment. The second term has seen rising layoffs, increased unemployment and plant closures, increased consumer debt, stagnant wages and rising inflation.

I want to thank the country of El Salvador for the successful and professional job they’ve done in receiving and jailing so many criminals that entered our country, and it was under the previous administration that the number became record-setting, and they’re all being taken out.

The vast majority of people Trump sent to El Salvador’s abysmal prisons had no criminal record.

I ended seven wars. And in all cases, they were raging with countless thousands of people being killed. This includes Cambodia and Thailand, Kosovo and Serbia, the Congo and Rwanda, a vicious, violent war that was. Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia, and Armenia and Azerbaijan.

The ceasefire between Iran and Israel ended the bombing, much of which was done by the US, not the covert war between the two countries. Ethiopia and Egypt are not at war. Trump’s claim that he ended the border skirmishes between Pakistan and India so enraged Modi that he made a point of meeting with Xi and Putin in a united front. Kosovo and Serbia aren’t at war, in part because of the presence of UN peacekeeping troops in Kosovo. The fighting is far from over in the Congo and Rwanda and the peace accord Trump helped to broker didn’t include the leading rebel group in the eastern Congo, M23. Armenia and Azerbaijan have yet to sign and ratify the proposed peace treaty. The ceasefire between Cambodia and Thailand was principally negotiated by Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. Well, at least he didn’t claim to have resolved the war of many years between Cambodia and Armenia, as he did earlier in the week.

No president or prime minister. And for that matter, no other country has ever done anything close to that, and I did it in just seven months. It’s never happened before. There’s never been anything like that. Very honored to have done it. It’s too bad that I had to do these things instead of the United Nations doing them. And sadly, in all cases, the United Nations did not even try to help in any of them. I ended seven wars, dealt with the leaders of each and every one of these countries, and never even received a phone call from the United Nations offering to help in finalizing the deal. All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that, on the way up, stopped right in the middle. If the First Lady wasn’t in great shape, she would’ve fallen. But she’s in great shape. We’re both in good shape; we both stood. And then a teleprompter that didn’t work. These are the two things I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter. Thank you very much…Everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize for each one of these achievements.

The United Nations was involved in negotiations to end all of these conflicts. Under Trump I and II, the US has bombed: Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iran and Somalia, as well as Venezuelan boats in the Caribbean. And according to the UN, someone from the president’s party who ran ahead of him “inadvertently” triggered the stop mechanism on the escalator. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the White House was also operating the teleprompter for Trump when it stopped.

Many years ago, a very successful real estate developer in New York, known as Donald J. Trump, I bid on the renovation and rebuilding of this very United Nations complex. I remember it so well. I said at the time that I would do it for $500 million, rebuilding everything. It would be beautiful. I used to talk about, “I’m going to give you marble floors, they’re going to give you terrazzo.” The best of everything. “You’re going to have mahogany walls, they’re going to give you plastic.” But they decided to go in another direction, which was much more expensive at the time, which actually produced a far inferior product.

Trump’s buildings were notorious for shoddy materials, cost overruns and unpaid contractors.

Today, many of Iran’s former military commanders, in fact, I can say almost all of them are no longer with us; they’re dead. And three months ago, in Operation Midnight Hammer, seven American B-2 bombers dropped the 14 30,000-pound H-bombs [sic] on Iran’s key nuclear facility, totally obliterating everything. No other country on earth could have done what we did. No other country has the equipment to do what we did. We have the greatest weapons on earth. We hate to use them, but we did something that for 22 years, people wanted to do.

The Pentagon’s own damage assessment estimated that the bombing had set back Iran’s nuclear weapons program–to the extent it had one–months, not years.

As everyone knows, I have also been deeply engaged in seeking a ceasefire in Gaza. We have to get that done, have to get it done. Unfortunately, Hamas has repeatedly rejected reasonable offers to make peace, and we can’t forget October 7th, can we? Now, as if to encourage continued conflict, some of this body is seeking to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state. The rewards would be too great for Hamas terrorists for their atrocities. This would be a reward for these horrible atrocities, including October 7th, even while they refuse to release the hostages or accept a ceasefire instead of giving to Hamas and giving so much because they’ve taken so much, they have taken so much, this could have been solved so long ago, but instead of giving in to Hamas ransom demands, those who want peace should be united with one message, release the hostages now. Just release the hostages now. Thank you.

Hamas has repeatedly accepted US-proposed ceasefire deals, only to see Netanyahu reject them at the last minute. Israel attempted to assassinate the Hamas political leadership in an airstrike on a Qatari compound in Doha, where they were meeting to assess the latest Trump-approved ceasefire plan.

I’ve also been working relentlessly stopping the killing in Ukraine. I thought that would be, of the seven wars that I stopped, I thought that would be the easiest because of my relationship with President Putin, which had always been a good one. I thought that was going to be the easiest one. But in war, you never know what’s going to happen. There are always lots of surprises, both good and bad. Everyone thought Russia would win this war in three days, but it didn’t work out that way. It was supposed to be just a quick little skirmish. It’s not making Russia look good; it’s making them look bad.

Trump said he would end the Ukraine war days after taking office. This week, he bragged about making “billions” off the war by selling weapons to NATO.

No matter what happens from here on out, this was something that should have taken a matter of days, certainly less than a week, and they’ve been fighting for three and a half years and killing anywhere from 5 to 7,000 young soldiers, mostly, mostly soldiers on both sides, every single week, from 5 to 7,000 dead young people. And some in cities, much smaller numbers, where rockets are shot, where drones are dropped. This war would never have started if I were president.

Trump has a morbid fascination with talking about the maimed and the dead.

China and India are the primary funders of the ongoing war by continuing to purchase Russian oil. But inexcusably, even NATO countries have not cut off much Russian energy and Russian energy products, which, as you know, I found out about two weeks ago and I wasn’t happy. Think of it, they’re funding the war against themselves. Who the hell ever heard of that one?… It’s embarrassing to them, and it was very embarrassing to them when I found out about it. I can tell you that. But they have to immediately cease all........

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