“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........

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