Faithful readers: I know a series like this can be tiresome to plow through, but as we all know, these facts have to be shouted from the rooftops many times before anyone will take notice. Thank you for your attention and any action you have taken--sharing, discussing, anything.
This is the fourth and final post in a series about apparent mental disorders displayed by Donald Trump. The quotes are from the transcript of a presidential COVID-19 press briefing held April 13, 2020. It is old news, but I use one briefing for these commentaries to provide a snapshot of the president's behavior at one point in time.
Blame shifting: "In part, people are reluctant to admit they have failed because of a general desire to avoid negative social evaluation and disapproval from others. Thus, to save face when things go wrong, people will sometimes shift blame away from themselves by bringing attention to external causes, attempting to obscure their role in causing misfortune." (Lozano, Elizabeth B. and Sean M. Laurent, "The effect of admitting fault versus shifting blame on expectations for others to do the same." PLoS One; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0213276).
Paranoia: "The paranoid personality-disordered person is suspicious of others—this individual thinks that others are out to threaten, betray, exploit, or harm. . . . People with paranoid personality disorder
are not normally grounded in reality, nor do they admit that they have
negative feelings about other people. They distrust people so much that
they will not discuss how they feel, and harbor suspicions for lengthy
periods of time." (Psychology Today online, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/conditions/paranoid-personality-disorder)
Some excerpts mention a video. The president played a campaign-style video about 5 minutes long, featuring several governors praising the president.
The excerpts are not continuous. A double space between paragraphs signals a break in continuity. I have not altered the text. I have removed elapsed-time markings and other non-text material that could impede smooth reading, used bold text to emphasize salient phrases, and inserted a few explanatory words in brackets.
The entire transcript can be read at
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-coronavirus-press-conference-transcript-april-13.
Diogenes---4/19/20
R=Reporter T=Trump
If you search "trump lies" you will find a wealth of material from sources ranging from the Boston Globe to YouTube, all documenting falsehoods this president has presented as truth to the American people. Here are just a very few.
LIES IN YELLOW
T: When on January 31st, I instituted the ban, Joe Biden went crazy. He said, “You don’t need the ban.” He didn’t go crazy. He didn’t even know what the hell the ban was, so he didn’t go crazy. But he did call me xenophobic, wait a minute, he called me xenophobic. He called me a racist because… He has since apologized and he said I did the right thing.
T: No one who has needed a ventilator has not gotten a ventilator. Think of that. You know, you heard all about ventilators, ventilators, we need ventilators, because they didn’t have them, because the states should’ve had them. No one who has needed a ventilator has not gotten a ventilator. No one who has needed a hospital bed has been denied a hospital bed.
T: And I’ve been asking from the beginning, “Why can’t we sterilize and sanitize these masks?” And it turned out we can, and there was a great company in Ohio. They sent us some great equipment and they’re doing that now, and now we’re going to have more than 33 million N95 masks per week will be cleaned, decontaminated, and it’ll be great. It’s something that frankly, I think people should have thought of a long time ago. [Mask sterilization has been in use since early in the outbreak, but is advised only in crisis situations of shortage. Only three reuses are allowed.]
BLAME PROJECTION--subject of blame in italics
R: [News about] Theodore Roosevelt has died. Have you decided the status of Captain Crozier?
T: Well, that’s going through the Navy as I understand it. The Navy is going to be making decisions on all of that, and they had a break in. I don’t think the ship should have been stopping in Vietnam when you have a pandemic to be honest with you. I don’t think the captain should have been writing letters. He’s not Ernest Hemingway, as I said before, and he shouldn’t have been writing letters. I don’t know who gave the orders to stop in Vietnam, but they stopped in Vietnam, and all of a sudden they get on and now you have over 500 sailors and people on the ship that are affected. I don’t know whose idea that was, but that wasn’t such a good idea in the middle of a pandemic.
T: And what we did last time is unprecedented. We literally rebuild tests. We rebuilt a whole industry because we inherited nothing. What we inherited from the previous administration was totally broken, which somebody should eventually say. Not only were the cupboards bare as I say, but we inherited broken testing. Now we have great testing.
T: Remember, and you saw the stories, I inherited this administration, Mike [Pence], myself, the whole administration. We inherited a stockpile where the cupboards were bare. There was nothing, and I say it and I’ll say it again, just like we didn’t have ammunition, we didn’t have medical supplies, we didn’t have ventilators, we didn’t have a lot of things that should have been had, and you can read your own stories on that because you know what happened. They didn’t want to spend the money, but we did.
PARANOIA--in yellow
R: What is the status of the funding for the World Health Organization?
T: I’m not happy with the World Health Organization. Not happy with the World Trade Organization either. We’ve been ripped off by everybody. We have, this country, for so many years, has been ripped off by everybody, whether it’s the World Health or World Trade. They’re like, I call them, the Bobbsey Twins. They look at our country, for years and years, we had people that did nothing about it. We’re doing a lot about it.
T: I’ve been brutalized [by the press] for the last four years. I used to do well before I decided to run for politics, but I guess I’m doing okay, because to the best of my knowledge, I’m the president of the United States despite the things that are said.
R: But just to be clear, this [video] was produced by government employees, by people here at the White House, this campaign-style video here?
T: I wouldn’t use the word produced. All they did was took some clips, and they just ran them for you. And the reason they did is to keep you honest.