(1/X) I have a general vague question for people....as you've noticed Trump and very many of the people he's nominated or who are advising him (Elmo, Hegseth, Gaetz, etc.) are sex offenders/harassers. My sociopathic co-worker is also a sex offender/harasser... (2/X) (lots of documented harassment, one story that is more like sexual assault). What is the connection? Is it that far right people are likely to be sex offenders/harassers? Or that narcissists are likely to be sex offenders/harassers? Or both? ....

(1/X) I wanted to do another quick thing about Trump and narcissistic sociopaths, hitting a couple things I've observed from my co-worker. The first is that you simply cannot predict what they will do.... (2/X) They are completely without morals and what motivates them is entirely different than what motivates you or me. So there's no way to do any kind of "rational analysis" of what they might choose to do...

(1/X) One final thing about narcissistic sociopaths before the election. If you simply write down the things they have done and the lack of consequences there have been for them, it sounds completely insane and not at all believable..... (2/X) I was thinking this with my narcissistic coworker (who was just given more important responsibilities by the university)...I started to write an email to someone describing it, and it sounded to insane that I couldn't finish it.

(1/X) Good piece in Slate on Trump's sociopathy. One thing I've been struck by over and over again in dealing with my department's malignant narcissist is how quickly...

slate.com/news-and-polit… (2/X) professionals can diagnose his personality disorder. Within two or three minutes of hearing about him, they "narcissistic sociopath." Now I understand people's hesitancy to go down the road of psychological analysis of political figures..

(1/X) I wanted to do a quick thing about obeying in advance, as the LAT and WaPo have done with Trump by spiking their endorsements of Harris. Fear is a *very* big part of what makes narcissistic sociopaths successful as is a feeling of helplessness... (2/X) Fear and helplessness completely dominate the way that the media chooses to cover Trump. Bezos and the LAT owner bent the knee to Trump in advance out of fear. But here's another example....the media is already dropping the "island of garbage" story because...

(1/X) Another thing about narcissistic sociopaths. First, let me say that the coverage of the campaign the last few months from most mainstream sources has been unconscionably bad. The general tone and focus of it suggests this is a regular election.... (2/X) Between two regular candidates offering different but acceptable visions for the country. The reality is one of the candidates is likely to undo democracy in ways that will take a generation to fix. And he's quite upfront about it....

(1/X) I wanted to do one other quick thing about narcissists. This time it's Elon. I don't have as a good a handle on him as on Trump, but one thing with narcissists is they constantly project. So when Elon says Kamala is someone's puppet, you know what that means.... (2/X) It means that he sees Trump as his own puppet. Trump is in steep cognitive decline, he's already let Elon pick his VP and run his GOTV (into the ground, apparently), so why wouldn't he let Elon run a big part of the government?

(1/X) I wanted to do another quick thing about the NYT's sane-washing of Trump and how it relates to similar things I have seen at work. I want to restrict to the Times here because while other outlets sane-wash too... (2/X) The Times is the worst offender and some other outlets have obvious motivations to do it (e.g. the big boss at CNN is pal of Elon Musks's who openly speaks of moving CNN to the right and has said he cares most about the next president allowing more M&A)....

Here are a couple of the last few tweets from the completely neutral totally not influenced by Peter Thiel outfit that Nate works for

(1/X) I hate doing these, but I feel like I'm being baited to do so. A few days ago Maggie H did an interview where she complained criticism of her reporting, James Fallows answered back (mentioning this account) and Jon Chait and some Reason bro took a shot at Fallows for... (2/X) praising this account. First things first...Jon Chait and some obscure Reason bro lecturing James Fallows about journalism is ludicrous. Fallows is a legend, a five-time National Magazine Award finalist. More on this later...

(1/X) The smartest boys on the internet have taken a break from virology research and campus politics to tell us LOOK RESISTANCE WINE MOM LIBTARDS, THERE IS NO WAY THE NYT CAN HAVE PRO-TRUMP COVERAGE, MOST PEOPLE WHO WORK THERE ARE DEMOCRATS.

This is dumb of course…. (2/X) There are many, many reasons why an organization staffed by people with mostly liberal leanings might produce coverage that favored a Republican candidate, especially if that candidate is Donald Trump….

(1/X) Another thread about narcissistic sociopaths....I've been reading articles about the Trump assassination attempt and they all the same thing: serious mistakes were made (making some kind of resignations appropriate IMHO) and also that Trump put a unique strain on things... (2/X) One thing that you learn very quickly when you work with a narcissistic sociopath is that weird shit happens when they are around. Can you always trace it directly back to them? Not necessarily. Are other people partly at fault too. Yes, but...

(1/X) I wanted to do a quick thing about bothsiding, again motivated by my experience with the narcissistic sociopath I work with. Thing about bothsiding is that it's not even really bothsiding (as @atrios likes to point out). Exhibit A, "weirdness".... (2/X) There are different ways of attacking your opponent as "weird". One is "othering", John Kerry looks French and orders the wrong kind of cheese steak, Al Gore is too wooden, Obama is too exotic (Romney's favorite meat is hot dog, to throw in one R example)....

(1/X) What struck me about last night's debate is the extent to which Trump was able to say "we had the best this, Biden has the worst this" over and over again, falsely without correction. A system that allows this is a narcissist's paradise.... (2/X) I was struck, back in the 2016 GOP debates by how Trump gave grandiose nonsense answers (about his wall, about somehow just "securing the border" by force of will) and how Jeb Bush talked about e-verify and real things that can used to control undocumented immigration...

(1/X) Josh Marshall's been talking about how many ostensibly liberal/nonpartisan media legal analysts are pushing the "Bragg shouldn't have prosecuted Trump" line. This is typical the special treatment narcissistic sociopaths get..... (2/X) Narcissistic sociopaths are a blank slate so you can project you whatever onto them. What many people will choose to believe is whatever is most beneficial for them to believe...

(1/X) I wanted to do one another thread about narcissistic sociopaths because I've been dealing with one a lot lately. I think there probably is some kind of a method for dealing with them but it is complicated because... (2/X) They behave in a way that makes no sense to others, so it is difficult to have a plan for how to deal with them, as there is no way to predict what they will do next.

(1/X) Sorry to keep doing these, but I wanted to do one more thing about how poorly media handles the asymmetry between Trump and Democrats. This is torn directly from my real life experiences watching deans empower an abusive narcissistic sociopath... (2/X) A way to bothsides without technically bothsiding is just to say things like "no wonder Americans are losing faith in politics". It blames no one explicitly, which means that it blames everyone implicitly...

I wanted to do another quick thing about how media has managed to continue doing it even as the Republican Party has become a cult of personality led by a narcissistic sociopath. Again, my observations are based on my university’s empowering of a narcissistic sociopath…(1/X) (2/X) First, as I’ve noted before, it is always possible to bothsides anything because no person or party is perfect and you can always find some bad thing Democrats are doing that somehow equates with what Republicans are doing. But Trump does make that more challenging…

(1/X) Sometimes I hear people wondering if it would be easier to stop Trump if we had the right kind of structures. I deal with someone like Trump (narcissistic sociopath) and the answer is "no".... (2/X) There are already many things in place to stop him. The Senate could have DQ'ed him. Republicans could stop him now if they wanted to. Instead, even "brave" Rs like Romney refuse to endorse Biden...

(1/X) Gonna give you my one Mitch hot take. He really f**ed up not DQing Trump in the Senate after 1/6. The country would be better off if he had, his party would be better off..... (2/X) His initial reaction was the he wanted to. So why didn't he? Too much pushback from his party, fear of the far right, and then you can always find a reason not to do something...

(1) I see a lot of people saying "political reporters are rooting for Trump." I don't think that's true, but what's going on isn't that different. Here's what I think is going on (based on some people I know in that general area)... (2) First of all, there is a lot of pressure not to have teh liberal bias. So you've got to be at least a little tougher on Ds than Rs. Then there's the "I was just doing my job stuff"...(2/X)