September 3, 2025

Thinking The Unthinkable, By Hal M. Brown

Tue, Aug 26 at 5:23 AM

I was going to write a Substack about this before I read my friend Sabrina Haake’s Substack this morning. Then I read her Substack and realized how what I was thinking fit in with what she was saying in her Haake Take titled “Blue states: Stop funding Trump's Confederacy.” It is subtitled “Previously held assumptions about federalism, including taxation, are falling.” I noticed that the illustration she used was Archibald Willard’s “Yankee Doodle” which is also known as “The Spirit of ‘76.”

I wondered why she used this painting rather than an illustration of a Civl War battle like one of these:

Still, even though she wrote about a peaceful civil war the picture is of a battlefield and you can clearly see, in addtion to the drummers and fife player a wounded soldier and a Union soldier raising his hat in victory.

This is her concluding paragraph:

A new kind of civil war is here, but Democrats did not invite it. When our backs are against the wall, facing the firing squad of a rogue president, complicit party, and corrupt high court determined to destroy us, we must act in our own self-interest. Freedom and our nation’s survival depend on it.

I agree completely with what Sabrina is saying about blue states hitting the Trump Confederacy in the wallet.

My focus is on the development we hope never comes to pass. This would be an actual armed confrontation between the New Union and the New Confederacy.

The Oregon Army National Guard consists of 41 armories in 33 communities. (Read about it in Wikipedia.)

Because we drove by one of their amories yesterday and Ann managed to take some decent photos last night I thought I’d use them as part of my Wednesday Substack.

Click above to enlarge.

There are a few scenarios which could develop where blue states would end up mobilizing their National Guards to protect themselves. Much would depend on the legal cover given if the Supreme Court came to its senses and ruled that Trump had violated the Posse Comitatus Act in sending troops to LA and DC. This could come to a head if he does this in Chicago as he has threatend to do.

If Trump defied such a ruling (Sabrina may want to weigh in on this since she’s a lawyer) and tried to take over normal law enforcement functions could the state governors order the National Guard to stop them from doing this? I seems to this non-lawyer that it is possible.

If Trump wanted his own soldiers to enforce his will, it could pit members of the Oregon National Guard against members of the Idaho National Guard (Wiki) or against members of active duty military.

I find it beyond the pale to imagine another actual replay of the Civil War with Americans shooting Americans. I could, however, see some extremely tense face-offs which resulted in a trigger happy soldier shooting someone.

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September 2, 2025

Message to Trump and all the blowhard bigots: Hey babes, walk on the wild side. My allusion, like in the song, is deliberate.

Yesterday, while we were in the car, Lou Reed’s classic “Walk on the Wild Side” was playing on Sirius Radio. I hadn’t heard it recently. I thought it was most likely on the play list because of Trump and his demonization of trans people and drag shows. (Click below to watch video)

"Walk on the Wild Side" touched on topics considered taboo at the time it was released, including transgender people, drugs, male prostitution, and oral sex.

The video unambiguously shows what the lyrics refer to.

The song was produced by David Bowie and his Ziggy-era guitarist Mick Ronson, shown below:

Here’s an article about the meaning of the song.

These are the people referred to in the lyrics:

Holly: Holly Woodlawn, a transgender actress who was part of Andy Warhol’s entourage.
Candy: Candy Darling, another transgender actress and Warhol superstar.
Little Joe: Joe Dallesandro, an actor known for his roles in Warhol’s films and a symbol of gay subculture.
Sugar Plum Fairy: Joe Campbell, who got the nickname for appearing in the 1965 film My Hustler.
Jackie: Jackie Curtis, a transgender actress and writer associated with Warhol’s scene.

September 1, 2025

If Trump was a mythical creature he'd be a hydra. By Hal M. Brown, MSW

This. with a few changes, is a republication of a Substack I wrote on May 17th. I was prompted to write it after I read “'I want the answer, and I want it now': Trump launches baffling attack at drug companies.” in RawStory.

The two posts below should constitute enough proof that Donald Trump is a mentally unwell rageaholic. The first could stand alone. It is a response to highly critical things Bruce Springsteen said about him on his overseas concert tour. The second comes out of the recesses of Trump’s fevered mind. Taylor Swift hasn’t been in the news saying anthing critical of Trump. She merely exists as a hotter than hot superstar and Trump can’t stand this. Therefore, why not follow-up an attack on The Boss with an attack on Swift. She could be called The Boss if Springsteen already hadn’t earned that name.

Attacking Taylor Swift doesn’t make sense. That is, it doesn’t make sense unless you’re Donald Trump.

It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d have thrown in an attack against Joe Biden just for good measure.

Amend that…

I just checked Truth Social. He did at 5:34 this morning:

Then this morning we have these stories which provide further justification for my “diagnosis” of Trump as an unwell rageaholic.

Trump rampages after 'bad and dangerous day'

and

'Historically criminal event': Trump rants about 'bigger scandal' in early morning blow-up

Most people know what a rageaholic is. This is as good a defintion as any (from Psych Central):

Rageaholic definition

“Rageaholic“ isn’t a diagnosis recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5).
This doesn’t mean rageaholic symptoms aren’t real, or that the uncontrollable flashes of anger you experience aren’t significant.
Rageaholism does exist. It’s been written about and explored in research Trusted Source, and it’s an informal term used to describe someone who seems unable to control their temper.
Often, a rageaholic will display unprovoked bouts of rage or a level of anger excessive for the given situation.

Trump’s rage attacks are part and parcel of his narcissistic personality disorder, that is, his exaggerated feelings of self-importance, excessive need for admiration, and a diminished ability to empathize with other people's feelings.

Trump postures as a strutting peacock who delights in showing off his feathers.

In reality under the pretense of supreme self-confidence are deeply buried feelings of inferiority. Therapists have written about this but none with the inside knowledge of his niece Mary Trump who diagnoses him as having a narcissstic personality disorder (read “A Provocative Psychological Analysis of Trump by a Trump”)

There is a phenomena which occurs with extreme narcissists called narcissistic injury (see Wikipedia). We see aspects of this with Trump but he never actually experiences the hurts of the injury. Consider this from Wikipedia:

A narcissistic injury will oftentimes not be noticeable by the subject at first sight. Narcissistic injuries, or narcissistic wounds, are likely a result of criticism, loss, or even a sense of abandonment. Those diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder will come off as excessively defensive and attacking when facing any sort of criticism.While the average person would likely react by expressing vulnerability, a person dealing with a narcissistic wound will do the opposite, causing them to come off as narcissistic, despite feeling hurt inside. The reaction of a narcissistic injury is a cover-up for the real feelings of one who faces these problems

Trump doesn’t come off as defensive when criticized because he instantly goes into attack mode. He does not experience an assault on his self-esteem even for a conscious nano-second.

I wrote the above back in May. Between then and now, in addition to what was reported in RawStory today, we have numerous other examples of how volatile Trump is, how he flies off the handle irrationally, how he doesn’t think things through befoe going into attack mode.

If you look up “Trump regeholic” on DuckDuckGo this is what you see:

At least one of my essays in on the list.

You can also do a Google search here.

Obviously this assessment is not original with me. It just needs to be said again and again. Hopefully it will sink in that whether or not Trump is physically falling apart or not, mentally he manifests so many pathologies and aberrations that if he were a mythical creature he’d be a hydra.

Addendum:

I’ve written many essays since 2017 about Trump’s psychopathology. There are so many I added them up in March and came up with four major ones. That why I wrote Sadists ® U.S: Trump and The Dark Tetrad. (It should be obvious that Trump is an example of someone who has all of the traits of The Dark Tetrad: narcissism, psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and sadism.) Then in April I added a fifth and wrote “Trump is in the Dark Pentagon, and I don't mean the home of the Dept. of Defense.”

I suppose the next geometric shape I can write about is a hexagon if I wanted to add rageaholic. This is approriate because each of Trump’s psychopathologies are different with some worse and more dangerous than others, since hexagons can be regular, with all sides and angles equal, or irregular, with sides and angles of different lengths and measures.

There’s an alliteration in this.

Since one never can tell what fresh horror Trump will emerge from his gaping maw there may be no end to the geometric shapes I could use to describe him;