Donald Trump's Tariff Reversal Is A Symptom of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy
I am not a psychologist, but I'm also not the first person to suggest this.
The late John Neville in “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” (1988).
I’m typing this entry on a brand-new MacBook Air. My old laptop was seven years old and starting to get a little cranky, but I figured I’d hang on to it another six months to a year. But then of course President Donald Trump started piling tariffs onto China (as I write he’s at 125 percent) and I figured I’d better take advantage of Apple’s pre-tariff inventory while I still can. My iPhone is in perfectly fine shape but I may replace that too. I hesitate only because I fully expect Trump to revive at some later date the global, crazy-high “reciprocal” tariffs that he suspended yesterday, rescuing Wall Street from an imminent bear market (and himself). That will push my retirement savings down again. Indeed, the lingering 10 percent everything tariff and ever-climbing China tariffs are, as I write, pushing stock prices down, and the S&P 500 is down more than 6 percent since Liberation Day (which, believe it or not, was only eight days ago). As people sell off their stocks they’re stuffing the cash under their mattresses rather than moving it into bonds because the bond market is starting to realize that it operates according to the whims of a madman.
Yes, but what sort of madman? In my latest New Republic piece, I engage in a little dime-store psychologizing by diagnosing Trump with Munchausen syndrome by proxy. (I am not the first to do so.) That’s the mental illness that compels mothers to poison their children so they can nurse them back to life. Baron Munchausen is a fictional character from the 18th century book Baron Munchausen’s Narrative of His Marvelous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, by the German writer Rudolph Erich Raspe, but the baron was based on a real person named Hieronymus Karl Friedrich Freiherr von Munchausen, who liked to tell outrageous tales and pass them off as true.
You can read my piece here. And now I’m afraid your 50-minute hour is up.
I would like to know the investors who bought up all the cheap stock at the Market's lowest point this last week, and then made a killing when the Market shot up this week. Is fpotus, or his handlers, manipulating the Market on purpose, to gorge on the profit taking? How many in fpotus's family did this buy and sell game, and how many Republicans did so? That's what I'd like to know.
I knew he was nuts, but Munchausen never occurred to me. It does, however, make sense to a degree. Perhaps, in his honor, we could initiate a mental health/cognitive evaluation for anyone trying to run for potus. Had such a thing been in place, he wouldn't have been allowed to run the first time. He really is stark, raving mad -- and so are his chosen "helpers." What in hell has happened to America?