The Psychological Unraveling Of Donald Trump With Nick Carmody
Co-host Nick Hauselman sits down with Psychotherapist and Lawyer Nick Carmody to get an in depth picture of how the MAGA movement perceives reality and why Donald Trump has been able to convince so many of them to be in his cult. They also discuss whether the fever has broken and fatigue over using hatred and fear has set in finally.
To support the show and gain access to the Weekender episode on Friday, as well as live shows and exclusive analysis, head over to Patreon and become a patron.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Hello everybody, I am Nick Hauselman, the co-host of the Muckrake Political Podcast, and Jerry Gates Exum is out again today, but I am pleased to bring in the show to discuss psychological aspects of the political race with Nick Carmody, who is a psychotherapist and a lawyer, and has also been on the show before with a terrific interview we had back in 2021.
And Nick, I'm so glad to have you back on the show.
I appreciate you having me on again, Nick.
That's great.
Well, you know, us Knicks need to stick together.
There's not too many of us.
Right.
So at any rate, I thought, let's just dive right in here.
Because again, it's funny having dealt with this since 2015, when the guy came down the gold, you know, elevator escalator.
Um, you know, we've been wrapping our heads around how is it possible that people could be drawn to this kind of person?
Why isn't it obvious that he is who he is?
We've had a lot of time, a lot of data to kind of examine this, figure this out.
So I'm kind of wondering, I think that I think the dopamine rush of sort of following this guy and dunking on liberals was the thing that we talked a lot a bit about last time.
And I'm wondering if if there's been a transformation since then in terms of how he's continued to maintain this focus on him and his methods.
Yeah, that's an interesting question.
We talked about Don Lemon's appearance right before the show, and that was one of the things that I was hoping to get into that conversation, but there was five of us and I kind of jumped around.
And we were talking immediately after the RNC convention, and one of the things I've been observing is that And, you know, the left and Democrats and liberals, you know, you can hear that in some of the guests that were on that show with Don Lemon.
It was just everybody's exhausted.
Everybody's frustrated.
Nobody really wants to kind of observe the political situation or MAGA or Republicans or even Trump through any nuance or even evolution.
Right.
It's just kind of like, you know, hey, we've been seeing this shit for 10 years.
We know who he is.
We know who they are.
And it's just kind of fixed in our mind.
But one of the things that That I sort of alluded to in that after RNC, when we were talking about Kid Rock, and we were talking about, I think it's Amber Jones, and we were talking about Hulk Hogan, and talking about Dana White, and then all of the different guests they had is that, you know, initially, much of the support for Trump was simply about, you know, in tort law, it's called intentional infliction of emotional distress, or what we know as owning the ledge, right?
And for a lot of people initially, you know, so much of politics right now, it fills so many different voids in people's lives.
One of them is it's become a source of entertainment.
Another one is, you know, and this is where we get in some of the conspiracy theories and the QAnon stuff, is that, you know, people who used to buy the National Enquirer or those types of celebrity gossip magazines or just, you know, just the absurdity of some of that stuff that was on just the absurdity of some of that stuff that was on
Well, now they can just plug into politics and they can get everything they ever got at the checkout line from the National Enquirer, you know, through QAnon, or they can get everything they want from an entertainment standpoint by, you know, plugging into, you know, certain shock jocks or the Five on Fox, where it's just, it's certain shock jocks or the Five on Fox, where it's just, it's constant trolling, it's constant kind of, you know, trying to, you know, kind of trigger And that was definitely the case early on.
But one of the things that I think that or at least they're trying and there seems to be some regression since the RNC.
Obviously, Trump is, you know, you can't control him.
But what I was starting to see was that there seemed to be kind of a maturation or evolution of the MAGA movement where at least some people in the movement were trying to create something that would draw people in What I was starting to see was that there seemed to be kind of a maturation or evolution of the MAGA movement where at least some people in the movement were trying to create something that would draw people in other than just this immature, petty conflict and triggering each other.
And we saw that with we're going to have Gold Star moms on there, right, at the RNC convention.
We're going to have the mom whose kid died of fentanyl.
We're going to have, you know, the black woman in the in the lower socioeconomic community who was talking about crime.
They had Amber Jones, who was who was obviously, you know, as the left was getting caught up in the hypocrisy of family values because they had a porn star on there.
What many in the MAGA community were seeing is, oh, she's a deplorable.
Now they're attacking her.
Now they're condescending her.
And I can relate to that.
And even, you know, whether they're a secret subscriber on her porn site or they kind of condemn her because they actually watched the Family Values talk, they could relate to her from a condescension.
And a disparagement standpoint to where, hey, I can relate to her.
And then you got a lot of different, you know, a lot of these younger guys, the Joe Rogan watchers, guys who, you know, I just wrote something the other day about Dana White.
Dana White, masculinity washes Trump, right?
For all his whininess, for all his bitchiness, for all his faux tough guy.
Just victimhood.
He's the antithesis of actual masculinity.
You're a tough guy.
But a guy like Dana White, masculinity washes him to where now you got tens of millions of MMA fans who otherwise weren't engaged in politics, who suddenly might be because they're listening to Joe Rogan, and they were pissed off because the gym was closed during COVID, and they couldn't go grab a happy hour and get dates during COVID.
Or because Dana White's bringing them on to the MMA stuff.
Or, hey, I like Kid Rock stuff, and Kid Rock's pushing them.
Or, you know, I'm a wrestling fan.
I mean, how many wrestling fans prior to the last couple of years do you think we're plugging into policy, you know, debates about politics?
Not very many.
And so I think they've done a really good job of trying to, you know, mature the movement and get into it.
And there is some legitimate shit.
I mean, the border is a problem.
Fentanyl is a problem.
Now, it doesn't necessarily mean it's all, you know, the left's fault for all this stuff.
But politics is about defining your opposition.
And there are, you know, there are a lot of legitimate issues that, you know, that the right does, you know, have a point with.
But we've fallen into this trap in politics where if the other side's for it, I've got to be against it.
Or, and we saw this a lot, you know, one of the reasons when I've talked to people in my personal life about the border is that one of the reasons why the left was kind of slow to start to admit to it.
One is 'cause you're not gonna see it on MSNBC 'cause they're not gonna disparage their own people.
But two is, for years, we heard about the migrant caravan coming before the elections, and they were tracking this and how many times it was mentioned on Fox News prior to the election, and then it would just fall off after.
And so it's kind of like the boy who cries wolf, and you hear about, you know, the caravan, the caravan, the caravan, and it's not happening, and then all of a sudden there is a problem at the border, and the left is, oh yeah, we heard this shit before, you guys have been demagoguing this issue, and we no longer You know, we're not going to, you know, we don't believe it's happening.
And it's also not being covered by left-wing media.
And then suddenly it's a big issue.
And then once it is an issue, then the left doesn't want to talk about it because it is an issue.
And then you just kind of fuel the fire for that issue.
I mean, wow, you've covered so many things.
Let's unpack a bunch of these things.
So, I think, you know, one thing I find interesting in my other life as a basketball coach, what I have to do as quickly as possible is ascertain what personality type each person is, so I can then figure out how to, what lens to use to communicate, right?
There's ways to do this.
I always say there's like, what, 12 different kind of personality types?
Is that low?
Is that high?
According to the MBTI, the Myers-Bridge, there's 16.
Okay.
There's different theories of personality, you know.
So yeah, so it's a 60 point, and you know, the quicker you can kind of figure that out, the quicker you can understand how best to communicate with people, and then also probably to figure out, you know, who you're going to be friends with and who you're not going to like to hang out with.
So I'm wondering, you know, is there a through line in terms of a personality type that does seem to gravitate?
Because I feel like what you're trying to say is that what the Trump administration kind of brilliantly did was tap into an electorate that had never participated in politics before.
We'll talk about some of the methods they're using, but it seems to me that maybe there's a limited supply of that, and it's that they get more and more desperate.
They have to get more desperate in their methods to find just the last few people they could get to maybe flip an electoral college vote in a swing state, if that makes sense.
Well, I mean, you know, it's cliche at this point, but obviously fear has always driven politics, right?
If you can scare people into thinking that, you know, and it happens on the left, you know, I'm not a Democrat, I'm not a liberal, you know, at this point, I'm so disgusted with tribalism that I can't affiliate with any party.
But, you know, I am also guilty of that, because how many times have I written that Trump is an existential threat?
Right.
Now, just because, you know, two things can be true at one time.
He can be, that can also stoke fear in people, and that drives politics.
Now, my intent isn't to stoke fear, you know, my intent is to try to observe and analyze and explain that, you know, on an academic or intellectual level, psychological level, but that can still be the effect.
Now, That has absolutely been the intent on the right right I mean that we have seen it I just wrote something the other day about the use of fear to try to you know why some women still support Trump and one of the you know.
One of the things that will always instill fear, and really anybody, any parent, but especially with mothers, is when they feel like their children aren't safe.
And we have seen that.
I've written many times with Tucker Carlson on his show, where he was talking like, they hate you, they hate your children, when they come for you, and they will.
That type of fear mongering.
You know, that scares people.
And one of the things that we've seen throughout history with demigods and with kind of authoritarian figures is that if you can create the perception of chaos, if not actual chaos, then people are willing to vote or in some cases install a strongman to restore order.
And that's kind of the underlying premise that goes on with Trump.
The case with some women is that if you think that the other side is worse, if you think that the gender ideology is coming for your kids, if you think that the The immigrants are coming for your kids.
If, you know, if everything that you hear politically scares the shit out of you and makes you fear for yourself and for your kids, you know, I use this evolutionary psychology kind of, you know, out of the lens.
Well, the fear of the unknown back in, you know, hundreds of thousands of generations when you're dealing with an opposing tribe was that, you know, they were going to come in They might kill your kids as they want, they want to reproduce and pass down their DNA, they're going to rape you, they're going to kill you, whatever it may be.
And we, you know, from an evolutionary psychology standpoint, we still kind of carry a lot of this stuff down with us.
And so one of the things that may have happened hundreds or thousands of generations ago is that the leader of your tribe may have been what we would call now a psychopath.
He may have been abusive.
He may have been mean.
He may have been treated you and your kids horribly.
But he may be better than what than the other guys, tribal alpha.
And so, you know, we're going to stick to this tribe because the fear of the known is worse than the unknown.
We kind of get a little bit with, you know, with that, maybe perhaps with Trump.
He's an awful guy, right?
We know he's treated women horribly.
We know he's a con man.
We know he's a fraud.
We know he's, you know, he's committed all kinds of crimes.
However, we're so scared of what the other, of how the other tribe is defined.
That we have to rally around this guy because he's so awful.
We know that he can defend us because he'll do anything and he's shown that.
Wow.
You know, so let's get into the personality types then, because for some reason it doesn't scare me that way when I hear it, and for some reason I can understand that he's lying, you know, 160 times in a short, you know, press conference.
But it seems to me like, and I'm sure you've seen, like, if you scroll Twitter or X, you'll see a lot of interviews with people at Trump rallies, right?
And you mentioned sort of policy, and people ask substantive questions about policy, what these things mean, and they have Generally, I mean, I know they're cherry-picking and they're editing these things, but I think I've seen enough of these to indicate that there is a lack of understanding of the political process itself and how democracy works.
So, to me, there must be some sort of, like, maybe a through-line personality-wise that they're able to tap into that is separating these tribes in terms of, you know, liberal or conservative or Democrat and Republican.
What do you think about that?
Yeah, some of that can be personality.
I think of what a lot of it is, is that, you know, it comes down to the tribalism in many ways is about a sense of community.
It's about identity.
Right?
And especially in certain, you know, so much of the culture war is geographical.
Politics is geographical.
Obviously, Trump is big in the South, or he's big in rural areas.
And, you know, if you're somebody who.
Maybe you weren't kind of like the pro wrestler fans, right?
Or we talked about the MMA fans.
If you're somebody down South or in the Bible Belt who wasn't really into politics, but now politics has basically become the primary source of entertainment.
of identity, of community.
You want to be a part of that, right?
And it's, I think we may have even talked about this three years ago when I was on there, and there's research that shows that there's areas of the brain that are active when we experience physical pain, that are also active when we experience social isolation or exclusion.
And so that would suggest that there's, you know, theoretically, there's almost a painful experience to be socially isolated or excluded.
Well, in this context, if, you know, Trump says something, everybody at my church, everybody at the gym, everybody at my office, everybody in all of my family members, you know, whatever it may be, whatever your little community is.
That's bullshit.
all huge Maga or huge Trump fans, and you say, "You know what?
That's bullshit.
That didn't happen." Or, "This guy, I'm not voting for him.
He's a con man." Well, what's going to happen to you?
You're going to be excommunicated from the tribe, right?
And again, going back to evolutionary psychology, what was the result of that hundreds of thousands of generations ago If you got kicked out of the tribe, you're dead, right?
So, we still carry some of that fear with us.
We still carry some of that, you know, that anxiety about not being part of that.
And then you take it, you know, into that fMRI scans where, you know, same areas of the brains are active.
And it's just easier to go along and get along.
And it almost becomes, you know, it almost, I guess I'm trying to think of an analogy.
It's almost like you hear of like, Like Jewish people.
Some people are practicing Jews.
Some people are just culturally Jewish, right?
Some people are practicing political, obsessed people.
Some people are just culturally, politically obsessed, right?
Or they just follow politics culturally, right?
They don't necessarily follow it because they're actually engaged in a policy, but everybody else is doing it.
So it's just some identity and it's a sense of community.
And so I think a lot of people just kind of get caught up into it.
It's like a tailgating party, you know, like at a college football game.
And it's easier than going against.
It takes a lot to go against that, especially right now, because so much of your political views, we attach values to it.
And if you're not, you know, anytime somebody says we don't share the same values, what they're usually saying is your values are shitty, right?
Your values are inferior to mine.
Nobody says we don't share the same values.
You have higher values than me, right?
And so anytime we attach values to politics, which we do around abortion, all the religious stuff that goes into it, then, you know, that makes it even harder because not only are we dealing with all of the issues with the tribalism and the identity and the sense of community, but you don't want to be perceived as somebody who's, you know, a bad person, an evil person, somebody who doesn't share the values of everybody at your church, everybody at your gym, your family, all of that stuff.
You know, it's interesting the way you're describing it now, years into this, because I think in the beginning the real focus was, again, that dopamine rush, where there was a literal physical energy that was created when they got wrapped up in these issues, be it, you know, on the border and trans, all sorts of things like that.
And I almost feel like over time, you know, there must be a deadening of that, where you don't get that same rush all the time over, you know, months and months and years, because now you're describing it as You know, we wanted to be part of the pack and not wanting to ruffle feathers or whatever, which is sort of a little bit less, because I get it.
Like, if you picture, you know, the French Revolution and Les Mis and the music and the lights and the camera, that crane shot, that is exciting.
That is something that will make you really, you know, feel a rush.
Like, I am standing up for the existence of this country, and I almost wonder if you feel like that just can't sustain itself anyway over enough time.
Well, I think early, we talked about the dopamine.
I've written a lot on dopamine and how it factors into stuff.
But I think that, and to kind of go back to what I was saying earlier about the, early on it was fun, right?
Triggering the libs and, you know, mugs with, you know, liberal tears are delicious and, you know, all that type of shit.
That was fun.
But that, it has kind of metastasized or morphed from fun and entertainment to now it's it's anger and it's existential right now it's not just about owning the libs now it's maybe about making sure i have enough ammunition for the the coming civil war against the libs right so it's become much more intense much more angry um you know there's something in sociology called the ratchet effect right where you know something only goes in one direction right when you have a ratchet Like a socket set, right?
It only goes in one direction.
You go the other direction, it's click, click, click, click, and then it's torque.
Click, click, click, torque.
And that kind of happens with society and with culture.
Things only kind of go in one direction with the ratchet effect theory.
And you kind of see that with what's happening, right?
It started out where it was fun, and it's kind of ratchet effect down to where it's becoming more intense and more angry.
And, you know, just everything feels more existential.
Well, that's fascinating.
I love the ratchet idea.
And let's actually pivot towards Trump himself because it's enough.
This is the guy that's leading this thing.
This is the guy that's like a Pied Piper.
And I wonder if people were talking a little bit about how he shared a photo of the airplane of Kamala Harris, where he tried to insinuate that because the reflection of the plane doesn't show anybody in it, that the crowd that she had at their hangar was fake.
Despite, you know, every video we've seen that shows a huge crowd there.
People I talk to sort of thinking like this is the indication that Trump is really starting to falter and perceptually, dimensionally, or whatever it is.
But I'm not even sure if he's changed that much.
I kind of feel like he's been dabbling in this kind of ridiculousness for so long.
But have you seen any kind of progression along those lines?
Well, I think he's getting more desperate.
First, let me say to whatever extent they are doctoring photos or they are manipulating that stuff on the left.
It's, you know, and I've written some of the stuff about the couch jokes and stuff with JD Vance is that you can't.
Bitch for years, almost a decade about misinformation and disinformation and lies and alternate realities and all this other stuff and then engage in the same behavior.
And so to the extent that it is happening on the left, I think it's it's it's wrong.
It's a mistake.
And you're basically you're giving fuel to the right to to you lose the moral authority when you're accusing the other side of doing something and you're doing it.
So I hope that that's not happening, you know, in whatever case.
Um, but as far as Trump, um, you know, I think he's getting worse.
I think that, uh, he's getting more desperate.
Um, you know, he knows that he, that look he had on, I wrote something about the press conference the other day.
You know, he came out, the look in his eyes, the tightness in his mouth, you know, a lot of times when he comes out, he's very animated with his mouth.
And as I wrote in the, in the, in the article, the, uh, the one time, the notable time that I really noticed he was animated with his mouth was when he was talking about, um, federal reserve chairman Jerome Powell.
And it indicated contempt for him.
And I know there were times when Trump was president where, you know, he had a lot of loans.
He had hundreds of millions of dollars in loans.
He wanted interest rates lower.
Obviously, it helped him.
It helped him for the economy, helped him to get elected.
So, I'm sure there's, you know, there's some friction with the Federal Reserve, you know, with Trump.
But, you know, he seems at this point, you know, he went from basically feeling like he had a shoe in with Biden.
To suddenly having this momentum flip around on him, especially after he got shot or shot at and nicked, whatever happened with him.
And that's another thing I don't really like to cool about because he got shot at.
You're in that position, whether it was a piece of glass from the teleprompter or the bullet, whatever it was, that experience was real, right?
You can't detract from that.
But having that experience, having the momentum shift around, seeing the crowds bigger for her, seeing the enthusiasm, knowing that if he loses he's probably going to prison, having the effects of aging come upon him.
I just saw a video the other day where he paused for 21 seconds.
I don't know if you saw that.
Well, in fairness, supposedly there was someone having a medical issue in the crowd, and they were attending to it.
I saw that, but I did read it a little bit more, but you don't have to use even that.
There's plenty of evidence of what you're talking about.
Yeah, well, I'm glad you said that, because I saw that.
I didn't send anything out, because I just saw it.
Again, those are the types of things that don't manipulate.
There's so much shit on Trump to use, you don't have to make stuff up or manipulate things or embellish things.
Um, to make him sound worse than he is because he's, he's awful as he is.
And so I, you know, I, I hate when, when that happens.
Um, but you know, one of the things that I think we're going to see with Trump, um, you probably heard the phrase may even use it when we talk about the aging process and our parents or grandparents as we go out the way we came in.
Right.
And so when we come in, we're almost very childlike, you know, in our in our advanced stages, you know, we come in as kids, you know, it's almost a, you know, the entire world revolves revolves around us.
We don't even have the consciousness to know that, but it does.
Our survival, our parents world revolves around us, our families world revolves around us.
There's this, you know, there's almost this narcissistic focus on us where it's only about us.
As we get older, as we, you know, as kids, we start to develop self-awareness, right?
We start to realize other people have feelings, or don't take his cookie, or don't hit him, or whatever it may be.
And so, as our self-absorption starts to wane a little bit, our self-awareness increases, and our awareness of others, and then into adulthood, then it becomes more, you know, about other people, our kids, That then it is about us.
Well, then it's you know, it's kind of like the bell curve when then we come down the other side as we start to age.
Well, then it becomes less about other people and it starts to become more about us as we as we start to lose that consciousness as we start to you know, whether it's Alzheimer's or dementia or whatever it is.
That's a natural progression right now.
We start to be the one that everybody's focused on and taken care of and we lose the self-awareness and the consciousness of how we relate to other things.
Well, that's the normal process.
Imagine if someone's entire life, like Trump's, was malignant narcissism, where the entire world revolved around.
There's no bell curve.
It's flat the entire way from, you know, basically birth to now he's, what, 78 years old.
Well, as he starts to kind of regress and devolve throughout that process, he's going to become, you know, his narcissism is probably going to Exacerbate in a way that's not even tempered by his grasp of reality, you know, worse than it is now his grasp of reality or his grasp of of his surroundings in a way that people's grandparents or parents happens.
But there's this happening independent of narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder.
So, you know, I see him getting worse in a way that is going to be tough to predict, but not shocking.
And I think that, especially when he's become self-preservational, knowing he's going to prison, knowing that he's losing, I think that he is going to continually just kind of devolve from where he's at now, and he's already in a bad place.
Right.
And part of me thinks that, you know, out of the desperation, like you mentioned, that's really where it's going to maybe, quote unquote, appear that it's getting worse when he's simply just getting more and more desperate.
But because I guess my take on it was, he was in the White House, he was on his iPhone.
I'm sure everyone was being able to tap into that anyway and hear whatever he was saying.
And people were calling him and giving him all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories that he was taking in then.
So to me, I don't even know if it's a progression or as much as just sort of how he's always been and now it's just as a desperate desperation kicks in for the fear of, you know, obviously being arrested again are being arrested being prosecuted for a lot of other things is going to kick in and it's interesting how it's captured.
The country in that sense where, you know, getting shot at being found guilty in the court of law in his mind somehow is a good thing, right?
He's been able to tap into more and more, you know, other places that you might with the black community.
He wants to say, well, because you your group of people in this country have traditionally been, you know, maligned by the police and by the Justice Department.
I am like that, too.
We are now the same.
And I think at some point, maybe before Kamala jumps in the race, there seemed to be even polling that would indicate that he was gaining in those sectors.
And again, is this even something that is thought out psychologically?
Are there people behind the scenes who are being able to craft these messages, understanding how it will affect the people?
Or is he able to do this somehow with that knowledge or innately or instinctually?
It's probably both.
I mean, Stephen Miller, as pathological as Stephen Miller is, he's pretty effective in what he does.
I mean, he's an awful guy, a dangerous guy.
I think that a lot of the stuff that comes through Trump comes from Stephen Miller.
So I think there's absolutely that.
And it would be interesting to see, like, behind the scenes, was it Chris LaCivita?
You know, what the dynamic is between, you know, back when it was Bannon and it was Jared Kushner, they couldn't stand each other, you know?
So it'd be interesting to see what's the dynamic between the people trying to run a professional campaign and, you know, the whispers that Stephen Miller's putting in Trump's ear.
It would be interesting to be a final wall.
But obviously Trump is, you know, he is very instinctive in his ability to push people's buttons and his ability to scare people and his ability to kind of trigger people's hatred of others.
So, you know, I think it's a combination of both.
He's very good at doing that on his own.
And I think that it's probably, you know, somebody like Stephen Miller can kind of give him maybe it's, you know, certain facts or certain details about stuff that Trump can just kind of naturally, you know, instinctively That's fascinating, especially because, you know, whenever Miller writes for him on a teleprompter, he can't seem to get through a teleprompter without adding, you know, 50% of it is off the cuff.
It's funny because you can tell, A, he's not a good reader, right?
He can't really emote that way, but then all of a sudden when he switches, it's obvious.
Now, there's a conspiracy going on from the people as the polls have shifted that The people in Trump's camp are sabotaging him.
This is how bad it's gotten now in the desperation, I suppose, where it's like, there's no other explanation besides someone is always there to try and push him down or whatever.
It's nothing of his own making.
And I find that fascinating, too, how that is starting to pop up.
And I feel like, how is that generating itself?
How does that gestate to get people that far where they would believe that whoever's joining the campaign is trying to sabotage it?
Well, it'd be interesting because you could see that coming from different directions, right?
I mean, that could be something that's planted by provocateurs on the left.
I don't want to say on the left, we'll just say anti-Trump people to get in Trump's head.
You know, you can see that being a Lincoln Project ad or something George Conway would have out there where it'd be like, you know, just to make Trump think that he can't trust his inner circle, right?
Hey, you know, there's leakers out there, you know, there's people out there who are as a conspiracy theory, you know, they don't have your back, they're turning on you.
Um, so you could see that, you know, being kind of planted or put out there, but you could also, um, see, you could also see Trump, you know, Trump's never going to take accountability for anything.
It's always going to be somebody else's fault.
He's always victim.
You know, he's, you know, he, he, he hires only the best people.
It's up for all the people that he fires because, you know, they're incompetent.
And so you can see that coming from Trump.
You could, you know, you can see that coming from, uh, uh, people outside of the campaign who, who, um, aren't happy with.
Maybe Chris LaCivita not being as intense or not being as aggressive enough and being critical.
So you can see that coming from lots of different directions.
I mean, one of the things I have seen that people have asked me is, you know, is Trump throwing the election?
Absolutely not.
I mean, there's, you know, he's going, he's probably going to prison if he, if he doesn't.
So he's not throwing this, you know, if anything, he's going to take everything and everyone down with him before he throws this election.
You know, speaking of Trump again, the narcissism and the basic personality disorders that he has, can those develop naturally without external stimulus growing up?
Or do you feel like, I mean, we had, there's some information about how he was raised and what he did throughout his youth.
So do you feel like that was external pressure that sort of comes to bear to create this kind of personality?
Or are there other factors?
I think, you know, there's probably cases where people can just, you know, psychopaths, where you're just born, you know, brain deformities, whatever it may be.
But I think in many cases with people, especially people who aren't nearly as severe as Trump and people that I've worked with or survivors of people who I worked with who have had people in their relationships or even people in my personal relationships.
Is that my observation?
There seems to be a predisposition and then a triggering experience, and that experience could be, you know, years long.
That's why you may see, you know, you have a path, you know, one or two pathological parents who engage in pathological parenting.
Two kids basically, you know, siblings basically expose the same thing.
One develops disorders, the other one doesn't.
You know why?
They both, you know, they're basically exposed to the same thing.
You know, one, there must have been some type of genetic or personality predisposition that did or didn't exist to cause one to to develop and one didn't.
Now with Trump, you know, maybe he just was born with a certain predisposition that was going to be extreme anyway.
And then exposed to, you know, Fred's pathological parenting and told that, you know, you either win or you're a loser.
You got to be a killer.
You know, all of the things that he was exposed to, you know, having the money, you know, everything that came with it.
And then obviously no accountability, never being told no throughout his life.
And we end up with what we have now.
Interesting.
Yeah, I mean they send it to military school for a reason and I don't know if a lot of people in that economic level of wealth would normally send their kids to something like that.
So that was another interesting.
I'm sure formative experience for him.
It does also seem like there are some I guess we'll have to call them.
Normal conservatives, the people that we thought for sure would reject Trump right away.
And there were the never Trumpers who would still say, well, I got to vote for the Republicans.
I'm sorry that I can't, you know, I can't stomach whatever's in the left.
I have to vote for him.
But it does seem like there's a little bit of a thawing now and we're seeing some Sort of grassroots movements towards these normal Republicans who are finally saying we have to actually vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz because rather than even sitting it out, which would probably be almost the same effect at this point.
So do you think that there's a sort of the fever is breaking?
Is there some sort of fatigue going on here with all of this and eventually that happens?
It seems to me would be tiring emotionally to deal with Trump on a daily basis like this, even if you were for him.
Does that is that something that is a natural occurrence you feel like that maybe we're finally getting to?
You would think so.
But, you know, for the last almost decade, how many times have we throughout history of the last nine years like, OK, this is going to be the thing, you know, starting with the the Hollywood access tape or, you know, I mean, hell, January 6th didn't do that for a lot of people, you know.
So it's I'm really cautious about saying I'm not it's finally happening because it's, you know, the the cult of personality and the tribalism And the sense of identity and community is very strong.
It's you know, I've written something in the past where two of the hardest sentences for people to admit or to say is I was wrong and I'm sorry.
Right?
And so, you know, when if you're somebody who was.
Arguing with your spouse, or arguing with your parents, or arguing with your kids, or your friends, whatever it may be, for six, seven, eight, nine years, about how they were wrong and you were right about Trump, it's really difficult to suddenly say, you know what?
I was wrong.
I was wrong that whole time.
All those maybe hundreds of hours of conflict that occurred in our relationship, where I was supporting a severely disordered con man, criminal, traitor, My bad.
That's really hard for people to do.
You know, it's the more off-ramps you pass by on that Trump Highway, the harder it is to take the next off-ramp.
And, you know, so we see that a lot.
Now, it doesn't mean some people aren't doing it.
And obviously, you know, some event could happen.
And maybe, as we talked about, Trump continues to devolve and regress.
But, you know, hopefully that's what happens.
But it's really hard right now to say, oh, yeah, it's all happening.
Obviously, Kamala and all that momentum is making it easier for some people to I think I forget who the mayor I just saw a mayor.
Yeah, Arizona.
I just saw him do that.
You know, I mean, that's that's tough.
You know, that's tough to do and he's doing it and we may see more of that.
But again, you know, is it?
Is it about principle?
Is it about integrity?
Or is it just because when the momentum of one wave was strong, I was on it, and now the momentum of the other wave is strong, and now I'm going to ride that one, right?
There's a certain amount of cover and safety with that.
And you know, you want to try to give people the, you know, the most generous interpretation of their behaviors.
But maybe that's what it took, right?
There wasn't a lot of momentum to do it with Biden and maybe Kamala Harris, or at least maybe not even her, but all of the momentum of the people who are backing her are providing some cover for people to do that.
We'll see.
For sure.
I mean, I've been asking a lot of people whether they think it was just simply the absence of Biden, which, you know, after the Biden's debate, and it's hilarious because have you ever seen the Nixon-Kennedy debate, the famous one?
Is that the first TV debate?
Yeah.
Yeah, he was sweating, right?
Well, if you watch it now, it doesn't look like he's sweating that much.
It really isn't.
There's nothing that would make you think about, oh, that was the moment where it kind of broke for Kennedy, even though it supposedly did.
But when you watch the Biden one, that had to be the low point of the low point for everybody who did not want Trump to win again, because it did feel like that was going to be it.
So the question becomes, were people so relieved that he stepped down, it didn't necessarily matter who was going to take his place?
Or is it Kamala?
Is it her magnetism, which she definitely has.
And also, I think she's pretty much been perfect since they launched this thing, which she kind of needed to be, without any mistakes.
Do you think it was Kamala or do you think it was just anybody but Biden?
It was probably both.
I don't think people realized How they felt about the situation until it happened.
I mean, I think a lot of it was like, you know, one was we people weren't expecting her to perform as well as she has so far.
And again, we're 90 days out.
She could completely tank who knows right?
She's, you know, you look at some old videos of her.
She was saying a lot of shit.
You're just like, you just cringe when she was talking.
And, you know, obviously now she seems more comfortable in her skin.
It's a 90-day sprint, basically, just beyond the attack.
She's a former prosecutor.
Well, by definition, what do prosecutors do?
They attack.
I mean, they're forward-leaning, right?
It's defense attorneys that are, you know, on the defense, on their heels, trying to misdirect and, you know, play legal judo, so to speak.
And right now it's just, you know, go 100, you know, full speed ahead.
That's all she has to do as opposed to, oh shit, I got to worry about, you know, I was the top cop in California and I prosecuted black dudes and now the black community's pissed at me.
Or, oh, I got to defend George Floyd people because I got to worry about that constituency.
Or I got to worry about God, you know, all that other shit.
Don't worry about that.
Don't play defense.
Play offense.
You got, you know, you got the biggest target in political history right now in front of you.
Go get his ass.
And so I think that's part of it.
She's more comfortable.
She's had four years, too, to to kind of also evolve and mature.
And of course, that's that's going to be part of it, too.
And that wave of support she got.
And if you're if you're a little bit second guessing yourself or a little bit unsure, a little bit lacking a little bit of confidence and all of a sudden this, you know.
Like, you know, maybe you're a sports figure, you walk out on the court and 20,000 people are falling for it, are screaming for you.
Man, my shot feels like it's going in tonight, right?
And maybe that's kind of a little bit of what she did, too.
You know, she's like, I think I can hit a few jumpers.
And then she stepped on the court and, you know, got hit by this wave of Of home field advantage and adoration.
And man, my shot's going in and then you hit a few shots and then, you know, then you're Steph Curry and you're hot and you kind of roll.
So, you know, I think that's part of it.
I don't, I know it was the case with me too, is I didn't think that, I thought it would be better.
I thought that he had to leave.
I was hoping she would be able to kind of handle it, but she has been better than I was expecting.
I think that's been the case for most.
And I don't think people realized how How deadened they had become to, you know, the situation until he was, you know, he left and all of a sudden she came on and it was, I think people were surprised by themselves, you know, how they felt themselves.
You know, suddenly for the first time in a long time, they felt good about politics, you know, since probably Obama.
I mean, there's a lot of similarities in kind of the vibe and the emotion around politics.
I agree.
I think for the, yeah, there was almost a cloud that was pushed away.
You know, I would say half of it was because we just felt like Biden.
I mean, I walked away from the Biden debate thinking, how does this guy run the country day to day?
Like, I didn't get any confidence he could do that, much less have a debate or finish the campaign.
And it's funny because the Republicans are still trying to prosecute that.
They want to somehow continue to bring Biden into it.
And it's just sad a little bit when you're watching Trump do these different things and trying to answer questions.
In fact, he had a question where they asked him since he was shot at with an AR-15.
And I, by the way, I dip my toe.
Have you ever done that, where you dip your toe on Twitter in a conversation about sensible gun rights?
Has that ever happened to you?
I've written a fair amount about the gun issue.
Oh, OK.
Well, maybe we can explore that for a minute.
But, you know, obviously, ultimately what it comes down to is I'm kind of fascinated because I always felt like I had a terrible interaction a few years ago with somebody at a wedding where I thought maybe we could come to an agreement that, you know, maybe not having AR-15s easily purchasable would have been something we could both agree on.
And that just fell apart completely.
I think people want to be able to have these AR-15s so they can fight the government, you know, when the government becomes tyrannical.
And I don't know if you've ever seen a Neil Brennan comedy sketch where he does this about where, have you seen this, where he wants to have once a year He's like, great, let them fight the military once a year, we'll put it on TV, Fox News can carry it, and it's like, you know, a bunch of people in a field with AR-15s and then there's one guy in a bunker with a drone control, you know, and that's it.
And then next year they'll come back and maybe they won't get slaughtered in the first 10 seconds.
But at any rate, the point being, That they'd asked Trump about that.
They said, you know, would you have any, you know, feelings about maybe having more sensible gun laws than somebody who just about killed you with an AR-15?
And his answer veered so wildly on, you know, from Chicago islands to Afghanistan, didn't really ever answer the question.
I'm kind of curious, how does that work?
What goes through someone's mind or what is, how is that functioning or not functioning properly where they can't even address the question when it's asked like that?
Yeah, I actually wrote about that.
That was one of the points I wrote in the thread was, you know, they asked him about the AR-15, and then he brought up that Chicago's got the strongest gun laws in the world, and look at their murder rate with guns.
And then he went off into Afghanistan, and then he went off into Russia and Ukraine, and then when he finished it, it's like he kind of like all of a sudden realized, you know, he was nowhere near the question, and his voice tailed off about, you know, people, we need to have countries respect us again, which You know, as I finished with is like, remember, this was a question about gun safety.
And so I, you know, I think with, you know, we can all do that.
I'm sure I've done it a couple of times today is that we, you know, we start talking, you know, six degrees of separation, we lead from one thing to the next, and there's like a word association that can take us from one topic to the next.
But especially with politicians where they're so conditioned and coached, With talking points, and then you add, you know, the emotion and he's especially in that he's so pissed off.
And as soon as you know, I remember, we just said the other day, it's like we talk, talk, we call it political Tourette's, right?
Where, you know, one word literally cause causes like this reflexive word association, and somebody will spit out a whole nother word, you know, if you're talking about Biden, hundreds, Biden's laptop, you know, that.
And so you can kind of see maybe that happens with him.
And again, and then we start talking about some cognitive decline or whatnot, but you know, he just starts talking about something.
It makes him think about something else.
He jumps to it, makes him think about something.
He's pissed off about this.
So he's going to say about, you know, he's going to talk kind of like the teleprompter thing.
Oh, I'm also pissed about that.
And there's this connection between this.
And then before he knows it, he's talking about how the world doesn't respect us and it has nothing to do with an AR-15.
And so, I think it's some of a normal cognitive process for most people, but obviously for him with his anger and his rage and his vindictiveness and then also he's pushing 80 years old.
He's spent the last six months practicing these talking points and now suddenly half of them aren't even relevant anymore.
For sure.
You know, it's funny.
Do you have any sense, like, a couple last questions.
You know, what we were worried about, even in 2016-2017, was he was not disciplined.
He was pretty much a terrible candidate.
He was able to, again, tap into a subset of the electorate that had never really participated and ground out just enough votes to win that one in 2016.
But, you know, I keep always saying, like, it's always, it will always get worse, right?
And we're always worried that maybe somebody else would come along who was more disciplined, younger, just better package and all those things.
But you use a lot of the things that Trump was using to then really take over and become a despot or authoritarian.
So, like, would you have a sense, like, you know, Ron DeSantis felt like that was the guy, right?
He was going to be the guy who had to, you know, he was just better looking, younger, all those things.
He couldn't have been, he couldn't have had a worse showing in his attempt to win the nomination.
Do you have a sense of what the difference is between him and Trump, for instance, that couldn't get him any traction?
Well, I wrote about this on the RNC with Trump with the charisma.
He's just, you know, his charisma doesn't work on you.
It doesn't work on me.
I don't find it to be charisma.
I find it to be kind of manipulative, dishonest, just kind of a con man or a fraud type of, you know, he's a, he's a late night infomercial salesman who got traction.
Right.
I mean, that's that's what that's who he is.
But it works for a lot of people.
And there is a certain charisma to that that that has that appeal.
But it's tough to record.
You know, there's a combination of this this unique charisma.
With disordered shamelessness to where he'll say and do anything, as well as an absolute disregard for norms or laws.
So like DeSantis doesn't have the charisma at all.
He doesn't have, there's still a certain amount of He may have an element of shamelessness, but it's not like Trump.
Right.
He still necessarily cares about maybe what people think about him.
You can tell he's uncomfortable at times when he's up there because he's worried about what people think in a way that Trump doesn't.
Right.
And there's still you know, there's still some elements where he's willing to challenge the Disney stuff that I think in some ways was was unconstitutional.
But there's still there's still an adherence to To just the way that the country works in a way that Trump doesn't care about any of that, right?
I mean, Trump's narcissism, I mean, everything that he does is funneled through his narcissism.
How does this affect me?
How does this benefit me?
How does this further my self-interest?
And it doesn't matter what it is or who it is, he'll trash it, trample it, destroy it in order for that to happen.
It's unusual in a sense that some people may have that, but they don't have the charisma or the ability to get to that point to acquire the power.
Other people may be able to acquire the power, but they're not as severely disordered as Trump.
So it's not to say it can't happen, but Trump is uniquely dangerous in that way.
That's fascinating.
And so I always say it always will get worse, no matter how bad it seems right now with this party.
And the question now is, it does seem like, OK, there is some sort of cognitive decline.
There's some issues with him.
And the reality, what have they hit her on so far?
They've hit Kamala on DEI, which doesn't seem to have really worked, although it got really disgusting, right, where they were questioning what her race was and whether, you know, and how it was just he said that she was disrespectful.
It's just really horrible stuff.
I think.
Really work poorly.
I think they're moving away, but you have, you know, attacking on the border and things like that.
So I'm kind of wondering as a desperation mounts because again, a five-point lead in a lot of these swing states is huge in this horse race of a political system that we've been built over the last, you know, 20 years.
Do you think it'll get worse?
Is there any sense of like where they could go?
Maybe even to attack her that would end up being just, you know, as bad as it's been.
I suppose there's always ways to get worse.
I think it would get worse with Trump.
I thought I remembered seeing something where there were closed door meetings where the Republicans were saying, hey, don't go after her on DEI, don't go after her on race.
But again, Trump will go off the teleprompter as soon as he has that reflexive, impulsive, It's not helpful with minorities.
predictiveness, Jose, whatever.
He's uncontrollable.
So I think he will get worse.
I think that they, you know, for the most part, the right is aware that that's counterproductive.
I mean, it's not helpful with minorities.
I think that, you know, already she's probably taking back maybe not as strongly with Black men, but definitely with just minorities in general are probably kind of starting to gravitate back towards her.
I I think in a similar way as we talked about with Trump and young men and the Joe Rogan crowd and Dana White, I think we're seeing a lot of that on the left.
I mean, a lot of the college kids who were pissed off about Gaza and Genocide Joe and all that shit, you know, it's a lot harder to pin that.
I do think he's going to get worse.
the genocide, the press, oppressor narrative on a half black, half Indian woman.
It just, it just is.
So who's, you know, so, you know, I think that's tougher, but I do, I do think he, again, I do think he's going to get worse.
I think he's going to be more out of control, but I don't think it's going to be helpful.
I don't think it's, It's effective with, you know, a certain segment that who's already voting for him anyway.
People who it works with, they're voting for him anyway.
Yeah, I mean my argument would be for everyone personally converts using hate and fear.
There's 1.2 people like in the suburbs are going to be completely rejected by that.
And so it's not 2 to 1 or whatever.
It's simply but there is a correlation where there's a little bit more people who will go against that and so and then it'll cause them I guess to get even worse.
I mean, I know they were talking about her, you know, sleeping her way to the top and things like that and I have to imagine Like, that is the cesspool they're going to try and dive deeper into and try and cause all sorts of, you know, rifts culturally with that stuff.
It's going to be bad.
I mean, I remember thinking how bad it was going to be when Hillary ran and the misogyny, and it was bad.
But I suspect as you get closer, because I think they timed this pretty well.
Biden drops out.
They waited for Walz for a week or two.
Now the convention bump, right?
The convention bump combined with Walz and what they're doing now, could give them an eight point lead, right?
Which is way beyond the margin for error and is a, would be a landslide in theory, if that's what, if that held up.
And now we get right into, you know, and then they're going to have a debate, right?
Do you have any sense of what your prediction would be for the first debate that they're going to have?
If they have any more than that, I don't know.
What do you mean prediction as far as what?
What, like, you know, I wouldn't say Kamala would kill him in a debate.
What do you think?
I think she's going to do well.
I think, again, if she comes at this, you know, similar to like what she was doing in the Senate hearings over the Mueller report with Bill Barr, you know, who was obviously a very If not a good lawyer, he knows how to be a lawyer, right?
And you can see his wheels were turning and some of his answers and some of his tailing off of his voice and she was going at him.
And so again, if she stays in that prosecutor mode and is able to kind of detach from her own emotions, don't let Trump piss her off and get her.
Um, you know, worked up.
If she stays on track and she just stays in attack mode, he's going to give her plenty of material.
You know, he will be like, he would be the dream witness to cross examine in a courtroom in an important case and basically just treat it like that.
Cause you know, he's, you know, he's gonna, he's gonna hang himself.
You know, he'll give himself enough rope to hang himself with verbally, so to speak, because he just can't help himself.
And if you want to circle back to your point about, you know, people who, like the mayor in Arizona out there, people who will peel off, well, that, you know, really extreme misogyny.
Like, how many women are going to, you know, who have, you know, corporate women, career women who have struggled to get where they want to get within a company and have achieved it on merit, have heard rumors or whispers, you know, that, you know, they did something to get there or they were dating somebody or whatever it may be.
So that shit's gonna, you know, that's not going to land on a lot of women and or who just don't want to hear the misogyny or the racism.
So, you know, that may be, you know, give people again that off-ramp like what we talked about earlier.
For sure.
I also think that all she needs to do is study the first debate between Biden because he will repeat what he said there.
There won't be much variation.
So there were so many times in my notes during that debate where I'm like, why isn't Biden hitting him on this?
And there's about five really juicy things he could have said.
They'll have her prepared for that, I'm sure.
So I'm anticipating a really great debate for her.
He probably cancels the rest of them if we're ever going to have any more.
And so now you can see how it's all planned out in terms of this rollout, and they timed it pretty well heading right into November.
So right now, it's weird because we've been so pessimistic for so long.
It's been hard to keep our audience engaged and upbeat through all of this.
And I gotta tell you, I don't know if it's the prednisone I'm taking from my back right now, or if it's just the euphoria of having a new candidate.
But for the first time, I feel pretty good about it.
And we'll see.
But Nick, I can't thank you enough for coming on and breaking this stuff down.
Oh, really quickly before I forget, so the things that you look like for physically when you're watching Trump, it's the mouth.
Is that the big one?
Or is there anything else you look for in terms of body language?
I don't necessarily look for body language, but that was what stood out when he first came out.
You just tell he's pissed, right?
He's raging inside.
Now, I thought he did a good job of managing that rage for the most part, but you could see it.
It was apparent that he's pissed off, from his perspective, for good reason.
He's, hey, I had this in the bag.
I'm canceling all these cases against me.
You know, this dude's, you know, got dementia.
I'm going to be president again.
And then all of a sudden everything changes.
And of course, you know, in his narcissism and his perverted sense of, you know, everything's unfair that doesn't go 100% his way, you know, that triggered him and he's not handling it well.
Absolutely.
Well, again, Nick, thank you so much for coming on the show.
I really appreciate it.
Tell everybody where they can find you and how they can read all your stuff.
So I'm on Twitter at Nick underscore Carmody, and I have a Patreon account that I don't have a paywall.
I got about 130, close to 130 articles on there now.
Every thread that I write, I try to rewrite it and either expand upon it or combine it with other threads, and I post it on Patreon, and that's patreon.com backslash Nick Carmody.
Awesome.
Well, thank you so much again, Mitt, for coming on.
I always look forward to reading your stuff, and we'll have to talk again soon.
Oh, one other thing.
I was invited by Bandy Lee to be a contributing author for the sequel to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.
So it's going to be The More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.
That book is going to be coming out There's going to be an all-day event at the National Press Club in D.C.
where we're going to have the same speakers from last time, and I'm assuming some new ones.
So, yeah, I'm excited to be invited.
That was a huge honor, and we'll see how that shapes out.
Awesome.
Can't wait to see that, too.
So, thanks so much again, Nick, and thanks, everybody, for being here.
And Jared will be back again for our Friday show, so stay tuned for that, and we will see you later.
