The debate Trump began with his vicious tweets about Elijah Cummings has now been moved (by him) from the attacks on Baltimore (which elicited defense responses from others) to new attacks against Bernie Sanders and Al Sharpton! We now discuss those topics, almost unrelated to the earlier arguments in the chain Trump has built, because that is what he wants us to do!*
And what does he NOT want us to discuss, to the same extent?
That Russia may have interfered in the 2016 presidential elections, that Russia may have tried to interfere in the 2018 midterm elections, and that Russia will probably interfere in the 2020 elections.
Trump doesn't want us to focus on how Mitch McConnell (now called Moscow Mitch by some) made sure that the Russians have some wiggle-room left to get at important parts of the US election system. Neither does Trump want us to think too much about why he is replacing the Director of the National Intelligence, Dan Coats, with a Trump yes-man, John Ratcliffe, who lacks other qualifications for the job and who seems utterly uninterested in taking Russian intervention seriously:
In contrast to Coats, Ratcliffe is a Trump loyalist who has backed Trump's claims that Mueller 's investigation into Russian election interference was a partisan plot to unseat Trump.In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, he said the special counsel's report and its conclusions "weren't from Robert Mueller" but rather "were written by what a lot of people believe was Hillary Clinton's de facto legal team."
All this makes narcissistic sense. The narcissistic injury is about Trump's victory as not being legitimate, and to heal that injury there must not have been any outside powers who influenced the 2016 election outcome, just as his re-election in 2020 must never be questioned. I doubt Trump cares about foreign powers interfering with US elections at all, as long as it's he who gets to win.
So how do we continue playing this game? As I wrote in the previous post, the only way to beat a narcissist in his or her game is not to play at all. We can't really do that, but what we can do is keep talking about the issues Trump does not want us to talk about. Foremost among those is election integrity.
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* It's a relief for me to start seeing more clearly what Trump is doing, because of his narcissistic injury. But it's also unpleasant to realize that the same injury might well mean that Vladimir Putin will be allowed to influence the 2020 US elections.