Outside the Beltway

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1. drj says:
   Saturday, 11 April 2026 at 07:31

   The Beutler piece has a few lines that stood out to me:

   This will not—literally cannot—fool the leaders of Pakistan or Iran or Israel or the Gulf States or Russia or China or our western allies. […]

   But it might fool people who identify as MAGA Republicans, and a subset of American swing voters

   We are all being forced to deal with statements, claims, and even policies that are obviously absurd because some of the dumbest, most gullible people on the planet* somehow became the deciding factor in US politics.

   And it’s not just Iran, and ICE, and whatnot, i.e., things that, theoretically at least, could form the basis of some sort of reasonable policy disagreement.

   We can’t even convince these dumbfucks that a bucket of orange paint and the World’s Worst Overcomb(tm) do not, in fact, constitute signs of physical vigor.

   * A group that happens to include some very fancy, very expensive Tallahassee and Kansas City-based lawyers I had the personal misfortune of having had to deal with recently. Just a reminder that if the rubes were just the rubes as we traditionally picture them (i.e., trailer parks and food stamps), we wouldn’t even be in this mess.

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2. charontwo says:
   Saturday, 11 April 2026 at 07:58

   @drj:

   If we are to discuss the results of Trump’s behavior, consider what happens when a pathological narcissist is frustrated by inability to obtain the narcissistic supply he needs to function:

   “Mike Brock”

   There is a personality structure in the clinical literature that operates, neurologically, on the same brain pathways as drug addiction. It requires a constant external supply — admiration, dominance, confirmation of specialness — not as a preference but as a structural necessity. The self, in this configuration, has no stable internal foundation. It exists only in the reflection coming back from the outside world. When that reflection confirms the self-image, the system functions. When it contradicts it — not merely fails to confirm, but actively contradicts — the clinical literature describes a predictable sequence: escalation, rage, reality distortion, and ultimately collapse.

   Dr. Ramani Durvasula, whose clinical framework on narcissistic supply has become a reference text in the field, and Sam Vaknin, whose taxonomy of narcissistic collapse is the most granular available, describe the withdrawal phase in terms that should alarm anyone thinking about institutional resilience. Vaknin distinguishes between partial and total collapse — partial collapse producing paranoid, persecutory ideation (”everyone is against me”), total collapse producing something closer to psychic disintegration. Craig Malkin’s “Triple E” framework — exploitation, entitlement, empathy-impairment — maps the specific cognitive features that make the collapse dangerous rather than merely personal. The empathy impairment is the critical variable. It means the people around the collapsing subject are not experienced as people. They are supply sources. When they fail to provide supply, they become threats.

   Dr. Frank George, the neuroscientist who has mapped the overlap between addiction pathways and pathological narcissism, put it simply: when supply is cut, the response is withdrawal. And withdrawal in someone holding executive power is not a personal crisis. It is a national security event

   The man I am describing is the President of the United States. And his supply sources are failing simultaneously.

   Let me map them.

   …

   When supply sources fail simultaneously, the clinical literature describes a specific cascade. I want to be precise about what to watch for, because the cascade has policy implications.

   Desperate attempts to regain supply. Expect increasingly theatrical gestures — executive orders designed for the announcement rather than the outcome, sudden provocative statements that reframe the news cycle, manufactured crises that restore the sense of civilizational stakes. The Iran deadline was arguably already this. When the existing supply sources are contradicting the self-image, the instinct is to find a new supply source large enough to drown out the contradiction.

   Narcissistic rage. Directed at whoever is perceived as withholding supply. Watch who gets fired next. Bondi was fired when the Epstein coverage became a supply problem. The firing pattern is not personnel management. It is supply management.

   Reality distortion intensifies. The gap between declared reality and actual reality widens. As I wrote yesterday, this gap is already being levied as a tax on American households — the Victory Tax, denominated in gas prices, supply chain disruption, and a strait under toll-booth control that Hassett keeps promising will reopen. As the supply crisis deepens, the declared reality will diverge further from the actual one. The announcements will become more extravagant. The facts will become more inconvenient.

   The search for novel supply sources. When existing sources fail, the clinical literature is consistent: novel supply sources are sought. In a president, this means new crises, new enemies, new wars. The Iran war was arguably already a supply-seeking event — the civilizational stakes, the deadline, the dramatic save. The question is what comes next when this supply source also degrades.

   The type transition. Vaknin’s most important clinical observation: the grandiose narcissist, under sufficient supply deprivation, shifts toward paranoid, persecutory mode. “Everyone admires me” becomes “everyone is against me.” The world reorganizes itself, in the subject’s perception, from an audience into a conspiracy. This transition is particularly dangerous in a holder of executive power because it rationalizes the most extreme uses of that power as defensive rather than aggressive. Research on NPD and aging suggests the condition intensifies rather than moderates under stress — the mask cracks, and what is underneath is less controlled, not more

   etc., etc.

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3. drj says:
   Saturday, 11 April 2026 at 08:24

   @charontwo:

   Still, for a brief, beautiful moment, the libs were thoroughly owned.

   You can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.

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