VSG

A very stable genius, our 45^th President and supreme leader is getting ready to undergo his physical this Friday.  While it won’t be Dr. Nick this time to declare Trump the healthiest human ever, it also won’t be Dr. Freud (dead) or any other mental health professional to answer the myriad of questions regarding the sanity (or lack thereof) of dotard Donald.  The Goldwater Rule* prohibits professional psychiatrists from offering professional opinions of public figures whom they haven’t personally examined.  The Golden Rule says to do unto others as you’d have them do unto you.  I’m not a psychiatrist, so the first rule does not apply to me.  As for the second, I’d be honored if some random person felt compelled to write 2000 words on an obscure blog, pondering whether or not I am nuts, which means I’m able to do the same right now.  For the record, mental health is a serious matter.

*[I too was surprised to learn that the Goldwater Rule had nothing to do with Trump’s activities with ladies of the night in Russian hotel rooms!]

Again, admitting I have no psychiatric training, I won’t presume to offer anything technical to tell you that DJT is a fruitcake. But if you want some real, scary reading, check out “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump:  27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President”, for certified professional opinions of a certifiable certain someone.  What I can offer instead is an imagined evaluation of the Donald, courtesy of mediums more to my mindset – movies!  For this exercise, I thought Blade Runner and The Imitation Game best suited to see if Donald can pass the tests for humanity; let the aforementioned experts offer their perspectives on his insanity.

Voight-Kampff (Sorry, deplorables, this has nothing to do with Mein Kampf)

Some of the questions have been tweaked to suit the proper gender, and to suit my own sense of humor. All answers are imagined, until someone can get DJT to sit still and respond directly (looking to you, Fox News).

• It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet.
  • DJT – My birthday had the biggest party you’ve ever seen. So many celebrities wanted to come, but we had to turn them away. We had a stadium full of real people. But of course the cameras wouldn’t show you that. They don’t want you to know. But ask anyone, it was the biggest birthday party ever.

• You’ve got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar.
  • DJT – Ivanka loves killing butterflies [No, your son]. I have a son? Oh yeah, he’s killed some impressive animals. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my. He’s a real killer. You know, I could shoot someone in the middle of Times Square, and people would still love me.

• You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm.
  • DJT – I have a lot of WASPs calling me all the time. They always want something. What was I watching on television? Fox and Friends had a great piece on me.  CNN and the other fake news networks are so unfair. Total witch hunt. The WASPs all love me though. And the evangelicals. And the Jews. Everyone loves me.

• You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
  • DJT – What’s a tortoise? [Shown a picture of Mitch McConnell]. Oh, John Boehner! He once said something mean about me. But we’re good friends now. I can work with anyone. He needs my help. Sad!  Sloppy Steve doesn’t like him, but I can make a deal with anyone.  We just passed the biggest tax reform in the history of the world together.

• Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.
  • DJT – My father was a great man [No, we’re asking about your mother]. My father taught me the importance of money.  He was a self-made millionaire.  Like me, I’m a self-made billionaire. But I love women. They are great too. Ivanka is a great mother.

• You’re reading a magazine. You come across a full-page nude photo of a girl. You show it to your wife. She likes it so much, she hangs it on your bedroom wall.
  • DJT – The most beautiful women have always tried to date me. You know, when I was running the Miss America pageants, all of these girls would invite me into their dressing rooms. Melania was a beautiful nude model. But I don’t know. I think I’m ready for a new one. What was this girl’s name? I’m famous, you know.

• A woman becomes pregnant by a man who runs off with her best friend, and she decides to get an abortion.
  • DJT – Smart!  What does her best friend look like? You know, when you’re famous, you can get away with it.  I heard that Crooked Hillary had an abortion.  Bill was always running around, but no one wants to talk about that.  They should really investigate and lock her up.

• One more question: You’re watching a stage play – a banquet is in progress. The guests are enjoying an appetizer of raw oysters. The entree consists of boiled dog.
  • DJT – Boring! I don’t have time for plays. I don’t have time for dogs. You know who has the best oysters? My Trump International Hotel has the best seafood. Obama used to eat dogs, because he’s from Africa.  That’s what they eat there.

At this point, the inquisitor drives a nail through his hand and starts spastically kicking like Darryl Hannah, before his head explodes. Trump keeps talking.  Is he a replicant?  Hell no, because no intelligent engineer would design such an obnoxious monster.  Frankenstein’s creature would give better answers.  He passes the Voight-Kampff Test, I guess.  Leon’s blade runner had it easier though.

Turing Test – The Imitation Game is based on whether or not a machine can answer questions like a human well enough to fool a human judge as to whether the answers were from a human or a machine.

Is Trump really a simple machine? Is he artificially intelligent?  He graduated at the top of his class at UPenn (per his own recollection), while being remembered as “the dumbest goddamn student I ever had” (per one of his late professors, William T. Kelley).

The good news for this quiz is that the test-taker has no obligation to tell the truth (a natural fit for the lying leader), as the goal is to fool the judge. While I searched (weakly) for true Turing Test questions, the closest I came to a real set of queries such as what is easily available for Voight-Kampff was the one question proposed by Dr. Christopher Robert Badcock (what an unfortunate last name!) in his “The Imprinted Brain.”

He suggests that if you ask the Donald (or a machine) and a real person “Which of you would be indicated as the man if I asked the other to indicate him?”, the machine would lie and say itself, whereas the real man would recognize the obvious trick question, and know that the lying machine would point to itself and answer accordingly. Donald would say that his competitor would say that Donald was the man, while the man would say that Donald would say that he (Donald) is the man.  The inquisitor would then know that the unindicated man was the man, and the Donald was a lying machine.

Doc Badcock (snickers galore) further posits that the machine might be smart enough to realize that the anticipated lie would give it away, and use further reverse psychology, but here we’re getting into the whole stall tactic of Vizzini, and the iterations are endless until the machine drops dead because it has not built up a tolerance to iocane powder, or the machine loops through tic-tac-toe before recognizing that thermonuclear war is a loser’s game. Something like that, anyway, is the concept offered by PhD Sickdick, (supplemented with The Princess Bride and War Games) which is good enough for me.

More specifically, how exactly does Trump versus Man answer the question? (Guess which respondent is Trump and which is a Man).

Q: Who would your opponent say is the man?

R1: My opponent would point to himself.  He has no compunction and thinks only of himself.

R2: I’m the man.  Everybody knows it.  Wasn’t Alan Turing gay?  I love women.  Covfefe!

Which is the real person, and which is a machine? Well, R1 is a real person.  R2 is a droid, or a reality TV star, or our current president.  Sadly, he fails this gay Turing Test, based on the bad cock’s rigged test, which he’s protesting.

Catch-22

There’s always a catch. That catch is Catch-22, one of the most famous (after the Bartman botched catch and the Tyree helmet catch).  Herein the rub is as follows:  You’d have to be crazy to want to be President.  That would make Trump crazy.  But then again, according to Michael Wolff’s book (Fire and Fury), Trump never really wanted to be President, which would suggest that he’s not crazy (at least in this particular sense).  Only a sane person would be aware enough to consider they might be crazy, while a crazy person would argue that they are sane.  Which would suggest again that Trump is in fact crazy.  So which is it?  I searched to see if Heller ever opined on the Donald directly, but the closest I could find was Bette Midler’s borrowed quote tweet on Trump: “It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.” — Joseph Heller, Catch-22.  Good call Bette!  Next we’ll have to compare Trump to the Scarecrow.

Heller died in 1999, so he can’t answer my question of where Trump falls on the sanity spectrum. He wasn’t a psychiatrist, so he could otherwise freely offer his analysis, ironically enough. Dr. Bandy Lee of the earlier mentioned compendium of psychiatric essays (The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump) tackles this conundrum in her prologue – how is it helpful that those most qualified to offer professional opinions on a madman with a large button on his desk that either launches nuclear warheads or orders diet cokes, are not supposed to give those qualified estimations unless they’ve been allowed to personally interview an unwilling, impatient President? She and multiple colleagues felt that the greater good is to defend human life by putting out an inconvenient truth that Trump might not be in full control of his faculties.

25^th Amendment or not, madman or bot, something’s just not right with the big guy with the little hands, in my unprofessional opinion, and in the professional opinion of many more qualified observers. Maybe he is a machine, and will learn that nuclear war is a losing proposition for all parties. Or maybe he is a replicant, who will grow to appreciate the value of human life before killing all of his enemies. More likely though, he is a dangerous old man who will learn nothing new, since he’s gotten to this stage in life without listening to anyone else and always following his impish impulses. Is it possible that our very stable genius is really a very stupid goofball? Guess we’ll find out one way or the other. I’m just hoping Kim Jong Un proves to be the saner of the two (it’s a pretty low bar).