Saturday afternoon here in California’s Central Valley. Pleasant day overall, breezy and not bad. Considering.

Blogging in the backyard again. Outside has become a habit, a quiet influence over a mental-screaming exasperation for our dour-looking predicament, watching a world disintegrate on that laptop seen below (also off an iPad).

A high vexation point is the real horror of the T-Rump. The way-worse person in charge of a way-big calamity. In fact, the way-worse person for anything, mainly because the T-Rump is a way-worse person, except in one particular case where he’s the best person, that’s in being shitty.
When the T-Rump came down that escalator nearly five years ago, I just knew him then as a TV douchebag, but shortly after he started the debates and the media was full of stories about the sonofabitch, I discovered the guy is a class-A asshole, who’d lie, cheat, steal and maybe kill to do whatever he wanted.

A lot of people, even knowing how monstrous he was, still voted for him — a crazy view of how crazy it is the T-Rump is POTUS, and we’re not — via PsyPost last Wednesday:

American voters view Donald Trump as having traits associated with sadistic personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder, according to new research published in Clinical Psychological Science.
The study found that even those who personally voted for Trump perceived him as having a highly disordered personality.
…
About 59-percent of participants reported voting for Clinton while reported 41-percent voted for Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

Unexpectedly, the positive and negative videos did not appear to influence the participants’ perceptions of Trump.
This could be due to the fact that they were already well exposed to his personality.
The researchers collected their data during the week after the 2016 election.

But the researchers did find that both conservatives and liberals perceived Trump as highly sadistic, narcissistic, antisocial, and passive-aggressive, though liberals tended to rate Trump’s personality as more dysfunctional in general compared to conservatives.

Jacob A. Fiala, a psychometrist at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs Aging Center:

“We found that, on average, those who voted for Trump and those who voted for Clinton did not have wildly different views of Trump’s personality. Both groups saw him as particularly sadistic and narcissistic, and even though the two groups disagreed about how prominently he displayed these traits, his own supporters still judged him to be more sadistic and narcissistic than 90-percent of people,” Fiala told PsyPost.

“So, my key take-away is that American voters were not as divided on whether Donald Trump displays narcissistic traits, for example, as they were on what it means to have a leader with narcissistic traits. What can be expected of a leader with narcissistic traits?”

And this take: ‘The participants observed Trump through the lens of the media, so it is unclear how well their assessments reflect his actual personality. But the researchers doubt that Trump’s media persona is significantly different than his real one.‘

And the survey was done in late 2016, now all these years later, the horror even more real. Insane how people work. Digby wrote this earlier today, seemed to fit: ‘And again, what makes me so stunned, even to this day, is not really him — it’s the people who obviously admire these personality traits. I can’t get past it. Are nearly half the people like this and I failed to see it all these years? Or are they so witless that they can’t see how pathologically incompetent this makes him?‘

And here we are…

(Illustration: ‘Basic Shapes,‘ by caricaturist/illustrator Chong Jit Leong found here).