How to destroy a democracy and create a manipulative pathocracy
An “unfamous” Polish psychologist named Andrew Lebaczewki had the misfortune of living through Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and Joe Stalin of the Communists, but he used the time to develop the splendid idea of a “Pathocracy,” which he defined as a working democracy ruled by normal people to a dictatorship ruled by psychopaths. His ideas never got much play because publishers were afraid to spread them because his thoughts were so  political.

Almost 80 years later in 2024, Kipp Mitchell published her PhD work after she had interviewed many predatory personalities — some professional psychologists employed by hospitals and clinics. She spent five years developing 20 attributes of predatory personality types. She developed four “clusters” from the 20 types:

Cluster One: a dynamic need for control; a grandiose sense of self; pathological inner response to challenge; vengeful; and refusal to compromise.
Cluster Two: being predatory or exploitive; sadistic and cruel; having a low regard for laws, agreements, social and moral codes; no boundaries in sexual relationships; unreasonable expectations of others.
Cluster Three: relates to truth: dark personalities cultivate a façade of normality; they are chameleon-like; dishonest; devious and manipulative; and unwilling to accept responsibility for the negative impacts they cause.
Cluster Four: is around the Dark Personality’s own interior life: their emotions are acted and they do not experience affinity or the joy that comes with it; they are callous and devoid of empathy, unremorseful; self-interested and brazen.”

It’s fascinating to read what excellent workers said about bosses
• “I constantly worry that he will ruin my career.”
• “I worry that they will….want to seek revenge.”
• “I am pretty sure there are no lengths to which this man would not go to see that I am destroyed.”
• “People can’t get it. People who don’t work in our fields….often don’t hear about or see the kind of evilness perpetrated on others, and just can’t believe it. Whereas, unfortunately, it’s commonplace in my work.”
The last comment came from a forensic expert practitioner.
Perhaps some column readers will remember my oft-used description of Donald John Trump’s “clusters” for more than a decade: sexual predator, jerk, prick, asshole, malignant narcissist, socio-psychopathological nutcake, and war criminal.”
Please read what dictionaries, encyclopedias and the American Psychiatric Association’s Mental Deficiencies #5 lists characteristics of those characters. As an example, a jerk is also a prick and is also an asshole as defined by psychologists and dictionaries. There is a good match between Mitchell’s clusters and my one line.

Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of California Essi Viding also investigates clusters: “I often think of these peoples (in clusters) as having an in-group of one. In social psychology we talk about people we care about, and most of us, because we are group-living animals, collaborate, do altruistic acts, we’ll behave in ways that across the ages have increased our survival. But across the ages, we’ve had people who exploit other people’s altruism, and when the chips come, only care about themselves.”

Donald Trump, a malignant narcissist, loves only himself, and is described in all clusters. Please examine the 20 characteristics listed in the clusters and identify how many do not apply to the ruler of Trumpistan and “the best president the United States has ever had. Better than Lincoln or Washington.”

A few examples of the 20 attributes
of predatory personalities
The “Only I Can Do It” president has done thousands of illegal acts that fit under four clusters:
1. Posted that “Kharg Island being blown to smithereens!!!” during his war with Iran.
2. Stated the war with Iran was not a war, just a minor engagement. “Small potatoes.”
3. “The Iranian military has been destroyed. All of their navy ships are at the bottom of the ocean. The war is basically over.”
4. The United States controls the Strait of Hormuz, has closed an’s harbors, and the area should be renamed the Strait of Trump.
5.  Canada should become our 51st state and Lake Ontario should be renamed Lake America just like he has renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. How about renaming New Mexico to New America?
6.  He has established a “midterm convention for the Republican Party in Dallas because he is “ on the brink of another landslide victory.”
7.  His monuments and commemorative coins indicate “I am the greatest and most popular person to ever serve as president, maybe the most popular person to ever live.
8.  Like his father Fred, Donald Trump has believed in the philosophy of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. It was basically the “religion” of the Trump family.
9. Every small boat coming out of Latin American countries is carrying fentanyl to the United States, so we blow them up and kill the crews, a total of 239 so far. “The boats are all carrying drugs.” They are not fishing.
10. Posted “At my direction, and through a partnership of private business, have secured majority U.S. control of more than 65 BILLION BARRELS of proven Oil Reserves in Venezuela, at no cost to the American Taxpayer.” “This act will reduce prices at the pump.”
11. His crowd at his first inaugural was much larger than Obama’s crowd in 2009.
12. He is more popular than Jesus.
13. He believes he can do no wrong, is loved by the people, feared by enemies, his deals never fail, his wars are overwhelming victories and his party is on the march to another majority.
14. There are no icebergs in front of him. Wind turbines cause cancer, so,  that’s why he cut $4 billion from their windpower construction funds. Solar panels and EVs make heat worse. After all, climate change is a well-known hoax. Oil and gas do the work.
15. During a debate with Kamala Harris, Trump said: “They’re (people from Haiti) eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. Twenty thousand illegal Haitian immigrants have descended on a town of 58,000 people, destroying their way of life. Residents are reporting that the migrants are walking off with the town’s geese. They’re taking the geese.  You know where the geese are in the park. And even walking off with their pets. Haiti is a filthy, dirty, disgusting place. They probably have AIDS.”

16. Trump: “The S&P 500 had 74 all-time highs, for the booming manufacturing sector.” (This was when manufacturing had 62,000 fewer workers in a month.)  The University of Michigan Survey of Consumer Confidence hit a record low in 2026 and continues to sink down.
17. Thirty-thousand Dollar General and Dollar Tree stores that normally sell to the poor last quartile, increased sales by 3.7% because grocery and gas prices are going up  – and so was the inflation rate.
18. The Labor Department has changed the H-2A guest worker program to make foreign farm workers cheaper to hire by cutting hourly wages by as much as $7.00.
19. Trump’s distain for NATO and the United Nations is gradually forcing a “new world order.”
20. On his relationship with Dolly Parton: “I knew her a little bit. She really liked me. I will tell you!” She refused a government medal he was going to give her at the White House. She did not want to support his politics.

The Trump administration:
A blend of cruelty and stupidity
Tanzanian Benjamin Fernandez was 17 when he accepted the offer of a scholarship from the University of Northwestern-St. Paul. When he was 21, Stanford University offered him a full scholarship for its MBA program. After graduating, he went to work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he worked in financial technology. Then he started a financial-technology company in Palo Alto, Cal., that now serves 500,000 customers in the Divided States of America. 

His company NALA pays a lot of taxes. But now he must run his company from abroad because the Trump administration has passed laws that bars Tanzanian nationals from the DSA. The law bars people from 24 countries under new entry restrictions.
Fernandez recently wrote an article in The New York Times titled “I Went to School in America. Started My Business in America. I Can’t Stay in America.”

The following is my edited version of his statement about his treatment:
   
   “I am far from being the only person affected by the shuttering of U.S. ports of entry to foreign nationals from all 39 countries with travel bans. I arrived in the U.S. on a student visa. I am one of 234 of the founders or co-founders behind America’s current privately held billion0-dollar companies, each creating on average over a thousand American jobs. Nearly three in five of those billion-dollar start-up countries have an immigrant founder; almost half of the Fortune 500 in 2025 was built by immigrants or their children, producing over 15 million jobs worldwide. I have Tanzanian friends who got admitted into top schools like Harvard this year, but they can’t attend because of the visa rule. I can list companies and individuals whose lives and contributions to society were predicated on sane border policies. Two Nigerians came to this country as teenagers and built companies. One is the t scheduling company Calendly in Atlanta worth three billion. The other business, an infrastructure firm, was recently sold to BlackRock for $12.5 billion. The seller now sits on the board of OpenAI. America has always been exceptional because it believed in people before anyone else did. It believed in me. What happened?”  The answer is simple. “Four Cluster” Trump happened. Let’s get very serious for a moment. Do you think Donald Trump would punch the nuclear button to destroy all mankind and the earth if he is disclosed as a loser? Would anything restrain him?

Don’t Understand Trump? Read About His Teacher, Roy Cohn

  “American Scoundrel,” a biography of Roy Cohn written by Kai Bird, reveals why Trump is what he is. Cohn was chief counsel to Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, who died of booze and syphilis, who charged there were 225 Communists in the U.S. state Department, claiming he had a list by waving a piece of paper---that was blank. But here is what he taught the ignorant, lying Trump as Bird put it: “Deny everything, apologize for nothing, hog the spotlight, counterattack, counterpunch, countersue, always declare victory even when you lose (especially when you lose!), resentment sells, nativism sells, cruelty, if not yet normal, becomes the norm, rules and traditions are for suckers, and everyone is, if nor corrupt, is at least corruptible.” End of lesson.”

  The Statue of Liberty is on the East Coast where Trump is filling Washington D.C. with gold statues, triumphal gold arches, a White House turned into a gold house, and an Oval Office filled with thrift store gold junk. I’m suggesting that Trump balance this on the West Coast by building a huge gold statue of himself on Alcatraz with an inscription similar to the one on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your billionaires, oligarchs, and “best of the best,” who never have enough, your huddled CEOs yearning for more, as long as they are all White and have yachts to leave these teeming shores.” The gold plaque will identify it as the “Statue of Stupidity.”

  of the environment!” Only 25% of French homes have air conditioning.
The Swiss are experimenting with placing solar panels between train tracks to see if they can get enough electricity to power their electric trains. It is working. They may install solar panels on 3,000 miles of track in Switzerland to run their trains.
The Divided States of America has 140,000 miles of track. Solar panels between them could help solve a major problem!