Trump hesitated. "Who told you that?"
"I don't remember," I said.
"Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he's a Jew." ("I did give him a book about Hitler," Marty Davis said. "But it was My New Order, Hitler's speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I'm not Jewish.")
This Vanity Fair interview shows his anger at being asked, his forgetfulness, and his disorganized thinking, in which he basically contradicts himself. His many denials, even during the debates, of things that has had said ("Global warming is Chinese hoax" was followed later on by ("I never said that.")
Another example is when he was endorsed by David Duke, he said he had never heard of him and had never heard of "white nationalism." Of course, public records show his involvement in refusing rentals to blacks (court records) and that he had denounced Duke in 1999. Is this forgetfulness, lying, or both?
Now how does this mental disorder dovetail with a politics based on propaganda, the Politics of the Big Lie? Those who cannot focus for long can become both masters of the Big Lie (a lie so outrageous few will believe anyone would tell such a whopper and repeated over and over).
If the brain is wired to be unable to focus for long, the most impressive messages will be few, short, and repeated over and over. This is the very heart of propaganda.
The followers of authoritarian leaders who have mastered the Big Lie, perhaps gifted with the ability to condense strong emotions (of being betrayed, of being victimized, of being demeaned) into a few short messages: Build a Wall, Deport the Mexicans, Clean the Swamp, etc.
This allows both the ADD (or AD/HD) leader to concentrate and to enable the followers to dismiss critical rebuttals of simplistic ideas and lies by focusing on only a few issues, based on false information and emotional appeal (anger, hatred, scapegoats) and thus find a common bond of the master propagandists and the blind follower.
Add to this a serious sleep disorder, and we have a perfect storm of of mental derangement. Here is what Trump said during the campaign, where he often appeared with puffy eyes:
"You know, I'm not a big sleeper," he said. "I like three hours, four hours, I toss, I turn, I beep-de-beep, I want to find out what's going on." And so he watches enormous amounts of TV (Fox News) and his short sleep is interrupted by waking to check out the TV and then tweet, leading to incoherent tweets at 3 am in the morning.
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