I’ve started actually listening to the daily rallies because I’m very, very interested in tracking how this narrative is changing and being shaped, and this part was just utterly wild.

And it’s inexcusable that only one reporter, as far as I heard, challenged him on it. https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1252359167236423682

Things like this are genuinely disturbing glimpses into the nightmarish core of Trump’s experience of the world. His narcissism twists into all-encompassing paranoia; the virus is literally part of a plot designed to shame and destroy him.

I don’t think he thinks that it’s a real plot on a conscious level; I believe that for him it’s visceral and instinctive. He hears people explaining why their situation is desperate and what he hears is a calculated personal attack, because everything is.

There is no reason, as far as he’s concerned, why anyone would say “we don’t have enough of X, people are dying, we need help” except to attack him. There’s no reason why anyone would report on it other than to make him look bad.

Nothing has *any objective reality* for him apart from how it affects him, because for someone with this kind of psychology, they themselves are the only truly real thing in existence. If something is bad for him, it’s villainous. It’s personal because everything is personal.

I’m not trying to make anyone feel sympathetic toward him—really the polar opposite, because I take satisfaction in the idea of his misery. But imagine for a second just how terrifying and miserable it is to be Donald Trump right now.

Imagine living with that level of paranoia, where quite literally the entire world is conspiring against you, and you’re capable of feeling nothing for any of it other than hatred and resentment and fear.

What he says at the daily rallies—I don’t think it’s fair or accurate to call them briefings—is such a piercingly clear view into what’s in his head and it’s... it’s just really something.

Trump is very, very different from Adolf Hitler on a number of levels, but what I’m hearing from him at these rallies is alarmingly reminiscent of Hitler’s paranoid derangement in his last days in the bunker and that’s not hyperbole.

Everyone was conspiring to foil him. All his previous allies were scheming against him and always had been. Everyone around him was traitorous or incompetent and usually both. But his attention was fractured. He rambled. He threaded to have people shot and then forgot about it.

The things he said and wrote were an incoherent salad of rage and bitterness and paranoia. He spoke of himself as the hero of the German people, of his love for them, and yet he also railed against them and wanted them all dead with him.

Trump hates all of us—and that includes his base. Oh, he probably loves them in the pitiful twisted way he can love anything, but he also hates them, because he hates everyone and everything. He doesn’t care if we all die. Part of him wants us to.