Does Donald Trump know he is a racist?
Donald Trump denies he is a racist is the video above when asked about it after his “#hithole” comments last week.
Trump replies when questioned by reporters, “No, I am not a racist.”
Are you scratching your head?
How can he say that after what he said last week? Does he believe people are that dumb or can he, himself, not see it?
Well, the answer is both. He does believe people are beneath him and can’t see what he sees, but he also doesn’t see who he is.
When you look at someone who has very ugly traits or behaviors, be it habitual lying, narcissism, psychopathy, racism, bigotry, etc, they will not see themselves as “that” person. “That person” is a bad person and no one sees themselves as bad. “Bad” is always someone else. No one ever owns “bad”.
This is why negative behaviors and traits like this continue on and on. The person with the slanted way of seeing the world has no idea they see the world slanted. If you talk to them, they will come up with 100 justifications as to why they are not that person and why in the end, you are wrong and they are right.
I am often asked in my classes, does a psychopath know they are a psychopath?
The answer is no.
Do they know they are different?
Most of the time, yes, but they attribute it to many reasons that are positive and not negative. They are smarter, wiser, more in control, aren’t emotional, etc.
No one sees themselves as bad. Take a look at yourself. We all have “bad” traits. Do you own yours??
Most likely not. When is the last time you lied and said “my bad”. Probably never. You justified why you should do it, didn’t you? Or you wouldn’t have done it.
The healthier you are mentally, the more you are aware of your shortcomings and can openly talk about them and discuss them. The more you are unable to face them, talk about them and own them, the more you lean towards displaying dark behaviors in a state of denial.
Where do you fall on that scale?
Can you even look at yourself?
Happy Monday!
I agree that he can’t look at himself. I think that even if he tried to, on a vet or on a lark, he wouldn’t be able to.
If my comment isn’t here, does it mean that it didn’t pass moderation or that I failed to post it?
You haven’t watched him speak enough.
yeah. i read more now and saw that in the past his company actively discriminated against black people. and saw more instances given. so yes, you’re right.
Trump can’t hate them THAT much:
“So Trump meets with my brother, and my brother comes up with an idea to convert Mar-a-Lago into a private club that is open to everyone,” Richard Rampell tells me. At the time, Palm Beach’s Waspy private clubs had what he calls an open secret: as Trump claimed, they didn’t admit Jews or African-Americans.
With the specter of his lawsuit still hanging over the council, it voted 4–1 to approve Trump’s plan, and those who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, become members of the other clubs now had a club of their own. Naturally, the question when it comes to Donald Trump is always: Was it for him or them? “He basically opened Palm Beach up . . . to make a buck,” says Laurence Leamer, author of The President’s Butler, a novel about a “flamboyant” New Yorker who becomes president. “But he did it, and a lot of people in his shoes at that time wouldn’t have done it.”
I know so many people who are just like that regarding getting fatigued with the way some people react to some other person. It’s a trap though, and it’s an easy one to fall into because many times it happens pretty much automatically without even thinking about it.
Person A is a jerk.
Person B can’t stand person A and says all kinds of nasty things about person A. Some are totally accurate. Many are exaggerations or just imagined outright.
Is person A not a jerk because of what person B does, or does person A actually stand on their own?
You can even reverse this hypothetical scenario.
Person A is an incredibly amazing person.
Person B is enamored with person A.
Does person A somehow become a terrible person because person B props them up on a pedestal they don’t really belong on despite person A actually being a great person?
Basically, if we let our opinions of a person whom we can evaluate on their own merits be influenced by what third parties say about that person, we open ourselves up to a kind of “denial of service attack” to use an IT term. In essence, all you have to do to tear someone down is find some terrible person to say nice things about them. For a relevant example, when David Duke endorsed Trump during the campaign, that may or may not say anything about Trump. There’s nothing anyone can do to stop someone from endorsing or supporting another person, so does that endorsement automatically mean Trump is a racist? No, it doesn’t. It only means that a racist person endorsed Trump for one reason or another. Trump should be evaluated on his own merits or lack thereof. The endorsement might say something about Trump’s policies being favorable to racists, for example. Or it might only say that one of Trump’s opponents found a way to get David Duke to endorse Trump as a way of making him look bad. Or a number of other possibilities.
Now, when someone like David Duke endorses you, while you can’t prevent him from endorsing you, you can disavow his support of you— that’s entirely within your locus of control, and a choice that you are always free to make of your own free will. So the disavowal or lack of disavowal actually DOES say something about Trump, because no one else can make that choice for him. And then if you take another step further out of the picture frame, how someone else chooses to write about the endorsement or lack of disavowal also says nothing about Trump, and has no bearing on his own merits, and so should have no influence over how one would evaluate him.
And the same would be true of Clinton, or of any other person who has ever existed, even of you and I. To do otherwise is to surrender our individual autonomy and make ourselves in a way beholden to others whether we recognize it or not. It’s a trap to base our evaluation of someone on what another person says about them to the exclusion of what we can know about that person directly from their own words and actions. If you’re going to use a third party’s input as a consideration in evaluating someone else, it’s better to take that third party’s own words and actions into consideration in evaluating THEM, and then use that evaluation as the context in which to inform our assessment of that first person, because then we’re more likely to get a more accurate result, and it’ll be easier to take into account our own personal biases because they won’t be all intertwined with someone else’s. Keeping things maintained within their own proper contexts rather than mixing them with unrelated contexts breeds clarity and accuracy.
>“That person” is a bad person and no one sees themselves as bad.
In my experience interviewing thousands of people, some (not all) of the people who have criminal convictions won’t see them, because they did “it” for a reason they perceive to be good – even magnanimous – maybe even the best of reasons. If someone committed retail theft, it’s because their kids didn’t have anything for their birthday. In some of these cases they perceive the ends really do justify the means. They truly do not seem to comprehend that what they did was wrong and illegal, and the reason they did it is inconsequential in the eyes of the law.
The person they are is good, and the bad act they are accused of doing is (at best) a means to a very good end, in their view.
I would hypothesize that people like Trump will not see themselves as racist because of the exact same reasoning – they believe what they are doing is for the good of the country (or whatever good it might be) and that what others are calling racism is something they believe they can justify if it helps or protects their own people (or reasoning similar to that).
So here’s the big point (from a recruiter’s perspective) – people will open up when their bad behavior is couched terms they find to be very good. For example, “It says on this report that you have a conviction for retail theft. Was it because you didn’t have anything to give your mom for Mother’s Day, and you didn’t want to let her down?” I could be 100% wrong in my guess about Mother’s Day, but they will respond with the actual good reason they did the bad thing, and open up to me. Not every time, but quite often. They do not perceive they are that bad person, but they perceive themselves as a person who was able to give mom something for Mother’s Day (or whatever the reason is), even if they had to do something bad to get it, it’s worth it, and therefore not bad.
Tom Ripley:
Well, whatever you do, however terrible, however hurtful, it all makes
sense, doesn’t it? In your head. You never meet anybody that thinks
they’re a bad person.
Has anyone ever replied that they’ve been working hard on trying to understand why they committed the crime in the first place? Or that they were consumed with guilt after they’d done it? I would think that not having a right answer to your question would be the best answer, or that citing specifically how their crime hurt others, expressing remorse for it, and how they would have done things differently would be the way to go. That’s what I would be looking for as an interviewer, but then again that person could be a very intelligent psychopath telling you what you want to hear. It always baffles me how criminals don’t know how to fool the parole board.
So I have many times acknowledged my faults and it makes me feel better to know I might be more healthy mentally than I believed
I grew up in say neurotic environment with a very controlling parent.
It is very hard to say my bad but I’m more prone to than not.
I’m always harder on myself than the other way
Once again, you are spot on with your assessment. Taking it a step further, I think people have distorted the definition of racism/racist. I’ve seen interviews of people saying hated filled remarks, but then adamantly deny being racist. To your point, they don’t want to own that label.
**What did you think of the doctor’s health examination of Trump?
With black unemployment falling to a record low, let’s ask ourselves what matters more:
1. Results of the president’s policies.
2. What somebody thinks that the president thinks.
Of topic -please do a post on The Dylan Farrow interview on CBS This Morning. I am so curious what you can tell us about her body language and if she is telling the truth about Woody Allen.
I believe that owning my mistakes is an attribute to my character. Saying…”Oops–my bad” and apologizing for it makes me a better person. I have no problem admitting I went off half cocked, but I highly judge others who don’t. What’s the big deal in owning it? What’s wrong with admitting you are human? At the same time, I’ve been told by a few that I’m self-righteous, and that label, I readily own. It’s something I should be ashamed of, but I’m not. Or should I not be ashamed of being self rightous? Sometimes I worry that having that trait makes me a psychopath because I lack empathy, empathy for those who lie, cheat, and steal or try to buck the system or hurt others to get ahead. I know that things are never all black and white, these people are obviously hurting in some way, but this is my problem with people. I lack empathy for liars, cheaters, and thieves–and to protect myself, I hide under my self-righteous umbrella as I rebuke them. Maybe I should find a better neighborhood to live in.
Why would calling some countries shitholes mean that someone is a racist? I come from Hungary, and I am willing to admit that my country is less developed that most western countries and in many ways backward. It is not a shithole though, there are countries that are way more backward then Hungary. THere is nothing racist in this.
I’d much rather you ask, “Is Donald Trump a sexual predator?” than ask about if he knows he’s racist.
Just my preferance.