Will anyone ever forget that moment? When Donald Trump came back from the hospital and went out on the White House balcony and did nothing but stand there as if he was inspecting his own country while also waiting for that country to pay homage back at his toughness, his “glory.” It was Trump’s “Mussolini” moment.

Business Insider has some excepts coming from Mary Trump’s “The Reckoning: Our nation’s trauma and finding a way to heal” and, as one might expect, Mary focuses more on the psychological underpinnings of Trump’s behavior, the dangers to the people around him, and the danger to the nation, rather than adding new facts.

The excerpts center primarily on Trump’s COVID infection and his behavior in and around that time. As is typical, it did nothing more than reinforce what Trump already thought of himself.

Mary Trump has asthma, and said: So I am acutely aware of what it looks like when somebody is struggling to breathe. He was in pain, he was afraid, but he would never admit that to anybody – not even himself. Because, as always, the consequences of admitting vulnerability were much more frightening to him than being honest.”

Rawstory brings out an old Trump quote that reinforces just how deep this denial went and how it became so dangerous:

Last October, Donald Trump was shortly admitted to Walter Reed Medical Center in D.C. after the White House announced that he’d been infected with COVID-19. Three days later, the former president was discharged from the hospital, after which he greeted a crowd celebrating the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barret, took off his mask and told supporters: “You’re going to beat it [coronavirus] … As your leader, I had to do that. I knew there’s danger to it, but I had to do it. I stood out front, and led.”

No, he didn’t pay attention to the guidelines, got sick in the safest building in the world, and was out of commission as a “leader” for three days. He didn’t “lead,” he was a jackass that ignored what he heard, acted like a jackass, fell down to the point that he needed someone to pick him up. Lead? He didn’t even act like an adult, as someone you’d let watch your children over a weekend.

Trump’s behavior was so shockingly awful that his attending physician at the hospital called it “insanity,” and said that every single person…in the vehicle during that completely unnecessary Presidential “drive-by” just now has to be quarantined for 14 days,” Phillips wrote in a since-deleted tweet. “They might get sick. They may die. For political theater. Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater.”

The doctor got fired, “Vindman’ed, for telling the truth about the actor parading around as “leader.”

This paragraph seems especially chilling and especially accurate:

Last week, she revealed that the former president had used the phrase “it is what it is” in reference to the surge in the coronavirus death toll last year, according to Business Insider. “That was a popular expression in my family, and hearing it sent a chill down my spine,” she wrote. “Whenever my grandfather, my aunt, or one of my uncles had said it, it was always with a cruel indifference to somebody else in despair.”

“Cruel indifference to somebody else in despair,” nearly all of us have an easier time imagining what it might be like to be colorblind than to be that blind to others’ suffering. Focused entirely on himself. We saw how that played out on January 6th.

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