I wrote this more than a month ago, left it as a draft.
10:41 am. One man. A banner scribbled across my TV reads, “Trump whispers to his attorney.” This is news. This is news 24-7 when a certain someone yawns, closes his eyes, scratches his face, or under the microscope of the ubiquitous cameras that follow him, does anything at all. One man whose every thought, every sentence, every look, however stupid or inconsequential, lights up the airwaves, whose impact on so many is immeasurable. One man.
I just finished reading Neal Bascom’s book Hunting Eichmann tracing the fifteen year quest by Israeli agents to find and try Adolph Eichmann, the notorious Nazi responsible for implementing the plans to exterminate Jews in Europe. One man.
One of his victims:
“…he had been beaten, herded off to a barracks, stripped, inspected, deloused, shaved and tattoed on his left forearm with the sequence A3800. The next morning, he had been forced to work in the gas chambers where he suspected his family had been killed during the night. Sapir dragged the dead from the chambers and placed them on their backs in the yard, where a barber cut offg their hair and a dental mechanic ripped out any gold teeth. Then he carried the corpses to large pits, where they were stacked like logs and burned to ashes. A channel running through the middle of the pit drained the fat exuding from the bodies. That fat was used to stoke the crematorium fires.” And this was just one day. And the ashes? They were sprinkled across the sidewalks so the men wearing those shiny SS boots wouldn’t slip.
One man. Adolph Eichmann, a man who never expressed remorse, who believed in God, who never thought he had done anything wrong, did to more than six million others what he had done to David Sapir. Before he was hanged he said, “I have peace in my heart. In fact, I am astonished that I have such peace…Death is but the release of the soul.”
One man caused such devastation to so many.
Timothy McVeigh
The Independent reported that “In April 1995, with help of accomplice of Terry Nichols, a friend from army training, the disillusioned McVeigh had driven a truck bomb beneath the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and lit a two-minute fuse before fleeing the scene in a second vehicle he had parked nearby. The truck, a 1993 Ford F-700 rental vehicle, contained 4,800lbs of explosives and it destroyed almost all the nine-story property, killing 168 people, including 19 children.”
He was executed six years later. So many members of the families whose lives he had stolen couldn’t witness the execution so it was beamed by satellite to them.
“McVeigh had not made any final words, no apology to the families of those who died. Indeed, before his execution, the disillusioned young man had expressed regret he had not killed more people.”
One man. 168 victims. 19 children.
Keith Davidson
A lawyer, Davidson cut deals for Karen McDougal and Stormy Daniels, and on election night 2016, when he realized that those deals, kept secret, had led to Trump’s unexpected election, Davidson texted National Enquirer editor-in-chief Dylan Howard, a co-conspirator in the catch and kill scheme,“What have we done?”
It took two this time, two men whose possibly illegal activities rigged the election in favor of Donald Trump, the last of the four individuals whose remorseless. narcissistic, sociopathic behaviors, have affected—and in Trump’s case, Individual #1, still continue to affect the lives of millions of people.
Donald Trump
For the capitol police who died, for the rioters who stormed the capitol on Trump’s bequest, for the thousands who died because of his irresponsible mismanaging of Covid, like Eichmann and McVeigh, he feels only justification, not remorse. "Why do I have to repent or ask for forgiveness, if I am not making mistakes? I work hard, I'm an honorable person."
Eichmann, McVeigh, Trump, and Davidson, the latter, who along with the National Enquirer made Trump possible.
The term sociopath refers to someone living with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) — as does the term psychopath.
“The most recent edition of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illness, which mental health professionals use to diagnose mental health conditions, defines ASPD as a consistent disregard for rules and social norms and repeated violation of other people’s rights.
People with the condition might seem charming and charismatic at first, at least on the surface, but they generally find it difficult to understand other people’s feelings. They often:
break rules or laws
behave aggressively or impulsively
feel little guilt for harm they cause others
use manipulation, deceit, and controlling behavior