I don’t often agree with David Brooks, but I think he hit the nail on the head in his opinion piece “Donald Trump’s Sad, Lonely Life“. Here’s an excerpt:
Politics is an effort to make human connection, but Trump seems incapable of that. He is essentially adviser-less, friendless. His campaign team is made up of cold mercenaries at best and Roger Ailes at worst. His party treats him as a stench it can’t yet remove.
He was a germophobe through most of his life and cut off contact with others, and now I just picture him alone in the middle of the night, tweeting out hatred.
Trump breaks his own world record for being appalling on a weekly basis, but as the campaign sinks to new low after new low, I find myself experiencing feelings of deep sadness and pity.
Imagine if you had to go through a single day without sharing kind little moments with strangers and friends.
Imagine if you had to endure a single week in a hate-filled world, crowded with enemies of your own making, the object of disgust and derision.
You would be a twisted, tortured shrivel, too, and maybe you’d lash out and try to take cruel revenge on the universe. For Trump this is his whole life.
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My horrible father was a third child (started cheating on my mother within a year of their marriage)
I’m a third child
Trump is a third child
My son is a third child
He has a third child son.
All of us spend our lives trying to get attention. Trying to get what we feel we’ve been cheated out of.
Oldest children are the entrepreneurs. Lots of studies on child position.
Most presidents are oldest: Bill clinton, George Bush, Obama, Hillary Clinton with her two worthless brothers (the youngest and a third child has a daughter who is a friend of my nine year old granddaughter)
http://deadpresidents.tumblr.com/post/15457991558/which-presidents-were-the-oldest-child-the
(or oldest male)
@EBDOUG:
This was studied extensively during the Apollo program. Seemingly unreasonable percentage of the astronauts were first born or only child. Turned out, first borns form an unexpectedly large fraction of the world. More than 50%!
I am a first born.
Some stats and links, and explanations:
https://www.quora.com/Are-80-of-Harvard-students-first-born-children-If-so-why
And middle children are the caretakers.
Trump and his siblings are anchor babies. According to his wishes, children born here of illegal immigrants could be deported. This should be brought up at the debate on Wednesday when the subject is discussed.
His mother Mary Ann came here to visit her siblings and stayed. She became a part of Fred Trump’s household. (probably a domestic) Then Fred married her so she was naturalized. Maybe we can deport him back to Scotland for “inciting to riot”. He was good looking in his hey day. His looks were from his mother.
It’s interesting and perhaps instructive to discuss the influence of birth order on one’s psychology, inclinations and ambitions. Of course, being a trend implies it’s been broken at some point, otherwise it’d be an absolute.
Point being, at this moment in history we are presented with two unique individuals to choose from for our President, both of whom have a long public resume and video/audio-taped history at our disposal to help us decide which lever to pull.
I still have faith in the overall judgement of the American public and the integrity of the electoral process that the right person will be elected next month. Even after seeing pathetically humorous skits produced in a Trump stonghold rural area of my home state of PA. http://on.cc.com/2dBW1Fy it seems pretty clear they are not the majority among us, thankfully. The greatest threat, perhaps, would be apathy at the polls, esp in swing states.
If sanity should prevail farther down ticket into the House and Senate on election day, there might be a real chance for Congress to finally start earning some of its pay again for a change. Of course, Ryan and McConnell aren’t going to lie down either way, so buckle up, it’s going to be a more or less bumpy one.
BTW, digging a little discovered that Abe Lincoln was a 2nd born, though his older brother died in infancy around the time Abe was born. So they never had any relationship beyond blood and accident of birth order. So was Abe, in effect, a 1st born (ie. nurture), or is there some genetic influence (ie. nature) for his ambitions and success? FDR was also a 2nd born, having a half brother much older, something of a playboy and had little contact with each other. JFK was 3rd born, if I’m not mistaken (Joe, Ted). So go figure.
Ralph, that overall judgement does not work if the voting system is not working the way it should, either by human error or human machinations. That’s how we got Bush the Latter. I don’t have a lot of faith that the Russians are not “voting” in this election. It infuriates me to no end that we will not spend the time and money to make sure our election process is safe. And I don’t mean with photo ID’s.
I think birth order differences stem more from nurture.
Wildwood – I understand your concern, but contrary to Trump’s twitter tirades and temper tantrums, the incidence of documented cases of voter fraud is practically nil, and anyway would be virtually impossible to turn an election except perhaps in small local county or township elections. And even in those rare cases it was detected and prosecuted (http://wapo.st/2dZ7ZvZ), so large scale voter fraud conspiracy is virtually impossible and something that someone (guess who) would allege only if they believed losing was imminent and looking for a lame excuse.
Likewise voting machines being faulty or compromised, the Florida 2000 “hanging chad” fiasco notwithstanding. Arguably, it was a conservative SCOTUS who muddied the waters there by overruling (5-4) the Florida Supreme Court to stop the vote recount and thus preemptively and prematurely award the state’s critical electoral votes and the presidency to Bush, despite Gore winning the overall popular vote nationwide. My wife insists it was Nader that gave the Florida and the election to Bush by taking votes from Gore, to which I always smile and say “SCOTUS” (not to mention Gore losing in his own home state of Tennessee, which would have also taken him over 270 electoral votes even w/o Florida).
I’m not sure what changes, if any, Florida has enacted to prevent such a future incident. Many, if not most, states have a paper trail if a recount is called for. For example, in my county of Chester in PA, which is pretty typical throughout the state, we fill in a small circle next to your candidates of choice on a paper ballot, which is then fed into an electronic reader. I believe those states or districts with electronic voting machines that don’t keep a paper trail (arguably inexcusable) are not online, so are less susceptible to hacking or tampering. So the system may not be perfect but integrity of the voting system and process is about the last thing we have to worry about in this election.
I still think turnout will be the key, but even if millennials largely stay home, women and minority voters are likely to make much of the difference in this one. On that count, Trump has made his own electoral bed, so it’s no wonder he’s not sleeping well and tweeting his bile and baseless accusations in the middle of the night.
I guess I should clarify my first paragraph above. When I said “large scale voter fraud conspiracy is virtually impossible”, what I really meant of course is “large scale voter fraud is virtually impossible”. Efforts at large scale barriers to minorities voting by state Republican legislators is perhaps another story.
In this hyper-partisan day and age, it seems the only thing that IS virtually guaranteed is a conspiracy theory.