Trump’s Assassination Fantasy Has a Darker Purpose

 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/trump-biden-assassination-fbi/678476/

Trump has a way of projecting his own vices onto others. His view of presidential power is absolute—to the point that his lawyer recently argued before the Supreme Court that ordering the military to assassinate a political rival “could well be an official act.” There is probably some limiting principle to this particular argument, but the fact that the issue is even under discussion is not a good sign for our democracy. Perhaps he believes that Biden was out to shoot him because he thinks that’s an order that presidents can freely give.

The Supreme Court’s disastrous Trump immunity decision, explained

 https://www.vox.com/scotus/358292/supreme-court-trump-immunity-dictatorship

Roberts’s opinion in Trump, however, seems to go even further than Trump’s lawyer did. The Constitution, after all, states that the president “shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” So, if presidential authority is “conclusive and preclusive” when presidents exercise their constitutionally granted powers, the Court appears to have ruled that yes, Trump could order the military to assassinate one of his political opponents. And nothing can be done to him for it.

Macron’s implicit endorsement of ‘antisemitic,’ ‘pro-Hamas’ far left shocks French Jews

 https://www.timesofisrael.com/macron-partys-endorsement-of-antisemitic-pro-hamas-far-left-shocks-french-jews/

Macron, who will remain president regardless of the parliamentary electoral results, “just endorsed a party controlled by pro-Hamas” forces, Yohann Taieb, a French-Jewish journalist, wrote on X on Monday. The Jewish groups that endorsed him were “being taken for a ride,” Taieb added.

This sentiment, shared by many French Jews, stems from a series of unusual choices by Macron throughout one of the most tumultuous political episodes in France’s recent history.

Hypothetical SEAL Team 6 political assassination resurfaces in Supreme Court presidential immunity dissent

 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/seal-team-6-assassination-hypothetical-scotus-presidential-immunity/story?id=111583216

In their dissents, both Sotomayor and Jackson addressed the question of whether a president would have immunity from criminal prosecution for acts of murder -- including ordering the assassination of a political rival.

"This new official-acts immunity now 'lies about like a loaded weapon' for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation," Sotomayor wrote in her dissent.

When the president "uses his official powers in any way, under the majority's reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution," she continued. "Orders the Navy's Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune."

I Saw the Grim Brutality of a Conservative Supreme Court Close Up

 https://www.thedailybeast.com/today-i-saw-the-grim-brutality-of-a-conservative-supreme-court-close-up?ref=home?ref=home

As Justice Sotomayor began to read her dissent, the atmosphere in the courtroom grew palpably more tense. In a powerful dissent joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, Sotomayor called out the majority’s lack of legal reasoning, writing: “[a]rgument by argument, the majority invents immunity through brute force” and calling the majority’s conclusions “utterly indefensible.”

Supreme court ruling would permit Biden to assassinate Trump as a threat to Democracy

 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/supreme-court-immunity-trump-biden-assassinate_n_66831f73e4b06575b36641d8

Legal experts said Monday that yes, as horrific and authoritarian as that sounds, the 6-3 decision by the court’s conservative supermajority means that President Joe Biden could theoretically order that Trump be killed and be immune from criminal prosecution.

Biden issues a warning about the power of the presidency – and Trump – after Supreme Court’s immunity ruling

 https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/01/politics/joe-biden-immunity-supreme-court/index.html

 President Joe Biden on Monday condemned the Supreme Court’s decision which ruled that presidents have an absolute immunity from prosecution for core official acts, and issued a stern warning over a possible second term for former President Donald Trump.

“There are no kings in America. Each, each of us is equal before the law. No one, no one is above the law, not even the president of the United States,” Biden said in a speech from the White House.

Sigmund Freud and the Lubavitcher Rebbe

 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12519653_Sigmund_Freud_and_the_Lubavitcher_Rebbe

In the winter of 1902-­1903, Rabbi Shalom Dov-­Ber Schneersohn, the 5th Lubavitcher Rebbe (known by the acronym RaSHaB), from a scion of Chassidic Rabbis, travelled from Russia to Vienna to consult with 'the famous Professor Sigmund Freud. This paper discusses their 'encounter.'

As a Therapist, Freud Fell Short, Scholars Find

 https://www.nytimes.com/1990/03/06/science/as-a-therapist-freud-fell-short-scholars-find.html

New revelations depict a Freud who seems at times mercenary and manipulative, who sometimes claimed cures where there were none, and who on occasion distorted the facts of his cases to prove his theoretical points. And, judged by current knowledge and standards, it is a Freud who, at least once, stepped over the line into malpractice.

In one little-known case that barely missed becoming a major scandal, researchers say, Freud induced two patients to divorce their spouses and marry each other. In addition, he hinted that the man should make a generous donation to his psychoanalytic fund.

Supreme Court Deals Blow to Trump’s Prosecution, Ruling He Has Broad Immunity

 https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/donald-trump-immunity-supreme-court-ruling-7ce6415b

The Supreme Court dealt a major blow to Donald Trump’s prosecution on charges he sought to subvert the 2020 election, ruling 6-3 Monday that former presidents enjoy sweeping immunity for their acts while in office.

The president “may not be prosecuted for exercising his core constitutional powers, and he is entitled, at a minimum, to a presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court, joined in whole or part by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

The court on its own threw out parts of the prosecution’s case against Trump, including on his alleged efforts to use the Justice Department to advance his unsubstantiated claims of election fraud and submit slates of false electors to replace those President Biden won.

The ideologically divided decision didn’t kill the prosecution entirely, with the chief justice saying a president “enjoys no immunity for unofficial acts, and not everything the President does is official.”

Scathing Sotomayor dissent: "The President is now a king above the law"

 https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-immunity-supreme-court-decision-07-01-24#h_970d5ce788355fc04d44ed8795e178fb

Justice Sonia Sotomayor did not hold back in her dissent.

“Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today. Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”   

“Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.” 

“Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. Because if he knew that he may one day face liability for breaking the law, he might not be as bold and fearless as we would like him to be. That is the majority’s message today.”  

The justice did not end the dissent with the traditional “respectfully” language.

“With fear for our democracy, I dissent,” Sotomayor wrote.  

Psychological projection

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection

Projection (German: Projektion) was conceptualised by Sigmund Freud in his letters to Wilhelm Fliess,[12] and further refined by Karl Abraham and Anna Freud. Freud considered that, in projection, thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings that cannot be accepted as one's own are dealt with by being placed in the outside world and attributed to someone else.[13] What the ego refuses to accept is split off and placed in another.[14]

Freud would later come to believe that projection did not take place arbitrarily, but rather seized on and exaggerated an element that already existed on a small scale in the other person.[15] (The related defence of projective identification differs from projection in that the other person is expected to become identified with the impulse or desire projected outside,[16] so that the self maintains a connection with what is projected, in contrast to the total repudiation of projection proper.)[17]

Some studies were critical of Freud's theory. Research on social projection supports the existence of a false-consensus effect whereby humans have a broad tendency to believe that others are similar to themselves, and thus "project" their personal traits onto others.[37] This applies to both good and bad traits; it is not a defense mechanism for denying the existence of the trait within the self.[38] A study of the empirical evidence for a range of defense mechanisms by Baumeister, Dale, and Sommer (1998) concluded, "The view that people defensively project specific bad traits of their own onto others as a means of denying that they have them is not well supported." [38] However, Newman, Duff, and Baumeister (1997) proposed a new model of defensive projection in which the repressor's efforts to suppress thoughts of their undesirable traits make those trait categories highly accessible—so that they are then used all the more often when forming impressions of others. The projection is then only a byproduct of the real defensive mechanism.[39]

Biden Trump debate - Significance

Freud Was a Fraud: A Triumph of Pseudoscience

 https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/freud-was-a-fraud-a-triumph-of-pseudoscience/

Freud was a despicable person with multiple character flaws. He betrayed his scientific training in a tour-de-force of self-deception, succumbing to all sorts of irrational beliefs. His vaunted psychoanalyses never objectively helped a single patient. It is astounding that his ideas and his cult were so influential for so long. Freud was a fraud, a liar, a bad scientist, and a bad doctor; but Crews’ book about him is excellent. Crews’ detailed, well-referenced investigation of Freud’s descent into pseudoscience is a fascinating read. Readers familiar with the development of alternative medicine treatments will find many parallels.