'Trump did all of it’: Former aide spills on unprecedented month of offenses

President Donald Trump likes to compare himself to a Republican predecessor, Abraham Lincoln, who the incumbent perceives to be generally regarded as his superior. Yet according to one of Trump's former subordinated, the current president is special in one sense — namely, that he is given a pass by the media for behavior that would be considered scandalizing from any of his predecessors.

"Imagine that weeks before a midterm, Barack Obama had run taxpayer-funded television ads starring himself… cut a deal with Vladimir Putin months after American intelligence caught Russia handing Iran the coordinates of U.S. troops in order to kill them… sent federal agents into the home of a Republican congresswoman… banned news outlets from the White House that investigated his administration… told a crowd of supporters that maybe one of our adversaries should bomb Republican-led cities… said he’d withhold money from GOP states that don’t elect Obama-approved candidates… and met with outside advisers who’ve reportedly drafted plans for the president to declare martial law and seize Americans’ ballots in the midterms," Miles Taylor, a former official for Trump's Homeland Security department during his first term, wrote on his blog on Tuesday.

He concluded, "Any one of those outrages would’ve spawned congressional fury. Together, they would’ve led to a spike in chatter about civil war. Yet Donald Trump did all of it (and then some) in just the past month."

In fact, Taylor characterized his list of grievances as being abbreviated.

"It leaves out the $810 million in congressionally approved spending that Trump unilaterally cancelled… the disaster aid he told North Carolina it wouldn’t get if his candidate lost… and the 250-foot triumphal arch his administration is racing to build — in his honor — before the courts rule against him," Taylor wrote.

In August, cult specialist Dr. Steven Hassan suggested to Alternate that one reason Trump supporters back him despite his many flaws is that he exerts a cult-like level of control over their loyalties.

"A key point in my BITE [Behavior, Information, Thought and Emotional] model of authoritarian control is information control, I emphasize how these destructive groups, like the Trump movement, are lying all the time," Hassan told AlterNet at the time. "And part of the appeal is really about using emotionally leading rhetoric to scare people, to create 'the other,' to demonize. I'll quote Eric Hoffer's 1951 book, 'The True Believer.' He said, 'The strength of a mass movement is proportionate to the vividness and tangibility of its devil.' We know that, evolutionarily, we're going to overreact to anything that's a perceived danger or threat to us. So 'owning the libs' means that they are a danger, and he's going to save people from them."

"There's so much tied up in this," University of Bristol cognitive scientist Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky told AlterNet. "There's latent racism. There's religion. There's the general conservative idea that poor people are — it's their fault, they're just lazy, everybody is responsible for what happens to them… except me, because I'm a farmer, and therefore I'm not lazy, and I've tried everything, and I deserve a subsidy."

He concluded, "There's a lot of attitudes and underlying currents tied up in this that are difficult to disentangle."