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Trump on the Couch Inside the Mind of the President By Justin A. Frank, MD

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“A great public service–critical for our time.”
–Bandy X. Lee, M.D., M.Div., Yale psychiatrist, expert on violence, and editor of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump

The New York Times-bestselling author of Bush on the Couch shows that Donald Trump is mentally and emotionally unfit to execute the duties of President.

No president in the history of the United States has inspired more alarm and confusion than Donald Trump. As questions and concerns about his decisions, behavior, and qualifications for office have multiplied, they point to one primary question: Does he pose a genuine threat to our country? The American Psychiatric Association’s Goldwater Rule constrains psychiatrists from offering diagnoses on public figures who are not patients and who have not endorsed such statements. But in Trump on the Couch Clinical Professor of Psychiatry Justin A Frank invokes the moral responsibility that compels him to speak out and present a full portrait of a man who presents us with a clear and present danger.

Using observations gained from a close study of Trump’s patterns of thought, action, and communication, Dr. Frank uncovers a personality riddled with mental health issues. His analysis is filled with important revelations about our nation’s leader, including disturbing insights into his childhood, his family, his business dealings, and his unusual relationship with alternative facts, including how

  •  The absence of a strong maternal force during childhood has led to Trump’s remarkable lack of empathy and disregard for women’s boundaries;
  •  His compulsion to polarize America has grown out of the way he perceives the world as full of deceitful and destructive persecutors;
  •  His inability to tolerate the pain of frustration has triggered his belief that omnipotence will finally remove it;
  •  His idiosyncratic use of language points to larger issues than even his tweets might suggest.

With our country itself at stake, Dr. Frank calls attention to the underlying narcissism, misogyny, deception, and racism that drive the President who endangers it. A penetrating examination of how we as a nation got here and, more important, where we are going, Trump on the Couch sounds a call to action that we cannot ignore.

Has Donald Trump ever been caught cheating at golf?

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By Mira Zaslove, Quora Top Writer

Trump is a great golfer. The best golfer to ever occupy the White house. It’s not even close. He is very good. Yet, as in most things Trump, he is not as outstanding as he claims to be. He lies and cheats.

Trump claims to have a USGA handicap index of 2.8. This is simply not true. Is Donald Trump lying about having a three handicap? Yes, and does he cheat too? Yes, he cheats:

Former Sports Illustrated managing editor Mark Mulvoy told the Washington Post that: “once playing with Trump in the 1990s he realized that Trump had placed a ball just feet from the pin that he had never hit.Mulvoy called Trump out on cheating and Trump rationalized:

“Ahh, the guys I play with cheat all the time,” Mulvoy said Trump told him. “I have to cheat to keep up with them.”

Someone I know golfed with Trump at a charity event. Apparently Trump was cheating and was called out.

When asked to stop cheating, Trump responded: “I cheat on my taxes, I cheat on my wives, and I cheat at Golf. Get used to it.”

Trump then smiled broadly, and kept cheating. He didn’t win the tournament. But he didn’t stop cheating.

A recent book has come out detailing the main ways Donald Trump cheats at golf even when playing against Tiger Woods

1. The Invisible Dunk

“I’ve played with him a lot,” says a frequent guest in Trump’s foursomes. “This one time, I was in the fairway and he was right of the green but a little bit down the hill. He didn’t think anybody was watching, but I was. I saw him make a chipping motion from the side of the hill but no ball came up. Then he walked up the hill, stuck his hand in the hole and pulled a ball out. It must’ve been a ball he had in his hand the whole time. Then he looked up and yelled, ‘I chipped in!’”

2. The Quick Rake

This is a sneaky little move in which you hit your approach putt and then quickly walk up and rake up what’s left of it, no matter the length, before your opponents can stop you or think to holler, “Hey, wait a minute!” Trump has mastered this move. He does it sometimes before the ball has even stopped rolling. MSNBC cameras caught him doing it once to a ball that had sped five feet past the hole and was gaining speed. By the time anybody can object, the ball is already in his pocket.

3. The Ball Switch

“Whenever I’ve caddied in Trump’s group,” says Greg Puga, an elite Los Angeles amateur and caddy, who has Trump in his group plenty, “he always gets his own cart. He makes sure to hit first off every tee box and then jumps in the cart, so he’s halfway down the fairway before the other three are done driving. That way he can get up there quick and mess with his ball.

The Gimmicks: An Armenian pro wrestler, unacknowledged pain and the line between genuine and act

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“How do we know how much of ourselves is “authentic” and how much is performed” – this is one of the themes that Chris McCormick explores in his book The Gimmicks: A Novel.

In the very first week of being published, The Gimmicks – which also touches upon the Armenian Genocide and the consequences of its denial – already garnered praise from critics and readers.

The book has received great reviews from The New York Times and BookPage, and has been recommended by the New York Times Book Review, the Pioneer Press, and The Millions.

Chris McCormick, whose mother is Armenian and whose great-grandfather witnessed his own father being murdered during the years of the Armenian Genocide, talked to ARMENPRESS in an exclusive interview about his book.

“My mother is from Armenia, and so even though I grew up in California in the United States, I was raised with an understanding of Armenian history, especially the genocide”, McCormick told ARMENPRESS when asked why he decided to write about the Armenian Genocide. “My great-grandfather, as a boy, hid in a tree and witnessed his father killed in the streets. That personal story led me, as an adult, to research more about the specific historical and political contexts that led to the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of the Young Turks, and the Armenian genocide. In the United States, there are many great historians—including Armenian historians like Peter Balakian and Ronald Grigor Suny, and Turkish historians like Taner Akçam—who have spent their whole lives fighting for the truth, and I learned so much from reading their books.”

ARMENPRESS – Was your main goal to write about the Armenian Genocide itself and emphasize it? Can you present your book’s main emphases in short?

McCormick – In my novel, I focus less on the genocide itself and more on the psychological and emotional effects of the genocide after several generations of Turkish denial. My book tries to ask: what happens to pain when it goes unacknowledged generation after generation? My main characters—Avo, Mina, and Ruben—grow up together in Soviet Armenia in the 1970s, but they each have very different ideas about what justice looks like. The story follows them around the world as they try to balance the past with the future.

ARMENPRESS – What can you tell us about your Armenian roots, how did your mother settle in the United States? Have you been to Armenia?

McCormick – Yes, my mother moved with her parents and brothers to the United States in the 1970s from Kirovakan (Vanadzor), when she was 19 years old. My aunt and uncle and cousins joined us in California after the Spitak earthquake in 1988. I was in Armenia for the very first time this past summer, and it was so beautiful and powerful to be where my mother grew up. Visiting her childhood home in Kirovakan, I got emotional. Think about it: When she was a little girl, there was no way for her to know that one day her American son—who had written a book in a language she didn’t yet know—would come to visit her house. Life is unpredictable and amazing!

ARMENPRESS – Why did you choose “The Gimmicks” as your book’s title?

McCormick – Your question about the title is difficult to answer because it comes from an American sport/entertainment called professional wrestling, where athletes fight each other in scripted matches. The title comes from the professional wrestling term for a performer’s role: his gimmick is the character he plays. Sometimes the line between the real person and his gimmick is very confusing, and a wrestler who forgets the line between his “real” self and his character is said to be “living the gimmick.” In my novel, the character Avo comes to the United States from Armenia and joins the professional wrestling business and performs as different versions of himself, different gimmicks, so that the brother he has betrayed will not be able to find him. One of my novel’s themes is how do we know how much of ourselves is “authentic” and how much is performed? Not only as individuals but as nations, too—do the stories we tell about ourselves shape us, or do we shape the stories we tell about ourselves? Or is it both, and if so, how?

ARMENPRESS – Is your book available in many bookstores across the US? Where is it available?

McCormick – The book just came out last week here in the United States, but I’m happy to say that it’s already widely available in bookstores and online, and getting good attention from the press. I’ve been doing public readings at bookstores here, and I’ve been grateful to see the number of people who have shown up in person to hear me read and to discuss the legacy of the Armenian genocide. 

ARMENPRESS – What reactions did your book receive in the US?

McCormick – I’ve been very happy to hear from readers and book critics about how much they’re enjoying the novel. In just its first week, the book has received great reviews from The New York Times and BookPage, and has been recommended by the New York Times Book Review, the Pioneer Press, and The Millions. Many Armenian-Americans have contacted me about the novel, but also many non-Armenians who did not know much about the genocide. My book is a story, not history, so I don’t believe that educating the American public is its primary goal. But if readers care about the characters and learn about Armenian history along the way, I think that’s a good thing. I’m grateful that The New York Times, our biggest newspaper, featured a positive review of the book. They have many books to choose from, and they chose to review mine. I don’t know why, but I’m grateful, because this means more people will have a chance to read the book.

ARMENPRESS – Do you think The Gimmicks could become a bestseller?

McCormick – It’s too early to say if the book will be a bestseller, but I hope so—wish me luck!

ARMENPRESS – What plans do you have for the future? Do you have any upcoming books? Is it possible that you will write about the Armenian Genocide again?

McCormick – I’m writing a new book, but it’s too early to say what it’s about. I don’t know if my Armenian heritage will play a part, but we’ll see.

Interview by Anna Grigoryan

Books of The Times: In This Corner, an Armenian Pro Wrestler. In That Corner, Genocidal History.

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By John Williams,

Chris McCormick’s new novel, “The Gimmicks,” contains what might seem like a few gimmicks of its own, including forays into the worlds of competitive backgammon and professional wrestling. But those subcultures, emphasized in the book’s eye-catching cover design and promotional copy, are not what fuel it. It’s really about history — personal and collective — and it’s rooted in horrors from more than a century ago that are still making news today.

McCormick’s novel begins in the early 1970s, nearly 60 years after the Armenian genocide conducted by the Ottoman Empire, during which one and a half million Armenians were killed. Ruben Petrosian is a teenager living in Soviet Armenia who is obsessed with the fact that Turkey has not yet acknowledged or apologized for the crimes.

“Alliances with Turkey were growing around the world, not shrinking,” McCormick writes, “and even sympathetic governments were willing to ignore its denial for the right price.” (Earlier this month, the United States Senate voted unanimously to officially acknowledge the genocide as such. The Trump administration balked, calling the crimes “mass atrocities” as opposed to orchestrated genocide.)

Ruben is a promising backgammon player — but not as promising as his friend and rival Mina. She finds Ruben dour, and his fixation on the Turks and history boring. (“I was going to say male,” she declares, “but boring works, too.”) She compares constant focus on the past to lemon trees: “Imagine if they never dropped the dead lemons from last year, or the year before that. Just went on carrying all their old shriveled lemons until the branches sagged so low that no new fruit could grow.”

After an orphan named Avo Gregoryan arrives to live with Ruben and his family, the two boys come to think of themselves as brothers, though they are really cousins of cousins. Ruben is scowling and bespectacled, with “the look of an old man cursed to live in a child’s body.” Avo, 6-foot-6, is “an enormous but entirely sweet-hearted boy.”

When Mina is chosen to compete at a backgammon tournament in Paris, Ruben schemes to be sent in her place, seeing the trip as a chance to escape his country and expand the scope of his political activities. “We’re better than hurting a girl, yes,” Ruben tells Avo while they conspire against Mina, “but we’re also better than spending our lives in a drunken village in the corner of a dying empire, aren’t we?”

From afar, Ruben convinces Avo, then 19, to move to Los Angeles and join members of the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (Asala), a group intent on securing “global acknowledgment, apologies and reparations” for the genocide. The operatives in California make plans for an airport bombing and the assassination of a genocide-denying professor. But Avo’s heart is not in it. Ruben’s fervor never catches in his gentler cousin, who daydreams about returning to Armenia and Mina.

Instead, Avo is recruited to become a wrestler (named The Brow Beater, for his prominent unibrow) by Terry “Angel Hair” Krill, a washed-up manager who narrates sections of the novel set in the late 1980s.

A thumbnail sketch inevitably makes this novel sound overcrowded and jumbled, but McCormick keeps things admirably nimble, moving the stories forward while shuttling back and forth through time and across perspectives. Raised in California and Armenian on his mother’s side, he leans on real history, like Asala and its tactics, for his novel’s bones.

At a time when plot and contrivance in literary fiction are not the most fashionable things, McCormick, in his early 30s, proves adept at old-fashioned skills that one hopes will never go entirely unpracticed. With a minimum amount of soapiness, he keeps the pages turning on his love triangles and nostalgic wrestlers and brothers at peace and war. And he allows his larger themes to resonate without pushing them on us too hard.

One of those themes is the tides of history, and whether one can ever really decide to avoid them. “I want no trouble. I only want to be provincial,” Mina writes at one point in a journal, willing herself to believe that “the past is the past is the past.” Others include the line between justice and petty vengeance, in matters both large and small; the power (or lack thereof) in apologies; and the appeals and hazards of “pretending so well that we forgot we were pretending.”

McCormick only loses his footing on occasion. Avo speaks some jarringly (for him) profound and “written” observations, like this one about America: “Everything that makes sense in that country is terrible, and everything that’s nonsense has a kind of grace to it.” And Ruben is not quite as vivid on the page as his cousin — his fundamentalism is believable up to a point, but not conveyed with quite enough psychological detail to sell his most brutal decisions.

The novel draws to a close around one last devastating event from history, the 1988 earthquake in Armenia that killed tens of thousands. “We lost everything,” Mina says of relocating to America after the disaster. “We’re being careful not to lose anything else in the moving, you understand?”

Follow John Williams on Twitter: @johnwilliamsnyt.

The Gimmicks
By Chris McCormick
354 pages. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.

The Wrong Republic

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By Sevan Nişanyan

The Wrong Republic
Nişanyan wrote The Wrong Republic , a critique of the founding myths of the Republic of Turkey, which was established in 1923.
Some Istanbul friends are going to hang a flag or something. Let’s make a little reminder.
Fake democracy
Iconic book by sevan nisanián ” wrong democracy “-” false democracy “, about nationalism and myths around the founding of modern turkey by Kemal Atatürk.

Lost, not forgotten

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MARDEAN ISAAC,

Between 1894 and 1924, Turkish leaders, seeking to create a religiously and “racially” pure state as the Ottoman Empire unravelled, organized and implemented a plan of genocide against the Christian populations of Turkey. The genocide was carried out in stages by official forces as well as irregulars and civilians. It involved mass murder and rape, pillage, abduction and expulsion. In the course of the Republic of Turkey’s formation, around 2 million Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks were killed, their property and wealth expropriated, and their ancient cultural and material heritages largely destroyed.

The Thirty-Year Genocide is a landmark contribution to the study of these epochal events. Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi – both Israeli scholars – conclude that the destruction unleashed on the Christians of Turkey was centrally planned and indisputably constitutes genocide. They emphasize three additional arguments: anti-Christian massacres in the late nineteenth century were not isolated incidents, but…

To read the full article, please click here

Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi
THE THIRTY-YEAR GENOCIDE
Turkey’s destruction of its Christian minorities, 1894–1924
672pp. Harvard University Press. £25 (US $35).

Alice Nazarian
BLOODIED, BUT UNBOWED
A memoir of the Ashur & Arshaluys Yousuf family
Edited by Arda Darakjian Clark
Translated by Ishkhan Jinbashian
426pp. Nineveh Press. £15.99.

Part II: Armin Wegner Asked Franz Werfel Not to Write his ‘Forty Days of Musa Dagh’

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By Harut Sassounian

This is the continuation of the letter written by Armin T. Wegner to Franz Werfel in 1932 which is being published for the first time:
“Already in 1915 I became friends with Johannes Lepsius. As I traveled by train, from Constantinople through Asia Minor to Baghdad, I witnessed the entire deportation. I repeatedly sent material to Lepsius for his collection. I have lived in close relationship with Armenians and Turks for several years, and have spoken their language, albeit very imperfectly. Hiding under my stomach bandage, I smuggled the pictures that I had taken of the horror scenes in the desert. I transported them, at the risk of death, across the border along with the refugees’ letters to the American embassies.

In 1919, in a public event in Urania [a scientific society in Berlin], with the help of Johannes Lepsius, I showed the pictures in a sensational lecture. As a result, almost a pogrom broke out between the immigrant Armenians and Turks. Soon afterwards I published my book, “The Road of No Return” (“Der Weg Ohne Heimkehr”), revealing personal experiences from that time. I related most of the experiences from the days of the deportation, for my Armenian novel.

At short intervals, two more books were published – “In the House of Happiness,” (“Im Hause der Glückselligkeit”) and my “Turkish Novels,” (“Türkische Novellen”) which also include two stories from the persecution of Armenians. At about the same time, in 1921, my novella “The Storm on the Women’s Bath” (“Der Sturm auf das Frauenbad”) – the description of an Armenian massacre – appeared in the Berliner Tageblatt. In the same year I published the stenographic report “The Court Case of Talaat Pasha” (“Der Prozess Talaat Pascha”), to which I was invited, along with Johannes Lepsius and others, as a witness.

In 1925, I began to write my Armenian novel, which I had already planned during the war. The first announcements of the work can be found around the same time in the Kirschner, and in Albert Sörgel’s history of literature, where the book had been announced with the title “The Expulsion” (“Die Austreibung”). But, as I set out to portray the vast epic of deportation and extermination of an entire race of people, I soon realized that my work would be piecemeal if I confined myself to describing only the end of this tragedy.

So the work grew under my hand, more and more, beyond what I originally had planned. The entire fate of the people, and the struggles of the peoples of the Middle East, should be presented in it. The antagonism of races, religions and classes were laid bare. It was not my will, but the inner nature of that work, which became a four-volume novel. I’ll give you a short outline of the blueprint that I shared with the academy two years ago.

The first volume deals with the prehistory of the novel – the youth of the main hero, who was born in a small Asian town in 1890. In 1896, during the massacres of Abdul Hamid, he loses his parents and grows up an orphan in the Syrian orphanage in Jerusalem. The actual content of the first volume, then, describes life in a small Asian city, the contrast of the Turks and Armenians, their conflicting as well as common revolutionary activities, and it finally leads to Constantinople in the court of Abdul Hamid. This volume will be titled “In the Shadow of God.”

The second volume, titled “Eternal Hatred,” leads first into the mountains of an Armenian village. It shows the differences between Kurds and Armenians, and finally depicts the outbreak of the revolution of 1908 in Asia Minor and Constantinople, the removal of Abdul Hamid and the victory of the Young Turks, and ends in a general fraternization and reconciliation of Turks and Armenians in the age of the Constitution.

The third volume, which will probably carry the title “The Scream of Ararat,” begins with the outbreak of the World War. This volume will also contain the conversation between Lepsius and Enver Pasha, which Lepsius himself has so impressively recorded. The novel always shifts between the ruling classes, the leading authorities, and the people. The Young Turkish leaders, and the whole diplomacy of Europe, play their part. The book ends with the actual beginning of the deportation.

The fourth volume, titled “The Desert,” then brings the extermination of the Armenian people in the steppes of Mesopotamia. This part also contains the scenes of those two thousand refugees who had rescued themselves on a mountain and were then brought to Egypt by a ship of the Entente – scenes that I suppose to be the inspiration for the title of your planned book, “The Forty Days Musa Dagh.” An epilogue to the last volume describes the murder of Talaat Pasha in the streets of Berlin.

The entire work is expected to retain the repeatedly announced title “The Expulsion.”

Although I began writing the Novel as early as 1924, it was interrupted by my other poetic and journalistic works. In the years 1925 to 1927, the project matured to its full extent, and from the beginning of 1930, I had to start the whole work once again. In 1928 my novel “Moni” (the novel of a two-year-old child) was published in the “Berliner Tageblatt.” At the same time, I offered the book to the publishing house Zsolnay in Vienna (in March 1928), and declared my readiness for a contractual bond for my planned work in progress, the Armenian novel, as a great portrayal of people. But Zsolnay refused. I then signed a contract with the Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt in Stuttgart (in the spring of 1928), for my multi-volume novel on the Armenian deportation, and at that time I received a considerable advance.

The great economic hardship, the pressure to feed a family and the not quite satisfactory sales of my other books, slowed down my work. Driven by financial obligations, I had to accept extensive journalistic work, again and again, which required long trips to foreign countries. In 1930, Thomas Mann applied on my behalf to the Prussian Academy of the Arts (Section of Poetry), referring to my work. At his instigation, I submitted to the Academy a more detailed plan of my great Armenian novel. I enumerated the various stations of the above listed individual volumes. Fortunately, the academy gave me considerable support for this work. But unfortunately, all of these sums were not enough to allow me to labor on the huge work with peace of mind.”

Books by Nikol Pashinyan and Robert Kocharyan named bestsellers by Bookinist

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Bookinist bookstores have published the bestsellers for the past month. As the bookstore reports, the work authored by Armenian PM Nikol Pashinyan “The other side of the World” and an ex-President Robert Kocharyan’s memoir “Life and Freedom” are among the top ten bestselling books.

“The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life” by blogger and author Mark Manson tops the list for July, followed by “100 Facts: Old Armenia.”

Protesting bookmakers’ workers reopen streets next to Armenia legislature

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YEREVAN. – Numerous employees of Armenia’s bookmakers, and who are staging a protest outside the National Assembly (NA) building since Wednesday morning, have reopened the Marshal Baghramyan Avenue and the Derenik Demirtchyan Street in capital city Yerevan.

But they continue their picket on the sidewalks running along Marshal Baghramyan Avenue.

In the demonstrators’ words, their demand was a meeting with the NA headship.

Babken Tunyan, Chairman of the NA Standing Committee on Economic Affairs, has received a five-member group from these protesters.

“We will wait for the answer by our group that is meeting with Tunyan,” a protester said. “If the answer doesn’t satisfy [us], we will close off Baghramyan Avenue again.”

Many workers of Armenia’s bookmakers are picketing outside the parliament building, and against the bill on limiting the activities of the country’s bookmaker offices. This bill has been approved by the aforesaid NA committee and sent for debate at the parliament floor.

This proposed law aims to toughen the terms for conducting betting in Armenia, and it has been developed along the lines of fight against gambling in the country.

The bill proposes to remove all bookmaking offices from Yerevan.

If the draft law is passed, it will come into force in November 2020.

Presentation of Armenian translation of 2nd President’s book

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The presentation of the Armenian translation of the book “Life and Freedom” by the second President of Armenia Robert Kocharyan took place on Sunday, May 12.

The event was also attended by members of his family, politicians, and associates.

Robert Kocharyan’s spouse Bella Kocharyan had a speech and noted that over the years they tried to convince Kocharyan to write a book, however, as Robert Kocharyan wrote in the book, he did not want to delve into the past.

The moment came, he was thinking about it, and wrote a book in three years. It is very interesting and easy to read,” she said adding that the book is full of facts that they did not know about.

“Robert is not an open person, but he has been opened up in this book. He writes so lovingly about the nature of Stepanakert, Karabakh, that it seems there is something artistic in it. He writes about his childhood in the book, as well as about his sister, and a very beloved brother,” she added.

Bella Kocharyan reminded that it is the second presentation of the book as the first one was held in Stepanakert on January 26.

The younger son of Robert Kocharyan, Levon Kocharyan, read the address of his father.

The first part of the book narrates about the people who created the heroic pages of Armenia, and the second part presents due to what efforts the development of the country took place.