Swiss psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross outlined the “five stages of grief” in her 1969 book On Death and Dying. In a Daily Beast opinion column, journalist David Rothkopf applies that framework to Donald Trump’s second presidency, arguing that the “desperate” president is moving through the stages politically.

“The groundbreaking psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in her landmark book ‘On Death and Dying,’ refers to five stages patients go through as they come face to face with mortality: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance,” Rothkopf writes.

“We’re roughly at bargaining now,” he continues. “Natalie Harp handles the denial, while Walt Nauta and his handlers are in charge of the isolation — even if it means squirreling him away on secret aircraft. Nobody handles the anger, but there it is in the form of tantrums on Marine One and in the Oval Office. And the bargaining, well, that’s the offer of the $5000 bribe he made yesterday.”

Rothkopf was referring to Trump’s promise at what the article describes as the unprecedented Republican Midterms Convention in Dallas. Trump said Americans would receive $5000 payments if the Republican Party retained both branches of Congress on Tuesday, November 3.

“Before this campaign season is over,” Rothkopf wrote, “there will be more. And then, for Trump, will come depression. Will he ever get to acceptance, or will he circle back to more anger, lashing out like Jimmy Cagney on his way to the chair in ‘Angels with Dirty Faces’ — or like Bruno Ganz in the bunker in ‘Downfall?’ We shall see. And we know, based on Trump’s history and his performance in Dallas, that it won’t be pretty.”

Rothkopf characterized Trump’s demeanor during the Dallas speech as extraordinarily desperate. His “desperation was so palpable … that he resembled nothing so much as a gangster in a 1930s movie being dragged by his armpits to the electric chair while pleading for his life,” Rothkopf wrote.

“What was supposed to be a celebration of Trump turned into a pathetic public freakout,” he added. “Naturally, while the perspiration and the agitation were apparent, Trump’s pleas took the form we’re most accustomed to hearing from him: fraudulent promises wrapped in lies inside a welter of threats and lunatic non-sequiturs.”

Rothkopf described the proposed $5000 payments as the most notable and desperate of those promises. Trump, he wrote, “‘offered’ to pay American voters $5000 each if they returned Republicans to the majority in Congress in November.” Rothkopf further claimed that the proposal was “an overt bribe and therefore patently illegal,” and said it resembled an earlier scheme that had never materialized, asking whether readers were “currently living in the lap of luxury thanks to your ‘DOGE dividend?’”

The Daily Beast columnist also wrote that the plan would cost more than $1 trillion and add to the country’s “already incomprehensibly large debt.” Rothkopf said Trump’s $5000 “bribe” was “no different from” the “promises” he made through his Atlantic City casinos. The claims about the proposal’s legality, cost, and effect on the national debt are presented in the article as Rothkopf’s arguments.

Source: Alternet