Counter-Narcissist Cheat Codes: Rope-a-Dope

Joe Biden’s Muhammad Ali Strategy Lesson

There has always been something psychologically poetic, symmetrical and telling about how the Republicans, the Russians and trump are always attempting to obscure and distract from trump’s or their own textbook malignant narcissism, or now rapid cognitive decline by trying to get everyone to focus instead on what are Biden’s normal signs of aging. Of course many now know the reason for this sense of reverse symmetry is due to what we call the Number one Counter-Narcissist Cheat Code: Projection.

Like everyone else who has paid close attention to American politics since the Cold War, I have seen Joe Biden up close and personal for a very long time. While there are outlined plans for more politically-centered psychological analysis on the biggest Biden questions, concerns and issues, this is a story about how he used a Counter-Narcissism and Muhammad Ali-type boxing strategy that may have just knocked trump and the Republican Party out.

What makes this story so interesting and unique from a CNI perspective beyond the possibility of connecting our strategies to “The Greatest,” is how Biden’s stealth “rope-a-dope” execution is a strong individual Narcissist Cheat Code lesson in itself.

What his example does is give an outline of how one can effectively use strategic planning, patience, a clever and disciplined set-up, and picking the best available moment to hopefully defeat or at least seriously knock back any pathological or serial liar dishonestly attacking you, with your best psychological punch.

At a minimum, Biden showed when done right one should at least be able to reveal toxic narcissists’ true faces to the public, by finally being able to tell or reaffirm your truth to those taken in by someone’s antisocial “big lies.”

Indeed, this is normally your chosen moment to show the world that of the two narratives, the one that has been blurted out the loudest and/or whispered poison from the shadows is mostly a projection house of cards built against you, while nearly all of the truths on the matter can be proven with clear and irrefutable evidence. Ideally, this is the evidence you started gathering once you recognized their nefarious and/or predatory nature.

However, to pull this off you must be certain that you have the time, energy, psychological fortitude and/or support network to get you through a likely bottomless fire hose of toxic sliming that happens when you take on a malignant-type narcissist.

You must also understand and know that even after you have defeated them, you will likely still be the target of a lot of nasty and insane fire because you are the cause of their narcissistic collapse. This will almost certainly continue until the consequences for doing so overpowers their compulsion to lash out at everyone and everything related to their mind-bending defeat.

If this doesn’t happen, assume they went covert and are plotting, and you will be right around 999,999 times out of a million. Sadly, it is just the nature of the pathological narcissist to blame everyone but themselves and to rarely learn a lesson. Combined this with the inability of modern psychology or medicine to “cure” those who are clinically without empathy or conscience beyond teaching them the emotionless cognitive kind of empathy psychopaths are well-known for using to manipulate others with, and you will have a better idea what we are up against.

trump’s compulsive inability to keep his big mouth shut about E. Jean Carroll defeating him despite it costing him tens of millions more in legal fines is a prime example of their pathological nature and “it ain’t over til it’s over” with a narcissist, until their full public persona knockout is complete, and further punishments for further misdeeds are set in legal stone.

In our Biden-Ali fable, we have an older gentleman who appears to have set a trap for the shameless narcissists who gave him the simple choice of submit or rebel, because they have been compulsively and unfairly attacking him on his age and cognition since the day he started going after the dream job he has been working towards and preparing for his entire life.

Indeed, he had little choice but to drop the hammer on the liars, falsely hurting his public image and sabotaging everything good he tries to do, since the supposedly accurate polls have been saying for quite a while that he is not where he needs to be popularity-wise to get re-elected. From the outside, it has been concerning how he and his allies seemed to be doing a less than stellar job of defending against the relentless untrue attacks on his accomplishments and cognitive abilities.

With a less than vigorous effort defending him, public thoughts and comments about being too old were starting to take hold in the zeitgeist. Apparently, one of the nastiest ways insincere questioners created the illusion that their lies had merit was to conflate the older gentleman’s physical signs of aging (struggles with walking and a weaker voice) with cognitive signs of aging. Meanwhile, reporters and many who know him well say any cognitive decline is generally minimal for a man his age. i.e. Up to this moment in time, Biden may forget a few more things here and there but still has the same sharp mind where it counts.

However, on February 8th, an out of nowhere yet unsurprising voice made public perceptions of Biden much worse. DOJ “special prosecutor” Hur submitted what seemed like a very damning report on Biden’s cognitive slippage. Hur stated, “We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter and closed the case,” but surprise, surprise, this former deputy Attorney General under trump who was bizarrely appointed by Merrick Garland to “investigate” Biden included several highly derogatory, prejudicial and useful partisan hit-lines in his report. So now there was an official DOJ report that strongly portrayed Biden as an elderly man with "diminished capacities,” which sure made it sound like he was too “diminished” to be President. Wow! Really?

Hur further said, “Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” which gave the impression that Biden would be found guilty if he could remember his details better. These comments were of course quickly jumped on as fresh “evidence” by right and left-wing outrage machines wanting to knockout the 81-year-old president by declaring him unfit to serve a second term.

The case against him itself was seemingly a trumped up document charge created to be conflated with someone else illegally having boxes of classified documents in an insecure maralago bathroom. This of course does not include several top secret documents that would interest tyrants who support trump, and have mysteriously gone missing.

This Hur poison pill “evidence” that Biden was too diminished was screamed from the rooftops for over a month until the House Democrats published the full 5-hour interview transcript that paints a very different picture from the politically spun prosecutor report released. Again, what a non-surprise that Hur’s comments have all the hallmarks of a gratuitous political slime job one would expect from a previous trump hire who doesn’t deny he hopes trump as president will appoint him to a lifetime federal judgeship.

I certainly have no time or interest in reading his report but from what I have seen as examples of Biden’s “poor memory,” most to all were things many of us with sharp younger minds do not remember well either. I would add that anyone who has lived such a long and full life and has the weight of the “free world” on his shoulders 365 / 24 / 7, is not going to remember all the normal minutia most people have the extra memory space to retain.

Is it ideal to have someone Biden’s age as President? Probably not in most cases. However, considering the alternative is just three years younger, insane, selfish, sadistic and a massively insecure malignant narcissist with dementia who is out for revenge and in the pocket of putin and many other villains, choosing the still fairly sharp lifelong American patriot Biden should be a no-brainer for every American who is psychologically stable, rational, and has not had their brain hacked in cult-like fashion, because an insane American dystopia led by a treasonous clown mafia don will end in tears for everyone except our enemies.

On the bright side, we are now more likely looking at a democratic and empathetic future with Biden as President over a fascist and sociopathic one with trump because Biden just picked his best possible moment to make the Republicans look foolish, dishonest and childish on live TV in front of tens of millions of Americans. This is why you may have noticed so many of Biden’s supporters still feeling mentally, spiritually and even physically relieved and energized by his vigorous, strong and forceful State of the Union speech, aka the SOTU.

What a contrast it was to behold! On one hand we had Biden very coherently (unlike word salad chef trump) talking about real and popular basic human wants, needs and issues, such as protecting us from lead in our water, calling out corporations for paying zero in taxes and deceptive shrinkflation, the revolutionary concept of letting our government negotiate drug prices with big Pharma, and little things like saving American and global democracy from threats foreign and domestic, all the while helping to create an environment for a relatively strong economy by most measures.

On the other side, we had the smarmy and toxic see-nothing, do-nothing Republicans with years of psychopathic disrespect and trumpian self-serving sabotage of our government, President, economy, national security, and democracy itself, under their belt. Regardless of what you think of Biden and the Dems, trump and the Republicans keep showing us over and over who they are.

They are an authoritarian christofascist cult not interested in participating in democracy. Like all narcissists, they want to dictate and dominate which means by hook, crook or any other shameless means possible, they are trying to steal America and our democracy from, “We the people.”

Thankfully, Biden’s words and tone at the SOTU strongly signaled from a CNI perspective that he and his team now have a much better understanding of the conscious and unconscious “playbook” of sociopathic behaviors trump is driven by, and is now essentially the 2024 Republican Party platform. If only Merrick Garland could learn this lesson.

Indeed, his masterful use of a long game strategy rooted in CNI-type psychology to counter dangerous disordered minds now shows us the Biden team has a higher level of awareness than in the past. This hopefully means they now fully know who and what they are up against, and how they must use various psychological means to set them up and knock them down. With the polls as close as they are, GOP psychological disorder and dysfunction needs much more exposure, and definitely more of the public opinion-type prosecution given at the SOTU.

The “rope-a-dope”

Certainly it is another really good strategic sign that knowingly or unknowingly, Biden seems to have been using a political version of a famous Muhammad Ali boxing strategy, the “rope-a-dope.”

In the boxing ring, the “rope-a-dope” was implemented by Ali laying back on the ropes where he would bounce around, he would cover his head and dodge his opponents relentless punches. He was only able to do this because of vast experience, he was so fast that they rarely could hit his head and he was in such good shape that he could dodge and take the body blows longer than the other fighter could punch them. According to Ali and proven in the ring, after 4 to 5 rounds, the fighter is punched out and he has them at his mercy, because they can’t fight back anymore.

With the gift of hindsight, it seems Biden should be credited with using a very similar version of this very sound and clever strategy when dealing with narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths and/or trump and the GOP, but I repeat myself. Indeed, Biden has been laying back on the ropes letting the GOP throw everything they have at him, but he had a plan, patience and the confidence to take whatever dishonest and toxic weak sauce punches they threw at him.

In this psychological sense, the strategy is to let the narcissist think they are winning because it takes their normal overconfidence to truly delusional levels. This massive overconfidence usually causes them to make more huge missteps and mistakes, like throwing wild and insane accusations at you, thus providing even more obvious evidence to take them down with, or to knock them into narcissistic collapse, which is often one and the same.

Indeed Biden seemed to be defending himself poorly and took a lot of body blows up until the State of the Union. However, from the very start of the SOTU, he came out guns blazing and destroyed one of the primary narratives for not supporting him for President.

The precision in which this was all executed really gives the impression that Biden and his people had masterfully lowered expectations while he quietly plugged away doing his job as “the leader of the free world.” You know, little things like trying to save and fix the institutions of American and global democracy and economy that the trump maga cabal cult did their best to destroy during their four years. You know, the corrupt things they crave to do all over again, but shamelessly will try to make permanent under a dictatorship this time.

It now seems apparent that by not fighting back as hard as many of us wanted him to do against the multitudes of right-wing propaganda machines and craven personalities relentlessly declaring him senile and unfit for office, Biden was laying a rope-a-dope trap for all of these malignant narcissist-types who thought they were killing him and grooming their “suckers” for fun, profit and authoritarian political power, when they were really punching themselves out, and then he could knock them out.

Indeed while many of us were very concerned these fascists and chaos agents were delivering mortal blows with their false but effective Biden is senile “send me money” routine, it now seems more likely it was Biden just rope-a-doping them until his 2024 SOTU speech of, “y’all got played” and “Mama said knock you out.” Ka-Pow!

On an individual level, Biden’s example of using Ali’s rope-a-dope strategy by laying back, taking hits and dodging to metaphorically let his opponents punch themselves out seems to have also revealed itself as a potentially useful cheat-code in one of the most tried and true knockout strategies in taking down a narcissist. That would be having a strategic plan with patience, discipline, research, a creative set-up, adaptation, and picking the best available moment to throw your hardest psychological knockout counter-punch in public.

The intent is to fully reveal to the world that virtually everything negative the narcissist has ever said about or done to you or others was almost exclusively based on their own self-serving delusional lies. Ideally everyone is also made to realize that these are people who’s natures are defined by incurable compulsive antisocial behaviors, and exhibit the signs of someone high on the Cluster B spectrum. It should be made clear that at the current status of psychology and medicine, the chances they will change for the better or can be cured normally range somewhere in between slim and none.

Well played Dark Brandon

Certainly a main goal of this year’s SOTU was to dispel the Republican’s hyped-up concerns and lies about Biden not having the cognitive abilities to continue as President, and he blew the doors off those concerns with perhaps the best and most forceful speech of his life. All those who portrayed him as senile now look like liars and fools.

In hindsight, one must wonder if Biden was playing some form of multi-dimensional psychological chess by allowing Hur’s unprofessional, gratuitous and dishonest partisan attacks on his cognition and memory to move forward in the special prosecutors report. How better to set-up Dark Brandon to knockout the main GOP narrative used against him?

For those who do not know who Dark Brandon is, the origin of calling Biden “Brandon” came about when chants from maga clowns saying, “Fuck Joe Biden” was heard in October 2021 TV interview at a Talladega, Alabama NASCAR race. While the reporter was interviewing a driver named Brandon, they wrongly claimed the chants were saying, “Let’s go Brandon.”

In short order, “Let’s go Brandon” became a very effective and popular right-wing rallying cry, Republican code phrase and gaslighting technique for them saying FU to Dems and Biden.

Cleverly, progressives later flipped the meme into “Dark Brandon.” This was a response to the even more self-declared Republican extreme position of “dark maga.” This time in short order, Dark Brandon became Biden as both supervillain to the right-wing and a politically successful alter ego superhero to the left-wing. Biden has since embraced the nickname to show his tougher side and even referred to himself as Dark Brandon in a humorously threatening way at the 2023 National Correspondents Dinner.

Every time Biden has defeated the GOP since, in many places online Dark Brandon is given credit for the victory on all sides. Again, in being patient, wisely using a rope-a-dope strategy to get the GOP to somewhat punch themselves out, and then picking his perfect moment to drop the hammer, CNI says, “Well played Dark Brandon,” and to anyone else who has successfully used a rope-a-dope-type strategy to defeat a narcissist.