Rapper and business mogul Kanye West mortified those of his sociopolitical milieu by tweeting forth his admiration for President Trump.  On April 25, Mr. West proclaimed, "You don't have to agree with Trump but the mob can't make me not love him.  We are both dragon energy."  Some of that mob suggested that Mr. West was mentally ill.  West's wife, Kim Kardashian, who had previously declared, "Without a doubt I stand with Hillary," took pains to tell the world she didn't agree with her husband.  More troubling, a musical colleague, Mr. Daz Dillinger, so consternated by West's remarks about Trump, deployed all ten words in his vocabulary to exhort criminal elements to harm Kanye's ass.

Kanye West also recently made puzzling remarks about "400 years of slavery," followed by the sound of heads exploding in the black American "live ever more in the past" "community."  Furthermore, at about the same time Kanye West was sending love vibes to the president, he cryptically tweeted, "Sometimes you have to get rid of everything."  These rebellions caused Kim Kardashian to hop to marriage brand protection on the talk shows.  Swiftly monetizing her husband's musings, as she does every marketable event in her life, she told a laughing audience on Ellen, "He doesn't mean getting rid of me."  Don't be so sure about that.  Her husband is a high-strung man, and the ultra-fishbowl life the Kardashians inflict may be unbalancing him, as it has other men who have tried for a place in the Kardashian-Jenner syndicate.

Kanye West's identification with Trump's masculine energy is an unconscious survival mechanism.  Kardashian-Jenner Inc. sucks the life force from men.  Fathers, husbands, brother, boyfriends – no male cycled through their empire of toxic exhibitionism comes out unscathed.  This harm to men and boys is  the Kurse of the Kardashians.  But the destruction of men's lives is not mystical workings of the black arts.  It results from the malignant psychological effects of unremitting personal scrutiny on males.  In today's world, lurid self-display and public gut spillage are paths for attractive women of no particular talent and flexible morality to become rich and famous.  But even in this world gone mad, most men are intrinsically disinclined to ongoing intimate public display.  It's a yin and yang thang.  Whether benign or malignant, invasive exhibitionism, in the absence of real achievement, is devastating for males.  And the kind of exhibitionism that has earned the Kardashian-Jenner females vast wealth is far from benign.

People generally mistreat each other through three overlapping aspects of selfishness: greed, anger, and lust.  The Kardashian-Jenner formula provides for quickly changing scenarios of this triumvirate of weaknesses played out in luxurious settings.  Its entertainment value derives from heightening the elements of selfishness in culturally accessible contexts.  Dramatic elements include salaciousness; ludicrous materialism (the fur coats in July syndrome); and childish plots, spats, tiffs, and betrayals, romantic and otherwise. 

This Kardashian-Jenner entertainment-retail conglomerate relies on taking in, chewing up, and spitting out males.  This began with the matriarch, Kris Kardashian Jenner, being unfaithful to her first husband and divorcing him despite having his four young children at home.  That husband, Robert Kardashian, was not yet a rich and famous Hollywood lawyer.  Immediately after the marriage ended, Mrs. Kardashian married the quite rich and famous celebrity, Olympian Bruce Jenner.  That marriage produced two children and ended in the psychological suicide of Jenner, who abandoned the roles of husband, father, and grandfather to simulate life as a woman.  Jenner ended up the best dressed lesbianish androgyne on TV.

America is a free country, and people have the right to live as they wish.  But Jenner, as the world's most famous male-to-female transsexual, is a case study in the pitfalls of that path.  He today reminds us that because transsexuals do not go through menopause, they cannot "age gracefully."  He has to style himself as a forever 35-year-old chick superimposed upon a 69-year-old male body.  After much dramatic exploitation of his so-called transition, the Kardashian clan has decisively abandoned him back.

The quintessential damage of toxic exhibitionism was inflicted on Rob Kardashian, the only boy with five sisters, none of whom granted him dignity or protected him from having his most private and personal experiences monetized on TV.  He had a severe mental breakdown, parts of which were shown on TV.  He said he hated Kim's selfishness and believed that his mother cared only about the girls.  Who knows?  But it is certain she cannot sell Rob's looks and dramatics as she can her daughters'.  Rob became mentally ill and obese keeping up with the Kardashians.  He survives by distancing himself from them.

Kim Kardashian initially elevated herself and her family to the highest echelons of exhibitionism through a sex video of herself and hip-hop performer Ray J.  After legal posturing, Kim let the video remain in the public domain for a large payout.  Kanye West may be noticing most of the relationships his wife and in-laws have formed in recent years are with black performers and athletes.  Perhaps they are charismatic entertainment fodder for programming and sales, as Kanye was supposed to be.

The central dramatic mechanism of the Kardashian-Jenner spectacle (that may be sinking into Kanye West) is the catalog of disastrous fake marriages and shallow but photogenic relationships with boyfriends and baby-daddies.  These connections often end with the coiffed and kohl-eyed bride confiding her pain to the camera, while the groom, services no longer required, is an off-screen smoking wreck.

Lamar Odom won championships playing basketball.  His reality TV career as Khloe Kardashian's husband ended in divorce, a coma, and brain damage.

After breaking up with Kim Kardashian, the football player Reggie Bush said he never felt comfortable being followed by cameras.  Season six of Keeping Up ended with "Kim's Fairytale Wedding" to basketball player Kris Humphries, followed in two months by Kim's fabulous second divorce.  A discarded Kardashian publicist said Humphries was set up as the fall guy, and the marriage amounted to a loveless plot twist to increase viewership and make money.

This season's leading dramatis persona is the dastardly Tristan Thompson, Khloe Kardashian's basketballer baby-daddy.  How could he betray her?  Especially after she shared to a few billion friends, "He wants to have five or six kids with me[.] ... [K]nowing I'm not on birth control is just like – it's scary.  It's like a really big step."  Kim played loyal sister, dropping on-air F-bombs on Thompson.  But plucky Khloe is giving "I shall survive" interviews and posing for photographs with Thompson in posh restaurants, over the pleas of her family not to take him back.

Kanye West is the most gifted man of the Kardashian collection, with his own struggles.  By declaring his appreciation for Donald Trump, he rebelled against his celebrity peers and joined the majority of Americans who love their country.  But he chose a woman who abides in the mansions of toxic exhibitionism, which is no fit place for a man to live.  Can his marriage to Kim survive this rebellion?

Image: DAVID HOLT via Flickr.