Is It OK to Think Donald Trump Needs a Psychologist? Yes, Everybody Does.

I think Donald Trump is absolutely mentally unbalanced.
And before I go on from there, let me say something most people who are questioning his mental health won’t say. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, if he has the wherewithal to deal with it.
I have never had the pressures of being a president and one thing almost anyone who has had that job will tell you is: no matter what sort of mountains you’ve climbed before, the pressure of this job is nothing like anything you’ve known. You have the nuclear codes and to make sure this country can react quickly to an attack, there is almost no limit on the president’s power to use them and launch us into Armageddon. If that fluffs up your ego rather than keeps you awake at night, you should not have the job.
You will send men and women in to battle, and then bear the responsibility when they die fighting for a political decision you made in the hopes that their deaths might prevent others. The problem with that is you can never know for sure whether they did. You will know for sure that they gave their lives.
Writing or even just signing those letters of condolence — or coming out to Dover AFB on occasion to watch as the bodies return — would shake the knees of the most mentally-stable individual. Then there is the fact that even though the media may lead you and the American public to believe that the president is all-powerful, he is not. This seems to be a surprise to Donald Trump, though how that can be after watching eight years of Barack Obama’s relationship with Congress is hard to figure.
Still, again, if you go into this thinking you can always bend other politicians to your will, you are in the wrong game, and if your mental stability depends on it, you are in trouble.
There’s another kind of trouble unique to politicians. If most of us are having trouble dealing with life, we can see a psychologist or psychiatrist. Politicians feel they can’t. They should, of course. Really with the responsibility a president has — literally the power of life and death — there is probably no one who needs it more.
I first sought out help in understanding my feelings when I left for college and realized the family I grew up in was, though they were wonderful people in most and many ways, still not the fairy tale family every one told me it was. Later, after a brief first marriage broke up, I sought out help again to understand what had happened and so to not make that mistake again. The next person I married I met at NBC 39 years ago next month, so that help was really the foundation for my life’s happiness, and yes, I still have someone to talk to about various issues that still pop up from time to time from that long ago childhood. It has done nothing except to make me a better person.
I’m mentioning my own life because I want to make it clear that when I talk about these issues I’m not doing it as a form of name calling which is what usually happens. Too many people are saying Trump may have mental illness problems just because they dislike his politics. I dislike the politics of many politicians, but 99% of the time that’s been an intellectual concern. Nothing like this.
When I would be in a psychologist’s waiting room I felt I was with the sane people, the people who when something did not seem right in their life decided to look into it and see what they could do to change it.
I wish Richard Nixon had been able to seek out help rather than Henry Kissinger, Al Haig and alcohol. Bill Clinton needed to look into his life and could have used someone trained in such matters, not the Reverend Jesse Jackson, which for Clinton’s problems, was like a chicken going to a fox to discuss its fears of being eaten. Many of our presidents had problems. Most were completely understandable. Depression was a major one for many. Lincoln was known for it, but if you were president during a civil war, had a wife suffering from migraines, depression and possibly bipolar, and two sons who died of typhoid and TB, being depressed was a sane reaction to real sadness, but he sure of hell could have used someone to talk to about it, if only there had been such people then.
Franklin Pierce died of alcoholism after every one of his sons died except one, and then that child died at 11 in a train accident Pierce saw. Reagan, according to his family, has his first signs of Alzheimer’s in his last two years as president. All these men and more could have used some help, but politics is still defined by Tom Eagleton. He is maybe forgotten to the public, but politicians know his story. A bright senator from Missouri, he was picked by George McGovern to be the vice presidential nominee in 1972.
Eagleton had been hospitalized for depression and even received shock treatments. Running against Nixon, Eagleton seeking help should have been an example to all of America, as later would be Betty Ford seeking treatment for alcoholism, but fearing he would be kicked off the ticket, Eagleton did not tell McGovern about his treatment. When it eventually came out, McGovern tried to support him, but the bond of trust was broken, and Democratic Party officials feared Eagleton would be judged by the public to be mentally ill, instead of a guy who when he needed some help went and got it. McGovern lost big time and what we got was a paranoid alcoholic who did not seek help and went down a self destructive road that led to his resignation, only after his defense secretary and chief of staff warned the Pentagon to beware of Nixon trying to launch nukes in some sort of action designed to unite America behind him. James Schlesinger and Al Haig were so afraid Nixon in his delirium would do something like that they sent the word that they would countermand the orders of the commander-in-chief if they had to.
Which brings us to Donald Trump. As any of us who covered Trump in New York for years can tell you, there’s always been something off about Trump. The thing was — since it was harmless to the general populace — there was something entertaining about it, much like Monty Python’s Upper Class Twit of the Year routine. Yes, the rich twits could end up in the House of Lords, and often do, but one would never become prime minister, so mostly it is just good fun. You know, how it’s always been. We’re mentally ill. The rich are eccentric. So it was fun…until now.
There are so many signs something is seriously wrong with Donald Trump. For a man who seems to have everything, and now the ultimate power, he seems constantly pissed off and has skin so thin he makes an onion appear to be a knight in armor. He has the attention span of…well, we lost him in the middle of that sentence, didn’t we? And his mood swings are wild. One day he is in Phoenix, rambling like the guy on the bus talking loudly to an invisible man. Some of it is canny, like yelling that the fake news press would not report that the hall was packed, which he said because he could plainly see what anyone could see if they walked to the back of the hall, which was it wasn’t packed at all.
In fact, I was actually as surprised at that as much as he probably was, because he’s still popular enough with his supporters to draw a crowd, and the Diamondbacks in their worse seasons could still draw 20,000 people in Phoenix to watch mere millionaires swing and miss at least as much as Trump was doing. But what was unsettling was the 75-minute attempt to prove himself a real boy, like Pinocchio while getting constantly tied up in his own strings.
He said things that were plainly not true and easily proved not true, maybe because he knows his supporters really don’t care, but maybe also because he has lost track of what’s true, or even of what he has said. He seems to believe it is the job of everyone in the nation not to piss off the president, which would be bizarre in any case from the man who spent years trying to prove the last one wasn’t even born in America.
He goes off in tangents and rants in a way that if this were your father, you’d be asking him whether he’s off his meds, because your dad who you love and forced to see someone would have been prescribed meds. So would you. So would I, but politicians are not going to seek that kind of help because someone might be able to tell that the president is dealing with psychological problems, but the real problem is that he is not dealing with them.
Now even the usually-unflappable James Clapper, who served every president from JFK to Obama — most recently as director of national intelligence — is wondering aloud whether Trump is stable enough to be trusted with the nuclear codes. On CNN, Clapper said he was scared by Trump’s Jekyll and Hyde personality where he will go off-kilter as he did in Phoenix, and then reverses himself the very next day as he did in Reno. Kellyanne Conway says this was out of bounds, but considering what she and her boss say about everyone — you remember Ted Cruz’ dad murdering JFK? — the Trumpanistas saying anything out of bounds is ridiculous.
Some of this wildness is just Trump not knowing the issues very well. He says the lack of his wall is hurting the country and then threatens to shut down the government, which would hurt the country worse, and in costing the government billions, make it even harder to find money for…wait for it…a wall. Also after saying, how many times, he’d build the wall and make Mexico pay for it, now he says he’ll build it and American taxpayers will pay for it, and if they don’t, he may cost many of them their jobs. Okay. Maybe that’s politics as unusual.
But the wildness of tone is not just politics, nor is it just his lack of understanding of all those issues he refuses to read up on. This isn’t a matter of policy or politics. Liberals hate Paul Ryan every bit as much politically, but no one questions whether he might have a breakdown in office. In fact, it was the very conservative Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee who questioned Trump’s stability. Books are coming out the likes of which we’ve never had, no matter how fierce the political disagreements. Forensic psychiatrist Bandy Lee has edited a book written with 27 mental health professionals called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump. Psychiatrist Allen Francis is coming out with Twilight of American Sanity: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump. Trump has zero impulse control and is a narcissist, although whether he has narcissist personality disorder is a whole other question because technically that involves someone actually being bothered because of his disorder and Trump — when he is not ticked off about almost everything — still seems to be enjoying all this.
Still, I wish he’d talk to someone. Even out of curiosity, so many people are questioning my sanity. What are they seeing that I’m not? I doubt he will. 71-year-old people who are this successful rarely question themselves, though maybe he might wonder why he worked so hard for this and seems to be having such a miserable time of it. I’m not even talking mental illness here. I’m talking just the kind of questioning we should all do when we get what we thought we wanted and we are as angry as often as the president.
If he were anyone else, I’d just sigh and think, it’s his problem, especially since he is so unsympathetic it’s almost impossible to have any empathy for him at all. But he’s not anyone else. He’s the president. He sends men and women into war. His statements about a government shutdown can sink Wall Street. He has the nuclear codes. His problem, whatever it is, is our problem too. It’s the world’s problem. If he were anyone else, his family might go to court and get a 48-hour hold in a facility. Maybe release based on a treatment plan.
That’s not happening here. What is happening is anyone’s guess. And everyone’s nightmare.
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