
IS TRUMP MENTALLY ILL? OR ARE THE MEDIA BEING PLAYED?
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The current President of the United States is being diagnosed by everyone in the media with such a fervent certainty that the bulk of Trump news is dominated by the question, “Is Trump Mentally Ill?” The one question that keeps bugging me is this: What if he ain’t?
I whole-heartedly support the media’s right to question Trump’s competence, temperment and his fitness to execute the office of President. That’s all fair game, but the wall to wall labeling of Trump as possibly having dementia, a narcississtic personality order or as a sociopath is both a total cop-out and utterly ignorant toward the one yuge question the media is too sure of itself to ask: “Are we being played for chumps?”
Trump may very well be the picture of sanity. He may go through the Diagnostic and Statiscal Manual’s criteria for Axis 2 Personality Disorder and pass with flying colours, or fail miserably depending on which doctor sees him. There is no standardized testing, the diagnosis is made by observed, historical and self reported behaviour. The interpretations are as wide ranging as the psychiatrists in the field all of which means there is no end to the speculations about Trump’s mental health, no end to the ratings driven sensationalistic media coverage.
So, what if you were President and needed an all consuming, all encompassing ongoing story to drive the 24 hour news cycle? What if you needed a distraction so profound as to keep journalists from investigating or constantly reporting on your dalliance with a foreign power? What kind of story would distract the media from hammering away at the possible collusion between you and Russia? (A story the media was hammering away at before Trump went crazy with tweet storms, firings, pissing contests, bizarre speeches and antics.) The story to kill those stories would have to be: The President is crazy, his behaviour is crazy, his speech is crazy, he’s an unhinged madman in the most powerful office in the world! Sound the alarm! It is the worst form of media navel gazing because it is so sexy and so easy to report, so I ask again, is it too easy?
The media persists in wall to wall coverage of what could be a total gaslight, a smoke and mirrors sleight of hand illusion. I haven’t heard any media heavyweight’s suggest that Trump might just be a son of a bitch or a truly evil human being or that he chooses to eximplify and amplify the very worst charachteristics of human beings for no other reason then it gets him what he wants. In short, the danger he represents may not be due to any type of insanity, but a coldly rational choice to sew confusion and chaos which keeps the media blind and distracts everyone from the massive collusion with Russian agents who staged a successful coup all with the blessing of the electoral college. What if Trump is PT Barnum and the media covers every minute of it?
Adam Dunbar
