A Growing Consensus: Trump’s Mental Health Is A Danger To Us All
by John Lundin
There is a growing consensus that, “The president of the United States is not well.”
That was the reluctant assessment of Ezra Klein in his December 29th article, “Incoherent, authoritarian, uninformed: Trump’s New York Times interview is a scary read.” The reference was to an impromptu interview Trump gave to Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Times on the day afer Christmas.
That interview sparked a flurry of armchair ‘diagnoses’ of the mental health of the current President of the United States.
An excerpt:
I know more about the big bills. … Than any president that’s ever been in office. Whether it’s health care and taxes. Especially taxes. And if I didn’t, I couldn’t have persuaded a hundred. … You ask Mark Meadows [inaudible]. … I couldn’t have persuaded a hundred congressmen to go along with the bill. The first bill, you know, that was ultimately, shockingly rejected … I know the details of taxes better than anybody. Better than the greatest C.P.A. I know the details of health care better than most, better than most. And if I didn’t, I couldn’t have talked all these people into doing ultimately only to be rejected.
People calling Donald Trump ‘crazy’ is nothing new, but there is clearly a growing consensus among folk who know Trump well and/or who have the mental health credentials to be making a credible assessment. And of course there are many in the media who are willing to express their informed opinion.
Michelle Goldberg may have begun the discussion when she wrote in the New York Times on December 1st, “There is a debate over whether Trump is unaware of reality or merely indifferent to it. He might be delusional, or he might simply be asserting the power to blithely override truth, which is the ultimate privilege of a despot. But reports from the administration all suggest an increasingly unhinged and chaotic president. Trump’s aides are trying to spin his behavior, which they clearly expect to get worse, as a sign of heightened confidence.
“Officials tell us Trump seems more self-assured, more prone to confidently indulging wild conspiracies and fantasies, more quick-triggered to fight than he was during the Wild West of the first 100 days in office,” Mike Allen reports on Axios.
“This should be seen as an emergency situation,” Goldberg concluded.
The concern is not new. Conservative columnist George Will wrote an article in the Washington Post in May of 2017, “Trump has a dangerous disability.”
“It is urgent for Americans to think and speak clearly, about President Trump’s inability to do either. This seems to be not a mere disinclination but a disability. It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.”
A number of top U.S. psychologists, like Harvard professor and researcher Howard Gardner, believe Donald Trump is a “textbook” narcissist, in the pathological sense. In fact, Trumpfits the profile so well that clinical psychologist George Simon told Vanity Fair, “He’s so classic that I’m archiving video clips of him to use in workshops.”
According to the Mayo Clinic, narcissistic personality disorder is “a mental disorder in which people have an inflated sense of their own importance, a deep need for admiration and a lack of empathy for others.”
A telling excerpt from the Christmas NYT interview:
We’re going to win another four years for a lot of reasons, most importantly because our country is starting to do well again and we’re being respected again. But another reason that I’m going to win another four years is because newspapers, television, all forms of media will tank if I’m not there because without me, their ratings are going down the tubes. Without me, The New York Times will indeed be not the failing New York Times, but the failed New York Times. So they basically have to let me win. And eventually, probably six months before the election, they’ll be loving me because they’re saying, “Please, please, don’t lose Donald Trump.”
This ‘narcissist’ diagnosis puts Trump in the same category as a number of infamous dictators like Muammar Gaddafi, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Saddam Hussein. And although there are narcissists out there who entertain us, innovate, or create great art, when a narcissist is given immense power over people’s lives, they can behave much differently. And there is a growing consensus of voices saying that is the danger with Donald Trump.
A Yale University psychiatrist is among those warning that Trump has become increasingly mentally unstable, imperiling the United States and the rest of the word.
Dr. Bandy Lee’s stark alarm, published Friday in a letter to The New York Times, calls for the public and lawmakers to demand a psychological examination of Trump.
It came on the heels of Trump retweeting violent videos from a far-right group in the United Kingdom, referring to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., as “Pocohantas” during a White House event honoring Navajo Indian heroes of World War II, and a Times story that said the president has suggested an “Access Hollywood” tape of him talking about groping women may have been fake, despite his prior admission it was real.
“He’s losing touch with reality,” Dr. Lee told CNBC.
Lee, the editor of the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” said in her letter to the Times that “thousands” of mental health professionals are deeply worried about Trump’s state of mind.
They have formed a group called the National Coalition of Concerned Mental Health Experts, whose website is Dangerouscase.org.
“All agree that he’s dangerous,” Lee told CNBC.
Citing ethical rules, Lee and other psych professionals, will properly not say how she would diagnose Trump, based solely on his public comments and demeanor. But she said that based on his behavior, he seems to be reacting adversely to the stress of an ongoing criminal probe of his presidential campaign’s contacts with Russia, saber-rattling by North Korea, and his decreasing popularity among the public.
Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist who was recently elected governor of Virginia, distinguished himself during the gubernatorial race by calling President Donald Trump a ‘narcissistic maniac’, drew criticism for using medical diagnostic terminology to denounce a political figure, though he defended the terminology as “medically correct.” The term isn’t medically correct — “maniac” has not been a medical term for well over a century — but Northam’s use of it in either medical or political contexts would not be considered unethical by his professional peers.
For psychiatrists, however, the situation is different, which is why many psychiatrists and other mental health professionals have refrained from speculating about Trump’s mental health.
Nonetheless, in a book of essays published in October, two dozen psychiatrists and psychologists challenged strictures laid down by their professions’ leaders and publicly probed Trump’s mental state. “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” is a recitation of evidence for what they contend is Trump’s malignant narcissism, hedonism and sociopathy.
Their consensus has two thrusts: First, the nation’s 45th president is a “clear and present danger to the United States, and to the well-being of its citizens.” And second, as a profession, mental health practitioners are bound by a legal and ethical duty to warn the public of the danger he poses.
Dr, Lee, an editor of the report, wrote: “It does not take a mental health professional to see that a person of Trump’s impairments, in the office of the presidency, is a danger to us all.
“What mental health experts can offer is affirmation that these signs are real, that they may be worse than the public suspects, and that the patterns indicate the need for an urgent evaluation.”
Ms. Lee also claimed the on-going investigation into links between Mr Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia would leave the President feeling “increasingly walled in”, adding that as a result, “his mental stability is likely to suffer and hence also public safety”.
“Mental impairment and criminal-mindedness are not mutually exclusive; not only can they happen at the same time, when combined, these two characteristics become particularly dangerous,” she said.
“Trump has shown marked signs of impairment and psychological disability under ordinary circumstances, hardly able to cope with basic criticism or unflattering news.”
It comes as a prominent psychologist criticized Mr Trump for what she said were more than 1,600 “lies” in his first 11 months in office, describing them as a “flood of deceit”.
Writing in the Washington Post, Bella DePaulo said: “By telling so many lies, and so many that are mean-spirited, Trump is violating some of the most fundamental norms of human social interaction and human decency.”
Last month the co-author of Mr Trump’s memoir The Art of the Deal claimed White House aides were “terrified” about the President’s mental health.
Tony Schwartz, a fierce critic of the 71-year-old since he took office in January, suggested Mr Trump was “deeply mentally ill” and “no longer connected to reality”.
Legendary Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein adds that Donald Trump’s presidency is most characterized by his lies.
The Washington Post reported on New Year’s day that Donald Trump has made 1,950 ‘false and misleading claims’ since taking office, and is well on his way to topping 2,000 his first year in office.
“There’s no reason to believe almost anything Donald Trump says, because what we know is that the president of the United States and his presidency is characterized, above all else, by the lying of the president of the United States,” Bernstein told CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The position of President of the United States is one that requires great empathy, a certain amount of humility, the ability to preserve relationships, and a willingness to establish new ones. These are all qualities that the narcissist lacks, and with their absence comes danger. Do we really want to put all Americans, and even the entire world, at great risk by giving a narcissist the nuclear code?
Donald Trump is very much like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, and the presidency is his “one ring to rule them all.”
In this case we do not have the option of destroying the ring. The best we can strive for is keeping it out of the possession of those who cannot resist abusing its power.
The consensus of media and psych ‘experts’ pointing to the danger of President Donald Trump’s mental health offers a call to each of us to ‘resist,’ to be vigilant, and to make our own voices heard. We may not be mental health professionals, but we know when our silence presents a risk to the whole world, a risk equal to that of a mentally-impaired president.
Speaking out against the danger this mentally-impaired president presents will be our calling in 2018.
