What If Trump Is Crazy?
Questioning the president’s mental health is a slippery slope
I n an article published on the eve of the president’s inauguration, blogger and journalism professor Jeff Jarvis declared that it is time to say that Donald Trump is mentally ill:
I was about to write that for the good of the nation and the world it is high time that someone in psychiatry or psychology break the Goldwater Rule and diagnose Donald Trump’s mental illness — not to feed jokes but to grapple with a profoundly serious and dangerous situation. Now someone has.
Dr. John D. Gartner is a psychologist and part-time professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. He diagnosed Trump with malignant narcissism.
I have several problems with Jarvis’s article, and with other, similar pronouncements. But first, let me concede that Donald Trump’s behavior at times — such as his persistent obsession with nonexistent voter fraud — does evoke images of deranged commanders such as Captain Queeg of The Caine Mutiny or Colonel Jessup of A Few Good Men.
Still, the Jarvis article and some others of its ilk seem off base.
First, Jarvis’s initial proclamation that it’s time to call Trump mentally ill implies that there has been reluctance to state that elsewhere, previously. But doubts about Trump’s sanity have been expressed widely by others — for instance, Dan McAdams, Sam Vaknin, Eliot Cohen — and for months. So neither Jarvis nor Dr. Gartner were opening any new doors.
More importantly, Jarvis — like some others who make similar charges — fails to acknowledge the dangers, and ugly precedents, of the use of psychiatry for political ends. In an article reviewing the sordid history of this practice, researchers Massimiliano Buoli and Aldo Sabino Giannuli observe:
Psychiatry has been variously used by totalitarian regimes as a means of political persecution and especially when it was necessary to make acceptable to public opinion the imprisonment of political opponents.
At the least, the gravity of charging Trump with madness, and of the perilous consequences of invoking the 25th Amendment — to remove Trump from office on the grounds of psychiatric disability — should be appreciated.
E ven if Trump is unhinged, those inclined to trumpet that the president is crazy should pause to consider the question raised by Soviet spy Rudolph Abel in The Bridge of Spies when asked if he is worried: “Would it help?”
Does it really help to declare that Trump is mad? It is a question worth pondering because the answer is not entirely clear.
It may seem to Trump opponents and critics that targeting Trump’s mental health — skirting questions of ideology — might allow Trump voters to join in efforts to remove or at least neutralize him. But it seems at least equally plausible that a charge against Trump’s sanity will be perceived by his ardent supporters as an attack on them, and fuel the conspiracy theories that Trump has long stoked.
A more substantive reason to attend to the president’s mental health is the matter of nuclear weapons. In the complex chain of command, under current law only the president has authority to order a nuclear strike independently. This grew out of concern during and after World War II that civilians, not military officers, should have ultimate control of the use of nuclear weapons. But in the parlance of systems science, this makes the president a “single point of failure” — making the entire system notably less than fail-safe.
In light of that issue, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R, UT), chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said he is considering legislation to require all presidents to undergo an independent medical — including psychiatric — examination. “If you’re going to have your hands on the nuclear codes, you should probably know what kind of mental state you’re in,” Chaffetz told the Washington Post.
An insanity defense might be pertinent if or when Trump were charged in criminal court. But it would have little relevance to an impeachment trial. Then it is only up to the judgment of members of Congress whether the nation’s best interest is served by retaining or removing the president.
The Congress’s view in that situation will reflect the sense of a persuasive majority of the electorate. Shortly after Richard Nixon’s second inauguration in 1973, his public approval was up to about 70 percent. By the time the House initiated impeachment proceedings in the summer of 1974, Nixon’s public approval was below 25 percent.
Donald Trump entered office with the lowest level of public approval of a new president on record, around 45 percent, while 45 percent disapproved. After only a month of the Trump administration’s tenure, public disapproval has risen to 54 percent.
Even if diagnosis of the president’s mental health is inappropriate or impossible, Trump’s conduct still is widely perceived, at home and abroad, as erratic, irrational, incompetent, or just nuts. And the distrust and insecurity spawned by that perception have tangible political impacts — overwhelmingly negative, and commonly called chaos. “Chaos is not anarchy,” warns political scientist Louis René Beres. “It is much more than anarchy, much more impactful and destabilizing.”
That is so even if, as some conjecture, Trump is “crazy like a fox,” feigning unhinged behavior as a ploy to confuse opponents.
So it may not help to claim that Trump is mentally ill. And arguing over claims that Trump is crazy may distract attention from the palpable threats Trump’s actions pose to the nation and its people.
Trump’s behavior has already undermined America’s security, alienating its friends and aiding its enemies. He has roiled the country’s social fabric, fomenting division, dissonance, fear, and anger. Trump has constructed an administration riddled with corruption and malpractice. And his plans and policies portend far more damage to come.
Overall, the harm inflicted by Donald Trump’s actions matters far more than whether his motives are sane.
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Copyright 2017, Lewis J. Perelman
This article is adapted from a comment originally published in Medium on February 17, 2017.
Also see my related article, Saving the Republic From Trump.
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