At Salon, Chauncey DeVega asked mental health experts to weigh in on Donald Trump's long and bizarre letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, sent in the wake of the House vote to impeach him for abuse of his office.
The responses are well worth a full read. Go, do that. To give you the slightest of flavors, though, here are some of the alarming thoughts of the experts still warning anyone who will listen that Donald Trump is not just a man with a "severe mental compromise," but an ongoing danger to the nation:
• "Obsessively focused on the self and nothing else."
• "His feelings define reality."
• A "projecting (paranoid) view of the world" with a "primitive" focus on himself.
• The "quintessential example of how professional victims actually think." An "expression of entitled, delusional grievance. [...] [W]hat psychoanalysts call delusional projection." A "treasure trove for psychiatric residents who want to study the psychotic mind."
• An "incapacity to recognize other people as separate from him or having worth." Through "very simpleminded projections he deletes other's selfhood."
In other words, Trump's letter shows what anyone with even the slightest exposure to the man already knows: Trump is a malignant narcissist, grievance-fueled, a man defined by his own projection and an ability to delude himself into believing whatever lies are required to prop up his internal premise of being the greatest, if not the only, human to ever live.
That Trump evidently had the assistance of white nationalist Stephen Miller and others in drafting the strange, delusional six-page diatribe, however, makes the observations of Dr. Bandy Lee especially compelling. Dr. Lee notes "a common phenomenon that happens when you are continually exposed to a severely compromised person without appropriate intervention. You start taking on the person’s symptoms in a phenomenon called 'shared psychosis.'"—or, when expanded to larger scales, "mass hysteria."
We have seen this time and time again: Trump's allies have regularly slid into spouting the same bizarre conspiracy theories, the same insults, and the same nonsensical defenses that Trump himself publicizes. Whether it is because Trump drives out all those who do show the slightest resistance to his compulsions or whether it is an act by staffers to ingratiate themselves to him is unimportant. The public consequences are the same.
Trump is "quite conscious" of his ability to create this hysteria, says Dr. Lee, and uses it to his advantage. "We are entering the 'uncontainable' stage [of Trump's dangerousness] because of this shared psychosis."
Go, read. And keep in mind that, even though experts have been warning that Trump is constantly exhibiting behavior that is not merely dishonest, but "delusional," "paranoid," "psychotic," and, when paired with the powers of a national leader, horrifyingly dangerous, the political press still refuses to address these dangers, and Republican lawmakers continue, aggressively, not just to protect but also to willingly amplify those behaviors.