I’ve written nearly 200 serious, snarky, or silly stories since I started posting on Daily Kos in March. The most recent one can be found there. If you have a few spare days, you can read all of my stories on my own website halbrown.org. During that time I never thought Donald Trump could be elected. As one of a comparatively small number psychotherapists writing here I wrote about 20 articles about why Trump was psychologically unfit even dangerous, to be president. Now he’s proving me right.
A few days after the election I reacted to Trump’s still Tweeting with the story at left.
I wrote then:
After watching my usual MSNBC shows while at the same time reading dozens of articles on progressive websites I’ve had these thoughts.
Starting out with Chris Mathews I saw him talk about what a good meeting Trump had with President Obama.
Boy, was he taken in, hook, line, and sinker.
By the time Lawrence O’Donnell came on the two Tweets coming minutes apart were posted by Trump. Thankfully, the contrast between the two didn’t go unnoticed.
What got to me the most was that any fleeting personal delusional normalization of Trump, any fleeting hopeful thought I had about Trump, was extinguished with his Tweets. Trust me, I never really believe he could become presidential.
It was wishful thinking.
Of course now he’s showing this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde aspect of his personality again, Tweeting about Hamilton at 3:00 AM. This isn’t a metaphor. This is deviant and dangerous behavior for a person who will be president.
You can bet that the best psychologists the national security agencies in Russia, China, and even allies like Israel, France, Britain, and Germany log onto his Twitter account. The CIA does this with their leader, and obviously they do it with ours.
I am certain these experts have compiled reams of material on Hillary Clinton. They are most likely playing a desperate game of catch-up on Trump. Who knows, they may be reading some of the psychological profiles I’ve written on Daily Kos. The would be well advised to read Israeli clinical psychologist Avner Falk’s penetrating, dare I say brilliant, analysis “Dr. Donald and Mr. Trump.”
Here’s an excerpt:
How can we square the magnanimous Dr. Donald with the mean and evil Mr. Trump? Well, the Jekyll-and-Hyde personality is familiar to psychological professionals. It is based upon what psychoanalysts call an unconscious “splitting of the self.” This kind of splitting develops early in one’s life, as a psychic defense, when the child cannot reconcile the “good” or pleasurable and “bad” or painful parts of himself. It usually goes along with an inner “object splitting,” when the child cannot reconcile the “good” and “bad” parts of its primary emotional “object,” usually the mother, upon which his very life depends.
The “splitting of the self” was given literary expression in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, while “object splitting” is given concrete expression in fairy tales, such as that of Snow White, whose protagonist has two mothers, one all good, but dead, the other all bad, cold, narcissistic, who keeps looking at her own image in the mirror. When this unconscious splitting persists into one’s adult life, the Jekyll-and-Hyde personality develops. Indeed, Donald Trump sees his world in split-up, black-and-white terms: to him, there are “very good people” and there are “very bad people” who must be denied entry, deported or killed. In reality, most people are both good and bad.
This man is dangerous. Not only is he personally not in control of his darker impulses, but his choices of advisers and appointments to his administration shows a disregard for both the beliefs and competence of those who will be running the government.
It’s understandable that he should value loyalty, but he shows every sign of wanting to surround himself with subordinates who are obsequious. Not only that, he has adopted far right positions for sheer political gain that he most likely doesn’t believe. He says things for shock value just for the pleasure of it. For example, I rather doubt he thinks women should be punished for having abortions, or that we should open the can of worms that trying to legalize waterboarding would cause.
If you add all the personality factors to the indisputable fact that he has almost no knowledge about how government works, and then factor in the fact that he has demonstrated a lack of intellectual curiosity, that he has a short attention span, plus if you believe only half of the reports that he tends to decide on a course of action based on the advice of the last person he talked to — you know where I am going with this as we gauge how high on the Charlie Foxtrot Richter Scale the catastrophe will be.
I don’t want to appear facile. This is as serious as it gets. But the old phraseology isn’t adequate for describing the course Trump has set this nation on. We are as imperiled now as the world was when Hitler came to power.
Addendum:
Earthquakes of a magnitude over nine occur every 10-50 years. Consider how the U.S. Geological Survey defines earthquakes over over 10.
Minor earthquakes occur every day and hour. On the other hand, great earthquakes occur once a year, on average. The largest recorded earthquake was the Great Chilean earthquake of May 22, 1960, which had a magnitude of 9.5 on the moment magnitude scale.[19] The larger the magnitude, the less frequent the earthquake happens.
Beyond 9.5, while extremely strong earthquakes are theoretically possible, the energies involved rapidly make such earthquakes on Earth effectively impossible without an extremely destructive source of external energy. For example, the asteroid impact that created the Chicxulub crater and caused the mass extinction that may have killed the dinosaurs has been estimated as causing a magnitude 13 earthquake (see below), while a magnitude 15 earthquake could destroy the Earth completely. Seismologist Susan Hough has suggested that 10 may represent a very approximate upper limit, as the effect if the largest known continuous belt of faults ruptured together (along the Pacific coast of the Americas)