So the Washington Post has a dual Op-Ed/Book Review in Sunday’s paper. It asks Is Donald Trump Mentally Ill? Or Is It Just America? Three books are looked at: the first is THE DANGEROUS CASE OF DONALD TRUMP: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.
However, I prefer the content of the two other books: TWILIGHT OF AMERICAN SANITY: A Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump by Allen Frances, and FANTASYLAND: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History, by Kurt Andersen.
In his new book, “Twilight of American Sanity,” psychiatrist Allen Frances asserts that Trump is not mentally ill — we are. “Calling Trump crazy allows us to avoid confronting the craziness in our society,” he writes. “We can’t expect to change Trump, but we must work to undo the societal delusions that created him.” And those delusions, Kurt Andersen contends in “Fantasyland,”have been around for a long time. “People tend to regard the Trump moment — this post-truth, alternative facts moment — as some inexplicable and crazy new American phenomenon,” he writes. “In fact, what’s happening is just the ultimate extrapolation and expression of attitudes and instincts that have made America exceptional for its entire history.”
Many people have called Hitler and those around him “monsters”. I feel that that is wrong. Why? Because when we do that, we remove Hitler’s humanity, and thus, we absolve him and the Nazi regime of his crimes. You may say that they were monstrous human beings who committed monstrous acts, but they were human. We can’t let them off the hook
So too it is with Donald Trump and his base. No doubt, Trump is stupid, reckless, corrupt, infantile and completely unqualified to hold the office of the presidency. But crazy? No. Let’s not give him or his enablers that escape route. He seems crazy, yes, because his only goal in life is his own complete and total glorification of Donald Trump. As part of that goal, he has chosen to indulge the whims of his supporters completely and to the total exclusion of the rest of the country. What makes it seem crazy is that the leadership of the Republican party has chosen to indulge him as well.
But that’s not insanity, especially since it’s method by which he 1) got elected and 2) will probably get re-elected. Trump absorbed the incoherent rage, hate, victimization and racism of his base, and then reflected it back to them in a warm, glowing light of validation. And it worked.
You can’t argue with results!
Andersen is right: this country’s emotional reaction to our pressing issues has long been unhinged, thanks mostly to that contingent of the easily aggrieved and their relentless sense of entitlement and victimization. Also, 40 years of Reagan, Rush and Fox have turned their psychosis into The New Normal. I talked about this a little in my diary “America is Still Fighting the Civil War.” They were often easy to ignore until the Rise of Trump, when a number of factors combined to make his nomination and victory a reality. They can’t all be explained away by “they’re crazy”.