The mainstream media did not report the most inflammatory allegation ever made against Donald Trump, that at age 48, he violently raped a 13-year-old girl. The secondary press, including the Huffington Post, did publish articles about this story. But almost all of those secondary press outlets published only sparse accounts of the evidence. The most complete accounts were in especially obscure publications. The alleged victim filed a lawsuit and then dropped it, and this story faded into obscurity. But it shouldn’t have.
That’s because a complete presentation of the evidence obviously has what police call “investigatory credibility.” It’s credible enough to justify the time and expense of launching an investigation. For instance, the alleged victim has an eye witness and what might be called a hearsay witness, someone whom the victim told her about the offense soon after it happened. In sworn declarations submitted to and accept by a federal court in the alleged victim’s October 2016 civil suit against Trump, the victim, using the pseudonym, Katie Johnson, the eye witness and the hearsay witness spelled out the basics of what happened some 23 years ago. The victim also has online a 29-minute video of her telling her story at length. It’s loaded with details that are the sort that police use to establish enough credibility to conduct an investigation. Moreover, the circumstantial evidence is extensive and also compelling.
Questions and challenges abound about this story, but it’s not going away. In conversations with a wide variety of people, including psychoanalysts, the dean of a law school, and various journalists, it becomes apparent that this is, as one highly regarded journalist put it, “a complex story.” The answer to one question leads to another and another. That’s why a book chapter length piece was needed to establish “investigatory credibility” in the face of numerous heart-felt objections.
Chapter 2 of my book, How to Transform Trump: Based on Other Sociopaths Profound Life Changes, does just that. I’m quick to add that this book title, much less the preface and Table of Contents raise a flood of objections and questions. But in conversations with reasonable critics, I’ve been able to interest them in reading the book. The point is not to earn money for me. I have a solid reputation as an altruistic and generous minister who has helped hundreds of people without remuneration. As the book argues, the point is to get the book in the hands of leaders in all walks of life to interest them in launching the first of two procedures needed to deeply affect Trump: a public and persistent confrontation of Trump with the evidence so as to crack his sociopathic facade.
My interlocutors’ first and most deeply held objection is that sociopaths don’t change. I have evidence that they do in chapter 5 about two brutal sociopaths who did change profoundly, not just by behaving better. Of course, that evidence and other arguments for the capacity of sociopaths to deeply change is itself extensive and should be the subject of another book. But that kind of far reaching challenge isn’t necessary to counter for the sake of interesting people in this proposal. That’s because the evidence that Trump is a sociopath seem incontrovertible and attested to by leading experts. And this evidence will convict him in the court of public opinion and incite much more extensive investigation into the claims of the alleged victim.
The second intense objection is that the book’s method for derailing, much less changing Trump, can’t work. The method is what I call empathetic explanation, or empathetic insight. As soon as people hear the words “empathy” and “Trump” in the same sentence, it’s common for them to call this proposal both ridiculous and totally undesirable. Why undesirable? Most people hate Trump and want to see him either drawn and quartered or at least stripped of all his holdings and put in prison where they hope he will be brutalized. This visceral reaction to Trump, I contend, is part of what made him who he has become. Hate begets hate is the simple version of this idea. And I marshal other professionals’ similar opinions to help make my case. Moreover, the two sociopath obviously were changed by both confrontation and empathetic understanding. Without the empathy, they would’t have changed.
Ironically, therefore, this book is more of a challenge to liberals who hate Trump or just are convinced that he can’t change than it is to the most reasonable conservatives who are ambivalent about him. But this book’s chapters on understanding and transforming Trump at least present a thorough argument that seems worth considering. At least that’s what the professionals who wrote testimonials for this book have said.
Again, the point is to explore an alternative method that, if it does work, will work within six months after the public confrontation begins. The Mueller investigation may work, but it will take at least a year to undertake, and it’s still too uncertain whether it will work.
I’m John H. McFadden, and I’m an ordained Presbyterian minister and California State Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with 47 years of experience. (BD 11-19-1940; aged 77) I’ve had articles published in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, Tikkun, and two professional journals. I worked as a contract social worker in the California Department of Corrections for seven years. For 33 years, I consulted extensively with Bernard Apfelbaum, Ph.D, a prominent psychoanalytic psychologist, and often presented papers for discussion to his group, a Berkeley consortium of psychoanalytic therapists. Dignity Press has my completed manuscript, Empathetic Explanation: A Solution to the Psychological Part of Any Problem, which they plan to publish soon.
