I posted this here about a year ago. I didn’t write anything for today. Instead I just made this tweet about Trump’s reaction to the coronavirus and posted it on Daily Kos.
In doing this I was looking at old images and came across the one I used for this article which is alarming in the sense that everything that Trump has become was predicted a year ago by mental health experts. I think it bears rereading it.
Two important articles addressing President Donald J. Trump’s psychological unfitness for office were published yesterday (Mar. 26, 2019). Taken together they paint a truly alarming picture of the precipice the country is teetering on because of the personality of the president.
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I envision the country on the edge of a cliff where the whims of the president could topple us into a near-dictatorship and autocracy.
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Our only hopes to correct the course of Trumpism and his GOP enablers are with the press, the Democrats in the House, and the Democrats who must oust Trump in 2020 and win the Senate. Only then can the country reset the autopilot which now is headed the country into a dictatorial autocracy where presidential sadism and revenge are tolerated by the Republican establishment and cheered on by Trump’s cultlike followers.
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There may be no remedy if Trump wins another term and the GOP wins the Senate where they can shape the Supreme Court for generations. We face living in a country like Gilead in "The Handmaids Tale."
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The first article is by Bandy X. Lee, MD, Jeffrey Sachs, and Ruth Ben-Ghiat.
Bandy X. Lee is a forensic psychiatrist at Yale University Medical School and is the editor of “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” now in its second editions. Jeffrey Sachs an American economist and public policy analyst. He was director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He holds the highest rank Columbia bestows on its faculty. He is known as one of the world's leading experts on economic development and the fight against poverty. (Wikipedia). Ruth Ben-Ghiat, according to her website, is an award-winning historian, author, and political commentator on fascism, authoritarian leadership, propaganda, and threats to democracy past and present. In her regular columns for CNN and the Washington Post.
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They write, in part:
Mental health professionals and others have been trying to warn the public about the dangers of US President Donald Trump since his election. Trump’s extreme narcissism, sadism, lack of empathy, and admiration for despots are on daily display. Some may wish to see him as a self-absorbed clown, but he is a clear and present danger to the world who must be prevented from leading (or misleading) it to disaster.
With the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, the dangers have greatly multiplied. While we have not seen the actual text – only a version of it rendered by the president’s political ally, US Attorney General William Barr – Mueller’s purported conclusion that Trump did not collude with Russian President Vladimir Putin will likely embolden Trump to attack. What makes the Mueller claim especially disastrous is the reality of tacit collusion staring us in the face. Trump ran his 2016 campaign while secretly trying to score a real-estate mega-deal in Moscow (and, as usual, lying about it to the public). He publicly opined on canceling sanctions against Russia while pursuing this deal.
Trump will feel enabled in his vindictiveness and delusions of grandeur. In recent weeks, Trump repeatedly taunted a dead US senator and uttered not a word of regret for the 50 Muslim worshipers slaughtered in New Zealand by a white supremacist who referred specifically to him in a manifesto justifying the massacre. When criticized, Trump spends days raging against his foes on Twitter. He uses rallies and other public occasions to model a politics that regards humanitarianism and compassion as weaknesses rather than fundamental human values.
In their essay, they assess Donald Trump’s behavior noting that whatever psychological syndromes he may have suffered from his condition may be worsening because of cognitive decline. They say the president’ s nationalist words are not to be taken lightly noting that his nationalistic view is echoed by white extremists here and around the world.
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They come up with these five steps summarized below. They say should be taken without delay:
- The House of Representatives should start impeachment hearings.
- Congress should urgently reclaim the clear and unambiguous constitutional right to declare war.
- Mental health experts must fulfill their responsibility to protect society’s health and safety by explaining publicly that Trump is not just a conniving politician, or a forceful leader, but a mentally unstable individual capable of creating widespread harm.
- The media need to go beyond covering Trump’s mood of the day to covering his mental instability.
- Americans need to organize politically to prevent another election debacle in 2020, perhaps one that Trump will try to stoke through cries of fraud and calls to his followers to violate the rules of democracy. If Trump is not impeached (as he should be), every effort must be made to preserve democracy and protect society from his destructiveness.
Bandy Lee also is interviewed in the March 26th Salon: “Yale psychiatrist on Trump: "Instead of containing his sickness, we as a nation have enabled it.”
the author Chelsea McLaughlin outlines the points made in a podcast in her interview with John D. Gartner, the founder of the Duty to Warn group of mental health professionals (which I have been a member of since it was formed over two years ago). Gartner was trained by psychoanalyst Otto Kernberg who is considered the world’s greatest living expert on malignant narcissism. He is currently working on a film documentary, #UNFIT, which is a collaboration between multiple Emmy Award-winning Director Dan Partland, longtime Producer Art Horan ("The Usual Suspects", etc.), and many of the nation's leading mental health professionals.
It begins with five minutes of news and then the interview starts about five minutes in.
If you aren't familiar with Dr. Gartner’s views on Trump and malignant narcissism the five-minute explanation is well worth listening to.
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In the podcast, Gartner lists the traits of narcissistic personality disorder and audio clips of Trump are played demonstrating how he exhibits them. He then continues to explain how the disorder Trump has is much worse that narcissistic personality disorder. He continues:
"[This] combines narcissism with paranoia - all of his crazy conspiracy theories, his projections of evil on the press and to minorities and anyone who disagrees with him, his constant sense that he's a victim - and antisocial personality disorder which is the personality disorder of criminals, people who lie and have no conscience, who violate and exploit the rights of others and have no remorse about it.
"And finally the fourth component is sadism, which as it sounds, is taking pleasure in harming, humiliating or degrading other people."
This combination makes for a grim diagnosis: "When you put these four traits together, you have the most dangerous type of leader that it's possible to have," Dr. Gartner said.
"That's why there was such a duty to warn people. It's not just that he's narcissistic, we certainly have many narcissistic politicians, it's that he's truly dangerous.
Just like the authors of the first article Dr. Gartner expressed grave concerned that Trump now feels vindicated by the Mueller report and that this may embolden the President to take dangerous actions.
This brings to mind the photoshop I made and posted on Daily Kos after the Barr letter came out. Humor is among the healthiest defense mechanisms, but then this isn’t really funny because it depicts what both Trump and Putin are probably thinking.
Above: Two caricatures by DonkeyHotey plus my own photoshopping to put the iPhone in Trump’s hand.
