Depending which circulation rating site you look at, USA Today is number one overall or number three in circulation with numbers one and two being The New York Times and The Washington Post. However, there’s no doubt that USA Today has a wider readership among the general population who aren’t interested in the harder news and opinion provided by the Times and Post.
This is why it is significant that an opinion piece by clinical psychologist John Gartner, founder of the Duty to Warn group (full disclosure: I was an early member), and psychiatrists David Reiss and Stephen Buser was the most read opinion piece this past week.
Here are a few excepts from:
- Is being unfit grounds to impeach a president? James Madison appears to have thought so when he said, during the debates of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, that a president could be removed for “incapacity, negligence or perfidy.”
- Many of us in the mental health community have been arguing for years that Trump should be removed because he is psychologically unfit. We posted a professional petition online stating that “in our professional judgment … Donald Trump manifests a serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of president of the United States.”
- Most recently, "Dangerous Case" editor Bandy Lee and a group of colleagues issued a mental health analysis of the Mueller report in which they concluded “there is compelling medical evidence” that Trump “lacks the capacity to serve as president.”
- Citing (Bandy) Lee’s mental health analysis of the Mueller report, (Jamie) Raskin said, “The president is failing at every level of basic mental and cognitive health. He cannot take in information successfully. He cannot process information successfully. He cannot engage in decision-making without bias, distortion, impulsivity, impetuosity, and he cannot keep himself and others free from danger.”
- Pelosi has thus far resisted calls for impeachment on the grounds that it would arouse the ire of Trump’s base going into the 2020 election. But she seems to ignore the opposite risk: Underreacting desensitizes us to the dangerous severity of Trump’s dysfunction, normalizing the abnormal.
I included this in yesterday’s diary about Trump’s behaviour during his overseas trip for the commemoration of D-Day:
I couldn’t think of anything particularly new to write to express my thoughts and feelings about Trump’s sadistic malignant narcissism (read my Mar. 16, 2019 diary)...
Wikipedia explains that “a notable difference between “narcissists” and “malignant narcissists” is the “feature of sadism, or the gratuitous enjoyment of the pain of others. A narcissist will deliberately damage other people in pursuit of their own selfish desires, but may regret and will in some circumstances show remorse for doing so, while a malignant narcissist will harm others and enjoy doing so, showing little empathy or regret for the damage they have caused.”
Malignant is one of the most frightening words many of us have ever heard. It usually refers to cancer which has spread and may be life-threatening. When the preface malignant is applied to the word narcissism it describes Donald Trump.
Add the characteristics of malignant narcissism (above) which are so obvious in Donald Trump to the indications he may be suffering from early dementia as described in another USA opinion piece by John Gartner...
… and it would seem to me that an objective observer who isn’t familiar with psychology, to put it colloquially, would see that Donald Trump is not behaving normally.
While more and more television commentators (at least on MSNBC) are talking about this (Gene Robinson used the term malignant narcissism the other day), and Democrats in Congress must be recognising this (in part thanks to Bandy Lee: see “House Democrats plan event to scrutinize Trump's mental health”) the question I have is whether this is starting to sink in with some of Trump’s less than totally brainwashed supporters.
Certainly pieces like this in USA Today may help a little, but how long can Trump supporters see the truth that ought to be as obvious as the noses on their face?
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