Here’s an article that may have slipped under your reading radar unless you subscribe to Ms. Magazine or caught an article about it on RawStory on Tuesday. It is by Thomas Smurthwaite, an Oregon-based psychologist who served for 20 years as staff psychologist at Kaiser Permanente Northwest, where he specialized in clinical neuropsychology and men’s anger control.
In this article the author describes why Trump reminds him of many of the abusive men he treated in a “feminist-informed” treatment program for court-mandated batterers which he established. He notes that most of the men he treated had a patriarchal belief system and thought they were “entitled to certain privileges because they were men.” He worried most about men with narcissism and antisocial behavior, since they became aggressive quickly.
From the article: President Trump has a dangerous combination of narcissism and antisocial traits, along with toxic patriarchy that entitles him to have his way. He overpowers political subordinates while tearing down boundaries that contained prior presidents. Encouragement from the patriarchal right intensifies his craving for power.
In my years of working with abusive men, I never saw a more effective bully. Donald Trump’s personality disorder is not adequately contained, but containment is sorely needed.
It turns out that this isn’t the first time Ms. Magazine has published articles by a psychologist about Donald Trump. Here are three articles by Jackson Katz, Ph.D., a psychologist internationally renowned for his pioneering scholarship and activism on issues of gender, race and violence.
Donald Trump and the Tragedy of Failed “Masculine” Leadership
Trump and the “Nasty,” “Horrid” Women Reporters
Unmasking Donald Trump
Does anybody want to hazard a guess who the first president was to grace the cover of Ms. Magazine was? Here’s a hint, they decided to depict him in a classic Superman pose and it wasn’t this delusional self-aggrandizing malignant narcissist:
Still can’t guess?
Here’s the then publisher Eleanor Smeal writing in HuffPost about why they decided to feature President Obama on their cover:
By
Excerpt:
It's not every day Ms. puts a man on its cover.
In choosing the cover for this special Inaugural issue, Ms. wanted to capture both the national and feminist mood of high expectations and hope as the 44th President of the United States takes the oath of office.
Expectations have only grown since the election, with President-Elect Obama now enjoying over 80% of the public's support. Most people wish him well, and indeed hope he does "save" us from economic disasters, unending war and occupation, global warming, the decline in our international reputation, and relentless attacks on women's rights, civil rights, human rights, science, privacy...the list goes on.
Here’s a January, 2009 interview by Amy Goodman (in Democracy Now) with the then publisher Eleanor Smeal about why Ms. decided to feature President Obama as the first male to appear on the cover in over a decade. At the time critics questioned the decision to put Obama on the cover, especially at so early a stage in his presidency.
Excerpt:
ELLIE SMEAL:
Well, first place, Amy, I wanted to say that this isn’t the first time Ms. has had a man on the cover. It is the first time in twelve years.
But we did it on purpose using the Superman image, because so many people want him or think of him as maybe saving us from global warming, war, torture, all the horrible things that have been happening with the Bush administration. But we realize, of course, that he’s an ordinary man. And one of the reasons that the women’s movement exists is that we have to organize, organize, and make sure that our issues are front and center and hold our leaders’ feet to the fire. We say all that really in the cover story. In fact, what we have in the cover story is major women’s leaders, also our readers, giving their vision of what must be done to turn this country around and to remake America. So we know exactly what we were doing. In fact, we use his own joke, where he said he wasn’t born in a manger, but he was on Krypton. In other words, we all know that no one person can save us, but we do have to make sure that so much gets done, especially in the area of women’s rights.
I know. I know. In these times nostalgia for Barack Obama is enough to bring tears to our eyes. I’d almost forgotten what it was like to have a president with a self-effacing sense of humor but the joke referenced above brought the memories back.
Then presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama, at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner in New York City, made the revelation that he was born on Krypton and sent by his father, Jor-El, to save the planet Earth. This is the same speech where he noted that “it’s been said that I share the politics of Alfred E. Smith and the ears of Alfred E. Neuman.”
Trump, of course, thinks that he’s incredibly funny, knee slapping hilarious, and no doubt worthy of the “Noble” Prize for Comedy.
I wrote about Trump’s sense of humor here (and even used a link to the Superman story in The Week which is in this diary):