Update: Read review in Variety
A review of #UNFIT was featured on Daily Beast today:
Top Psychologists Compare Trump to Hitler and Mussolini in New Documentary. In the eye-opening documentary “#UNFIT,” premiering in virtual cinemas Aug. 28, psychologists and former allies of President Trump diagnose why he’s a danger to America.
I wrote about #UNFIT almost a year to the date ago. Not much has changed about Trump’s behavior since then except it has gotten worse, so I think it is fair to simply republish what I wrote then. Obviously Trump has demonstrated he is even more psychologically unfit and dangerous. There are examples in his more recent behavior that prove the thesis of the documentary which includes video clips which are now almost classics as examples of what the clinicians are explaining.
This is the difficulty in making a documentary about an ongoing crisis. There is always a drop-dead date where additions can’t be included.
I updated my old diary in just a few places in parenthetical italics.
Here is a link with #UNFIT updates posted during post-production not available when I wrote the following.
Dr. John Gartner, the clinical psychologist who started the Duty to Warn group teamed with two experienced Hollywood filmmakers and has been working on a Kickstarter funded documentary featuring top mental health experts explaining why Donald Trump’s psychopathology makes him not only unfit, but dangerous, to be president. (Read about John Gartner on Wiki)
( Full disclosure: I have been a member of Duty to Warn its inception over two years ago and Gartner and I consider each other to be associates.)
The quotes below are (were at the time) from the film’s website “#UNFIT: Malignant Narcissism Comes to Washington.”
The movie includes interviews with journalists and with people who have dealt with malignant narcissists in their lives. There are interviews with working class people who “were jilted, screwed, and permanently harmed by (Trump) before he entered politics.”
In a tantalizing teaser their website says they “meet a former member of his inner circle who speaks to the psychology of how he seduces people to his advantage and later corrupts them.” (Now we know this is probably Anthony Scaramucci)
Those of us who scratch our heads over why Trump has so many ardent supporters will be interested to hear experts “theorize on the phenomenon of his hardened base of supporters, how and why they continue to support him, and why so many of them dig in, deny, deflect, and otherwise mirror his actions.”
It is being produced and directed by David Partland (see his background on IMDb) and co-produced by Art Horan (also on IMDb).
John Gartner writes (or wrote at the time):
Donald Trump is banned from running a charity because he committed rampant fraud, yet he still runs our country!
Malignant narcissism is a disorder responsible for the most catastrophic behavior throughout human history, yet almost nobody talks about it!
What the $#&!@% are we waiting for? A film!?
Well, all-righty then! The website for our film #UNFIT is LIVE. The film has finished production and is now in post production. It is a fiercely independent presentation of truth placing behavioral and psychological science over politics. It WILL impact the narrative. We need it.
Those of us, not just Daily Kos readers but the literally thousands of mental health professionals, who realized that Trump was psychological unfit and dangerous two or more years ago (now three years) are finally seeing more and more pundits, politicians, and media commentators describe Trump as a narcissist with no empathy who sadistically enjoys the pain his policies have inflicted on others. We have been frustrated over the fact that something we saw so clearly through the lens of our understanding of abnormal psychology was being ignored with a few notable exceptions (Lawrence O’Donnell, Joe Scarborough for example) by the mainstream media.
This week we saw Trump go over the edge in his behavior with his reactions to the Dayton and ElPaso shootings and the Epstein suicide (I wrote about the later yesterday).
When I began to post stories on Daily Kos in April 2016 (my first one is here) I didn’t even know about Erich Fromm’s formulation of malignant narcissism. But then I got to know John Gartner first from his articles and then through personal correspondence and saw how clearly Trump could be described psychologically as nothing else but a malignant narcissist.
From the #UNFIT website (at the time):
The malignant narcissist is grandiose, with an inflated sense of accomplishment, and an excessive need for admiration. He is boastful, hypersensitive to criticism, arrogant, and envious. He is always ready to raise hostility levels, and uses deceit and manipulation. He transgresses social norms, and lacks moral conscience. He is preoccupied with perceived disloyalty, bearing grudges, quick to blame others, and prone to conspiracy theories. He is dehumanizing to people he perceives as weak, capable of taking glee in their misfortune.
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We all know narcissists, but Malignant Narcissism is different. It's been at the root of some of the most vicious inhumanity in all of history. A malignant narcissist when threatened makes decisions impulsively and walks a line between sanity and insanity. We are now witnessing that descent in plain view. — The Producers
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Those who offer such advice he perceives as contrary will increasingly be seen as actively subverting his best interests, as he understands them. He'll grow more defiant, more reckless, more anti-constitutional, and more dangerous. — David Frum (George W. Bush speechwriter and MSNBC contributor )
Movies can have an impact books don’t. The publication of a best seller called “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” had an impact in that it educated lots of people who needed to understand the psychological underpinning of Trump’s behavior. It didn’t faze Trump the narcissist who didn't even (as far as a know) even tweet about it.
Perhaps a movie making the same case will, especially if it gets good reviews and lots of people see it in the theaters and then it’s picked up by Netflix or Amazon. Trump doesn’t read but movies like this get people talking. Its release should lead to coverage and interviews on television.
(Obviously the pandemic has changed this to some extent. However if the documentary gets enough publicity it could still result in John Gartner and others being interviewed on television and in other media. Hopefully it will be covered beyond the progressive media.)
Hopefully this film will be something of a sequel to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9.
Maybe it will be nominated for a best documentary Academy Award. In 2002 Moore won it for Bowling for Columbine… One can dream…