There are two articles in Salon today which, when taken together, paint a picture of how closely Trump’s views mirror those of Adolph Hitler.
The first is by Heather “Digby” Parton:
Digby includes this tweet in her article...
and this seven second video:
Robert Jay Lifton, before Mary Trump came along, was the most famous mental health professional to come out to explain how and why Trump’s psychopathology made him a threat to democracy. He had a Wikipedia page for years as did Phillip Zimbardo of the Stanford Prison Experiment. This was before Bandy Lee and John Gartner had theirs.
Both Lifton and Zimbardo contributed to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump and have been interviewed or published articles about him as a web search of Lifton Trump and Zimbardo Trump will show. When I went to college every psychology and social psychology major was familiar with Lifton and Zimbardo.
Igor Derysh interviews Lifton here:
From the article:
"I spoke about what I called malignant normality that was being imposed on us, and the need to be witnessing professionals who told the truth and oppose the malignant normality," he said in an interview last week.
Lifton said that Trump's supporters and enablers exhibit the same "cult-like behavior" that he has studied, adding that the current administration has "Trumpified" every part of the federal government, in much the same way that the German government was "Nazified" under Adolf Hitler.
It is a short interview. I urge you to read what he has to say. Here is just a portion of one of his answers to one of Dersch’s questions:
You've referred to "malignant normality" a few times. Can you talk more about what you mean by that?
Well, I can tell you where I got that idea. It came from my work with Nazi doctors. I studied Nazi doctors and I spoke to a number of them. And in that situation, if a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz, at the ramp, was sending Jews to the gas chamber, that was considered his job. That was what he was supposed to do. He may have had problems with it, but that was what was expected of him. That was a form of the malignant normality of that regime. Now, Trump isn't a Nazi, but still there's an American malignant normality that Trump and his followers impose on us, and that malignant normality has to do with lying. It's particularly extreme in relation to the virus, but it has to do with a more general pattern of lying, a kind of paranoid grandiosity.
It has also to do with attacking and seeking to destroy anyone who questions his version of reality. All that is part of the malignant normality imposed on this country by Trumpites, which I think it's our responsibility to expose and combat with the full knowledge and experience of our professions brought into play. So that is how witnessing professionals, again, confront and combat malignant normality.
The question frequently asked about Trump by readers of the diaries I have written about Trump’s malignant narcissism is whether he is mentally ill or just plain evil. Another famous psychologist Eric Fromm came up with the concept of malignant narcissism. I can't count the number of times I’ve copied the description from Wikipedia. Here it is again, I republish it because it answers the question.
Malignant narcissism is a psychological syndrome comprising an extreme mix of narcissism, antisocial behavior, aggression, and sadism.[1] Grandiose, and always ready to raise hostility levels, the malignant narcissist undermines families and organizations in which they are involved, and dehumanizes the people with whom they associate
The social psychologist Erich Fromm first coined the term "malignant narcissism" in 1964, describing it as a "severe mental sickness" representing "the quintessence of evil". He characterized the condition as "the most severe pathology and the root of the most vicious destructiveness and inhumanity".[4] Edith Weigert (1967) saw malignant narcissism as a "regressive escape from frustration by distortion and denial of reality", while Herbert Rosenfeld (1971) described it as "a disturbing form of narcissistic personality where grandiosity is built around aggression and the destructive aspects of the self become idealized."
The bottom line, literally in this diary, is that it doesn’t matter whether Trump is mentally ill or evil, because it didn't matter with Hitler either.
(See How Mad Was Hitler?)