“Trump torched the Goldwater rule: Good!” is listed as the most popular article on Salon today.
I had a simple comment which I posted. I didn't put the links in since Salon has a thing about comments with links, especially those that go to something the commenter put online, but I added them below.
When I first wrote about Trump's psychopathology in 2016 ("The never-ending controversy about diagnosing Trump" Daily Kos) I wasn't familiar with malignant narcissism and just had him pegged as an extreme narcissist. Then in 2017 John Gartner wrote about Trump fitting the criteria for being a malignant narcissist in USA Today ("Trump's malignant narcissism is toxic" explaining why mental health professionals had a duty to warn). I wasn't familiar with this combination of pathologies first described by Erich Fromm. Now if you do a web search for Trump malignant narcissism you will find page after page of articles. Many will have long sections, wasted space in my opinion, explaining why the Goldwater rule doesn't and shouldn't apply to him. Plainly put, Trump is a malignant narcissist and this, not the Goldwater rule, is what mental health professionals and others like George Conway have done a great service in educating the open-minded public about. I agree that the Goldwater rule is best tossed in the "discard bin" in psychiatry.
Before Trump ran for president and mental health professionals started diagnosing him a title like the one in Salon would elicit the response “huh, what’s the Goldwater rule?” Some people might have thought it referred to a James Bond movie villain. My opinion basically has always been akin to giving the finger to it and saying “Goldwater rule, Goldfinger rule” or, to credit George and Ira Gershwin, “you say you say tomato I say tomahto, lets call the whole thing off.”
As a clinical social worker a rule from the American Psychiatric Association never applied to me anyway. Well known mental health professionals who have gone public about Trump like John Gartner and Alan Blotchy, the author of numerous Salon article, are clinical psychologists. Bandy Lee, who is a psychiatrist, resigned from membership resigned from the American Psychiatric Association in 2007 because of its financial ties with the pharmaceutical industry. Reference: “Op-Ed: The American Psychiatric Association Sickened America — It's time to right their wrongs and move toward recovery. Mach 7, 2021”
I agreed with Alan Blotchy, the author of the Salon article, about the Goldwater rule from the time I posted my first article about Trump’s psychopathology in Daily Kos about Trump being mentally unfit to be president: “Trump’s misspeak about 7-11 tells us a lot about him” (April, 2016).
Blotcky concluded:
Mental health experts are treated much differently than experts in other medical specialties. If a politician has a heart ailment, cardiologists are encouraged to discuss the problem in the media. If a politician has arthritis, rheumatologists are invited to share their knowledge. If a politician has cancer, oncologists are summoned by the media. There is obvious precedence for the mainstream media to solicit medical experts to voice their opinions about political figures.
The same should be true for mental health experts, given that mental health problems can be just as serious and incapacitating as the other medical issues mentioned above. They certainly have a major impact on public safety and welfare. We should not pretend that they do not exist because they make us feel uncomfortable. Nearly everyone now understands that to ignore or conceal mental health problems is only likely to make them worse.
Media professionals and mental health experts share the same fundamental mission: to serve and inform the public. They are not adversaries, and their goals are not in conflict.
A "duty to warn" the public should be a central guiding principle for both the media and mental health experts as we strive to recover from the trauma of the Trump years. The Goldwater rule should be discarded at last — its relevance is long in the past. At least that's one norm obliterated by Donald Trump for which we can be grateful.
The expertise of mental health professionals is absolutely crucial to be shared as the country is facing a movement led by a president who seems to be clinically delusional. He is leading a cult of followers who, like him, show signs that they also may be suffering from serious psychiatric disorders that impair their reality testing and lead them not only to believe falsehoods like “the big lie” or even to have paranoid beliefs, but for some to act on them with violence like they did on January 6th only much worse.
History of the Goldwater rule.
