Illustration: Trump may bore the hell out of Duffy, but I hate to admit that even though I hate wasting brain power writing about him, on a human level he is still pretty damn interesting to me.
After reading “Bonkers New Trump Audio Stuns Anderson Cooper: Sounds Like ‘Nixon Drunk Rambling’” and the summary of a Daily Beast subscrition article on RawStory “Blame Trump for unleashing a wave of 'insufferable Karens' on the country: columnist” it occurred to me that Trump may vie for the title among historians as the worst president in American history….
… but I think experts will consider him to be the most interesting of the worst presidents in the country’s history. I am a retired psychotherapist and not a historian but this is my own conclusion.
Prior to Trump it was President Richard Nixon at number 14 on the worst presidents list above who I think was the most interesting as a person. But Nixon with his hunger for power, his psychopathic tendencies, and his vulgarity and bigotry, and at the end as he realized his presidency was over what was revealed to be his tormented soul had a complex personality.
“Richard Nixon Turns Out to Be Even Worse Than We Thought” from 2013
Nixon's case shows the lengths some politicians will go to seize and maintain power. As well as gaining and maintaining power by malicious and illegal means, Nixon has helped tarnish the reputation of politicians internationally. It is hard for modern politicians to claim integrity when people like Nixon make them look inherently devious, selfish and morally bankrupt. In a word - psychopathic.
Far Too Strange for Fiction: Nixon, Tormented Tragic Hero
Artists of all stripes have taken a crack at him. Countless biographers, historians and armchair psychiatrists have tried to explain him-but still we demand more. Could any other politician inspire such fascination? No: George Bush (I and II), Ronald Reagan and even Bill Clinton are stick figures by comparison. Brilliant and vicious, tyrannical and weak, visionary and petty, spiteful and pitiful, Richard Milhous Nixon is our tragic hero, our Richard III, our Oedipus, our Lear.
Among our best presidents, I think Abraham Lincoln who is usually ranked by historians as one of the top three (George Washington and FDR being the other two) was probably the most interesting as a person.
I could go on at length explaining why I think Trump deserves the distinction as being the most interesting of the worst presidents in history but I won’t lay out a case which I think is obvious to anyone who is reading this. Suffice to say, mental health experts like Dr. John Gartner (USA Today in 2017) and I have long considered him to be a dangerous malignant narcissist (Capitol Hill Blue in 2018). More recently psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Lance Dodes, M.D. pronounced him as a psychotically delusional and paranoid man who is still enormously dangerous (Salon, 2021).
What I will say is that every time I decide I won’t read another word about him or listen to the authors of the new books about him being interviewed, let alone write a Trump diary, I find myself drawn into his world of phantasmagorical psychopathology.
Following his story as revelations about him emerge is like binge watching a long running television series which starts to get a little boring when one plot stream concludes and you consider tuning out, and then the writers come up with a new surprising and even more compelling story line.
Put another way, Trump has jumped the shark so many times that it is extraordinary that his show is still on the air.
I think only the passing of time will cement Trump’s ranking on the list of worst presidents. If he succeeds in destroying democracy in the United States and turns it into an authoritarian country where true majority rule has been negated he will end up in a newly created sub-basement for the worst president.
Saturday, Jul 24, 2021 · 3:25:40 PM +00:00 · HalBrown
On looking at some of the comment from those who, as arabian put it, just find him loathsome, but don't find him interesting I want to explain that having been a psychotherapist for 40 years and retired for 10 years I view him as a case study. I see him as a very unusual specimen what with his unique combination of psychopathologies.
