Link:
In retrospect perhaps the subtitle of this article should have been much stronger, after all “may be unfit to serve” is pretty damn mild. This is the only article by a mental health professional warning about the dangers of Trump’s malignant narcissism to be published in the mass media since Trump was elected. It is by clinical psychologist John D. Gartner who founded the Duty to Warn movement (logo on left) which has a private Facebook page with over 5000 members with the original description still being used: “A society dedicated to the proposition that Donald Trump is too seriously mentally ill to competently discharge his duties as president and must be removed according to the 25th Amendment.”
How prescient this was has just been revealed with the Cassidy Hutchinson testimony that with the Jan. 6th coup attempt by some in Trump’s inner circle had discussed invoking the 25th Amendment.
As far as I can tell, it was Dr. Gartner who first introduced the term and concept of “malignant narcissism” into the discussion about Trump’s psychopathology. As a retired psychotherapist who had diagnosed numerous patients I wasn’t familiar with it.
The Gartner article, remember this was published in May 2017, in USA Today begins:
If you take President Trump’s words literally, you have no choice but to conclude that he is psychotic. A delusion is “a fixed false belief that is resistant to reason or confrontation with actual fact.” Despite all evidence to the contrary, Trump asserts that his New York office was bugged by President Obama, and that his inauguration had the biggest crowd size in history. Before the election, Right Wing Watch published a list of 58 conspiracies proclaimed by Trump.
Is it all for effect, to rile up his base, deflect blame and distract from his shortcomings, or does Trump really believe the insane things he says? It’s often hard to know, because as Harvard psychoanalyst Lance Dodes put it, Trump tells two kinds of lies: the ones he tells others to scam them, and those he tells himself. “He lies because of his sociopathic tendencies," Dodes said. "There's also the kind of lying he has that is in a way more serious, that he has a loose grip on reality." Is he crazy like a fox or just plain crazy? Not a question we want to be asking about our president.
Much has been written about Trump having narcissistic personality disorder. As critics have pointed out, merely saying a leader is narcissistic is hardly disqualifying. But malignant narcissism is like a malignant tumor: toxic.
We in the Duty to Warn movement and others in the mental health profession sounding the alarm about Trump’s dangerous psychopathology we were like a mute trying to warn people in a crowded theater that the building was on fire while standing in the dark out of sight gesturing futilely. I posted articles in Daily Kos and before that in Capital Hill Blue about Trump’s dangerous psychopathology, but like the prominent mental health professionals, notably including the well known Yale psychiatrist and editor of the best-seller “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” Bandy X. Lee and Trump’s niece, clinical psychologist Mary Trump, albeit with a far smaller audience, I was helping to educate people who were open-minded and generally anti-Trump.
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This is how Chauncey DeVega put it in Salon today in
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Excerpt: "Donald Trump has repeatedly shown himself to be a fascist, a political thug, a cult leader, a pathological liar and a malignant narcissist. Those are just facts; to deny them is like denying the law of gravity. For at least the last six years, a small group of public voices (myself included) have tried to warn the American people and the world about the existential danger that Donald Trump and today's Republican Party represent to American democracy and society. For at least six years, the mainstream news media and the chattering classes have at best ignored us, or decried our warnings as hyperbolic and ridiculous."
John Gartner, along with two Hollywood producers, put together the documentary “UNFIT” but I think it helped inform and educate but changed few minds.
On television Lawrence O’Donnell was the only host who gave a forum to several mental health professionals who explained Trumps dangerous psychopathy, but he’s on MSNBC.
Here’s one of the interviews with Dr. Dodes.
Only John Gartner dared to go on Fox News and not unexpectedly his appearance on Watter’s World, to put it mildly, did not go well:
I admire John’s restraint in not telling the smug Jesse Watters what an ignorant asshole he was, let alone slapping his arrogant mug. But then, John is an experienced psychotherapist and did his best to get his points across despite being badgered by a hostile interviewer.
Only now with the Jan. 6 hearings, and especially after yesterday’s compelling and convincing testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson which was aired on Fox News is the message that Trump is, at least as of recently, dangerously mentally ill. How credible is Cassidy Hutchinson? Consider this editorial on the very conservative Washington Examiner: Trump proven unfit for power again.
The poll excludes clinical psychologist Mary Trump who I assume everyone reading this is very familiar with.
I have not included Alan D. Blotcky, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist in Birmingham, Alabama, and a clinical associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham because as far as I can tell he publishes primarily on Salon. His articles, like “The final, desperate days of our psychopath in chief: How bad will it get?” are excellent.