I'd like to see whether the mental health professionals and others here think this widely publicized comment from Trump praising Putin and his invasion of Ukraine represents such a lack of judgment on Trump's part that it veers into the realm of his not being able to anticipate the negative consequences of what he says (see link to search of Trump praises Putin from Google News, partial image below). This would assume Trump cares about what all but the media which is consistently loyal to him says.
If he cares about such negative coverage, his praise of Putin shows an extreme lack of judgment, so severe in fact that it strongly suggests his reality testing is impaired enough to be diagnostic of an important aspect of a psychotic process. If he does understand this it is a manifestation of his being a malignant narcissist.
Perhaps he believes that he can get away with saying everything, the "I can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it" phenomena. Only a malignant narcissist would say something like what he said to a crowd at an Iowa rally:
"My people are so smart -- and you know what else they say about my people? The polls?" I have the most loyal people -- did you ever see that? I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible."
If Pete Hegseth from Fox News is correct (below), then it suggests Trump was acting out an aspect of his malignant narcissism when he said this:
While talking with fellow host Jesse Watters, Hegseth dismissed criticism of the former president for gushing about Putin by claiming he was only doing it to get a reaction out of the American media.
"Vladimir Putin lives rent-free in the minds of our media," he said. "No entity has done more to spread Russian propaganda and to prop up the strongman that is Vladimir Putin than our own media. And Donald Trump was happy to troll them on it, as he continues to do to this moment." Reference
Below is a brief definition of psychosis. I highlighted the aspects of psychosis or impending psychosis which may be present in Donald Trump in bold.
The word psychosis is used to describe conditions that affect the mind, where there has been some loss of contact with reality. When someone becomes ill in this way it is called a psychotic episode. During a period of psychosis, a person’s thoughts and perceptions are disturbed and the individual may have difficulty understanding what is real and what is not. Symptoms of psychosis include delusions (false beliefs) and hallucinations (seeing or hearing things that others do not see or hear). Other symptoms include incoherent or nonsense speech, and behavior* that is inappropriate for the situation. A person in a psychotic episode may also experience depression, anxiety, sleep problems, social withdrawal, lack of motivation, and difficulty functioning overall. Reference, NIMH
* What someone says is considered behavior HB
Becoming what is sometimes called “a full blown psychosis” generally means that a person has blatant symptoms such as hallucinations, maybe be extremely paranoid, and is unable to attend to the normal functions of life like selfcare. However sometimes a person is what is called pre-psychotic or borderline psychotic meaning that manifest some, but not enough of the symptoms to make the diagnosis.
Before you weigh in with a comment, consider this from the article “Psychosis” published in 2017 in PubMed Central:
In their current conceptualization of psychosis, both the APA5 and the World Health Organization define psychosis narrowly by requiring the presence of hallucinations (without insight into their pathologic nature), delusions, or both hallucinations without insight and delusions.6 In both of these current diagnostic classification systems, impaired reality testing remains central conceptually to psychosis. In contrast to earlier diagnostic classification systems, the current systems5,8 operationalize impaired reality testing by identifying the symptoms that provide evidence of such impairment. Delusions (ie, fixed false beliefs), by definition, are evidence of impaired reality testing: delusional beliefs are ones maintained steadfastly even in the face of evidence contradicting them incontrovertibly. Similarly, hallucinations (ie, perceptions occurring in the absence of corresponding external or somatic stimuli) are evidence of impaired reality when the individual experiencing them is unable to recognize the hallucinatory nature of such experiences. Both the current APA5 and the World Health Organization8 classification systems acknowledge that “formal thought disorder” (ie, disorganized thinking, including illogicality, tangentiality, perseveration, neologism, thought blocking, derailment, or some combination of these disturbances of thought) is one of several commonly co-occurring features of psychotic disorders. The DSM-55 allows formal thought disorder to supplant hallucinations and delusions in the diagnosis of a psychotic disorder when it is accompanied by grossly disorganized behavior, catatonia (for schizophrenia, schizophreniform, brief psychotic, and schizoaffective disorders) and/or negative symptoms (for schizophrenia, schizophreniform, and schizoaffective disorders but not brief psychotic disorder), alone or in combination.8Since mildly disorganized speech is common and diagnostically nonspecific, the degree of thought disorder required to fulfill this DSM-5 criterion must be of severity sufficient to substantially impair effective communication.
Update: Lamont Cranston reminded me that impaired reality testing can also be an indication of early dementia.
The Poll will help me decide what to write about in future diaries.
In your comments please consider noting whether you are or were a mental health professional.