Is Trump crazy or crazy like a fox? It may be up to a jury to decide.

Is Trump crazy or crazy like a fox? It may be up to a jury to decide.

By Hal Brown

If Trump ever gets under oath, whether before the January 6th Committee or in court, his intent may likely be a crucial aspect of what will be assessed in order to determine his culpability. 

He may be able to avoid perjury by talking about what he believed. It is sometimes very difficult to prove intent in a legal proceeding. If a jury decides had no criminal intent because in his "crazy" mind he didn't believe he did anything wrong he might get off.

The two most potentially serious charges againstTrump are his inciting an armed assault against the Capitol to overturn an election and his stealing government documents. 

His initial defense might be that, for the first, he thought he was saving the country and it was his patriot duty to rally his "troops" to stop the illegal proceedings which would certify Joe Biden's election and cheat him out of his rightful second term.

For the second, he might begin begin by claiming he thought the documents belonged to him.

These both fall somewhere between lame and ludicrous when it comes to a legal tactic. 

His best defense for his actions, and in the case of January 6th his inaction following his initial action, might be to play the inept - insanity card.

Another way for him to demonstrate it would be to hold up this card:

It isn't a new quandary to wonder whether Trump is crazy or crazy like a fox. Mental health experts have weighed in on this, but now it may be a highly relevant legal question. 

Search the phrase and you come up with this on the first page (you'll find an article I wrote, republished below):

Note the second link from the bottom is one of my stories.

I asked the question in the following article which I put on Daily Kos (you can read the 40 comments here) on June 13, 2022:

Here's what I wrote in June:

For those of you who watched the hearing this morning I pose a question which I and others have asked before: is Trump crazy or is he crazy like a fox?

This morning if you watched the J6 hearing you saw a video of Williams Barr saying Trump was not a rational person.

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He said that if Trump truly believed the things he was saying then he was “detached from reality."

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Not being able to tell what is real from what isn’t is a hallmark of several severe mental disorders or conditions.

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Today Rep. Jamie Raskin said Trump either knew he was lying or was mentally incapacitated.(Read article)

There has been a lot of debate about whether Trump is crazy or crazy like a fox. I think there is fairly uniform agreement that early in childhood her developed into a malignant narcissist. It would fit that if he had so much, really just about all, of his identity tied up in his grandiose self-identity that when he lost the election he suffer something he’d never experienced. This is called a narcissistic injury. This is how Wikipedia describes it:

A narcissistic injury is also known as "narcissistic wound" or "wounded ego" are emotional traumas that overwhelm an individual's defense mechanisms and devastate their pride and self worth. In some cases the shame or disgrace is so significant that the individual can never again truly feel good about who they are and this is sometimes referred to as a "narcissistic scar".

This was published in The Week in 2017: Is Trump crazy or crazy like a fox? 

You're not taking crazy pills. The president and a distressingly large number of people around him regularly say things that sound quite literally insane.

I don't mean neurotic. The president and his advisers don't appear to suffer from anxiety disorder or depression. I'm not even talking about the severe narcissism that every commentator and armchair psychotherapist discerns in Trump's self-absorbed, needy, vindictive tweets and other public pronouncements. I'm talking about something far more serious: clinical psychosis — an incapacity to distinguish between fact and fiction, reality and illusion.

In The New York Times in their regular Conversation column on Dec. 15, 2017 Gail Collins and Bret Stephens discussed the question: Is Trump Crazy Like a Fox or Plain Old Crazy?

They begin:

Gail Collins: Bret, I’ve had a lot of these conversations over the years, but I cannot remember ever starting one by asking whether you think the president is off his rocker. In the real, mentally ill sense.

Bret Stephens: Um, was he ever on his rocker, Gail?

Look, I’ve gone back and forth on this question. If you look up old interviews he conducted 20 or 30 years ago (check out this video of his testimony to a congressional committee in 1991), what you find is a much more coherent thinker and verbally acute speaker than the man he is today. I’m not expert enough to say at what point mental decline slides into senility or dementia, but there’s clearly been a decline.

I posted this in June of 2018:

Here’s my diary from Dec. 15, 2020:

I wrote this almost exactly a year ago:

The question of whether Trump is crazy or crazy like a fox is not new. 

What is new is that since his election loss there is evidence that he actually now meets the criteria for having a psychiatric disorder or at least a condition where delusions are a prominent feature.

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Today's conclusion:

Since I wrote the above article in June, merely four months ago, if anything Trump's behavior has become more erratic and he's demonstrated more and more bad judgment. 

An example of bad judgment is that just yesterday he  launched what appears to have been an unprovoked -- and widely criticized -- attack on American Jews.  It ended with a warning they need to "get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel - Before it is too late!"

In late September he attacked on McConnell with 'death wish' remark on his Truth Social platform and made what was widely interpreted as a racist comment about this wife.

It may be that as the reality of his legal jeopardy on five, six, or more fronts is finally percolating up though his rigid psychological defenses and he is teetering between being a crafty but occasionally unhinged fox and just plain certifiably crazy. 

Being crafty and committing a crime may end you up in jail or found guilty of civil infractions that can have huge monetary implications.  

Being criminally crafty can end you up in prison, being crazy may be a get out of jail free card.

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