 |
| Click above to read |
Thom Hartmann posted this excellent article which clearly explains Trump's psychopathology. Reading it prompted me to revisit a topic I've written about numerous times. (Read Hartmann's bio on Wikipedia here.) He is a fellow Michigan State graduate who worked as a psychotherpist for a time and now, like me, lives in Portland, Oregon.
When I began to think about Trump's psychopathology I wasn't even aware of malignant narcissism. This is the combination of severe personality disorders described by Erich Fromm. I'd been a psychotherapist for 40 years and thought I knew all the diagnostic catergories whether they were in the official diagnostic manual or not (maligant narcissism never was in a diagnosis manual).
Then I joined psychologist Dr. John D Gartner's Duty to Warn group. ( It still has a private Facebook page here.
Gartner (see his Wikipedia profile) started an online petition which called for Trump to be removed under the 25th Amendment back in 2017.
2017 mental fitness for Office of President Trump petition
In the first months of 2017 Gartner collected the signatures of more than 25,000 mental health professionals and laypersons. The petition, "Mental Health Professionals Declare Trump is Mentally Ill And Must Be Removed", was sent to the Minority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York. At the end of April 2017, Gartner sent the petition to Washington D.C., with more than 41,000 signatures, although he failed to disclose that it was not only of mental health professionals.
The petition's declaration stated that: We, the undersigned mental health professionals (please state your degree), believe in our professional judgment that Donald Trump manifests a serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable of competently discharging the duties of President of the United States. And we respectfully request he be removed from office, according to article 4 of the 25th amendment to the Constitution, which states that the president will be replaced if he is “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office".
According to Gartner, Trump's mental handicaps are a mixture of narcissism, paranoia, sociopathy and a measure of sadism.
I learned about what what malignant narcisism was. Erich Fromm was a preeminent social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, and humanistic philosopher. He described it as a "severe mental sickness" representing "the quintessence of evil". It wasn't a new psychiatric condition, rather it was a combination of the already deliniated diagnoses of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), antisocial, paranoid, and sadistic personality disorder.
John went public with what for years was the only article, Donald Trump's malignant narcisism is Toxic, about this in a national non-partisan publication, USA Today in 2017. Now many people, at least among those who follow progressive media, know what malignant narcissism is because of Trump. Lawrence O'Donnell regularly has mental health professionals on his show discussing this. Even back in 2019 George Conway said Trump was a malignant narcisisst who was both mental ill and evil (Newsweek article).
Since then until recently until the last couple of years only anti-Trump and progressive media covered the dangerous psychopatholgy of Donald Trump. Gartner's 2017 USA Today article is is worth a read or re-read since it is precisent.
Shortly after the USA Today article was published, the best seller "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump" came out (Gartner was a contributor). It is interesing to read some of the reviews of the book below (from Wikipedia entry).
Estelle Freedman, the Robinson Professor in U.S. History at Stanford University, said of the book:
This insightful collection is grounded in historical consciousness of the ways professionals have responded to fascist leaders and unstable politicians in the past. It is a valuable primary source documenting the critical turning point when American psychiatry reassessed the ethics of restraining commentary on the mental health of public officials in light of the "duty to warn" of imminent danger. Medical and legal experts thoughtfully assess diagnoses of Trump's behavior and astutely explore how to scrutinize political candidates, address client fears, and assess the 'Trump Effect' on our social fabric.
Reviewing the book for The Wall Street Journal, Barton Swaim wrote "That the authors differ in their diagnoses does not give one great confidence in the field of psychiatry or, indeed, in the book’s value.", and stated that the essay authors sound "paranoid".
According to Jeannie Suk Gersen in The New Yorker, "A strange consensus does appear to be forming around Trump's mental state," including Democrats and Republicans who doubt Trump's fitness for office.
In a blog post republished on Salon in September 2017, journalist Bill Moyers wrote that "[t]here will not be a book published this fall more urgent, important, or controversial than The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump". In an interview with Robert Jay Lifton, Moyers said that Trump "makes increasingly bizarre statements that are contradicted by irrefutable evidence to the contrary." Lifton said, "He doesn't have clear contact with reality, though I'm not sure it qualifies as a bona fide delusion." As an example, Lifton said, when Trump claimed that former president Barack Obama was born in Kenya, "he was manipulating that lie as well as undoubtedly believing it in part."
If Trump gets reelected we will see his most extreme pathological impulses powered by the rocket fuel of the presidency. He'll be a guided nuclear missile with mutilple warheads aimed at American democracy. He already has his targets selected and has a plan for turning the United Staes into a dictatorship where he can destroy his enemies on a whim.
I made it though this blog story without proving Godwin's Law to find examples to illustrate this, well, at least until now:
Addendum:
I used to be a columnist for Capital Hill Blue (my articles). Many of my essays there were about Trump's psychopathology.
No comments:
Post a Comment