The HuffPost article Trump Hurls Attacks At Maggie Haberman In Midnight Meltdown About Her Reporting inspired me to do a Google search about Trump and his midnight meltdowns. Above you see the first links in a general Google search and in a Google News search for Trump meltdown. Google didn't provide the DonkeyHotey caricature. I added this.
My focus here isn't that Maggie Haberman has a special place in Trump's heart. I think she has become a kind of mother figure for him. He wants her unconditional love. As psychoanalysts know, the age of the analyst makes no difference when what is called transference occurs. This is from Psychology Today
If a patient’s mother was extremely judgmental to her as a child, and the therapist makes an observation that the patient perceives as judgmental, the patient might express that and even lash out at the therapist. This response could be interpreted as her applying to her therapist the same feelings that she felt toward her mother. A patient’s response to a therapist may also resemble her response to a romantic partner or some other person in her life.
All this is besides the point. Maggie Haberman is just one trigger for Trump's midnight rage attacks. His reactions to her offer an open door into the inner workings of his mind for anyone, especially mental health professionals like me, to diagnose him. Because he has his Truth Social he knows that that he "truths" (their term for a tweet or post) will be seen by those he is mercilessly lambasting and it will be shared in the media. He can't attack them to their face so he attacks them "in their face."
When he attacks Maggie Haberman I envision him sitting with her in couples counseling where the therapist can assess his psychopathology. What would a marriage counselor think if a husband angrily called his journalist wife a third rate writer and fourth rate intellect?
As someone who did a lot of marriage counseling in his 40 year career as a psychotherapist I can say that in addition to considering that he was jealous of her (or him) I'd be assessing whether or not a husband had an anger control disorder and that they couldn't mediate their impulses to lash out and hurt their spouse's feelings. I would note that they lacked empathy and might be a malignant narcissist. I would suspect that they had an inferiority complex. If they had a history of violence, or even violent fantasies, I'd be very concerned for the safety of their spouse.
Now let's take this analogy further. What if this man was also the President of the United States and his spouse was everyone in the country, or the world for that matter, who pissed him off?
During the day Trump has a few people around to act as a check on acting on his midnight manifestations of anger. With Trump this could be his chief of staff Susie Wiles who I suspect is a major mother figure for him. In the wee hours of the morning when he's been seething all day over a severe criticism, a FTBD (failure to bow down), or minimizing his magnificence, he's unrestrained and uninhibited there's nobody around. Does anyone believe he'd wake up Melania, assuming she's in his bedroom, and ask her for a hug because he's feeling upset? I assume the nearest people to him are the military officers with the nuclear football. More about this at the end of this blog.
In an oddly ironic way we are fortunate that Trump has midnight meltdown disease because it shows him at his worst. We all know what it is like to have a physical symptom at home which disappears when you go to see the doctor. Say you have chest pains so bad they wake you up but they only occur after midnight. This would be of serious concern. We have to take what Trump is like at midnight seriously. It is symptomatic of a serious psychopathology.
Trump is like a nuclear reactor which has been melting down for four years. Some of the control rods which prevented a mental meltdown were removed when he lost the election. More were removed when he had to sit in the E. Jean Carroll courtroom. Nobody can know with certainty what the last control rod stopping the meltdown will be. It could be something major like a surprise Supreme Court decision which goes against him or the refusal of the armed forces to carry out illegal orders. It could be a well publicized failure to deliver on his major promises which leads to some of his previously loyal members of Congress to turn against him.
It even could be something as simple as a photo of him dancing with Melania at his inaugural ball with her looking like she has the stomach flu. She managed to fake it seven years ago (watch here if you can stand it), but this time it could be different. This could go viral and lead to tweets calling him an incel and leading to snarky speculation about when the last time was that Trump had his manly man needs satisfied and had his former model wife begging for more.
I can imagine the scene on a nuclear missile armed submarine in the Pacific when they get an order at 2:00 AM Washington time to launch an attack on California when Trump has become enraged over their refusal to help round up migrants.
What could go wrong?
You can read all the coments I post to articles in RawStory here
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Primary Hal Brown's Blog website is halbrown.org (if you are reading this anywhere else any additions or corrections will be at this address)
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