Trump is in a whirlpool of weird and is mired in a maelstorm of mania. By Hal Brown, MSW

 

Trump is in a whirlpool of weird. Another way to put it is that he's mired in a maelstrom of mania. 

This was the top of the page story on HUFFPOST this morning.

The part of this story I reacted to is as follows:

This is the comment I posted to that article:

Maybe saying he is better looking than Kamala is what he thinks is part of a comedy routine, but if he believes it or thinks it is relevant to anything add this to the growing evidence that Trump is caught in a whirlpool of weird. He is, no doubt, the first presidential candidate to make such a comparision.

Two readers replied. One wrote "that boy ain't right" and the other wrote "he's weird." 

I thought about Trump, and Vance, being called weird and how this has become one of the Democrats most effective attack words. I am among the many writers who like to think of alliterations to use in titles so I came up with "whirlpool of weird" and then in looking for illustrations I saw the one of the maelstrom off Norway and came up up the second part of my title because it fit Trump so well. 

I ended up using PhotoAI to make illustrations of Trump caught in a whirlpool and used the one in the top middle from the six below:

Pairing Trump's weirdness with his mania makes perfect sense. This is from the Wikipedia defintion of mania:

Mania, also known as manic syndrome, is a mental and behavioral disorder^[1][2] defined as a state of abnormally elevated arousal, affect, and energy level, or "a state of heightened overall activation with enhanced affective expression together with lability of affect."^[3] During a manic episode, an individual will experience rapidly changing emotions and moods, highly influenced by surrounding stimuli. Although mania is often conceived as a "mirror image" to depression, the heightened mood can be either euphoricor dysphoric.^[4] As the mania intensifies, irritability can be more pronounced and result in anxiety or anger.

The symptoms of mania include elevated mood (either euphoric or irritable), flight of ideas and pressure of speech, increased energy, decreased need and desire for sleep, and hyperactivity. They are most plainly evident in fully developed hypomanic states. However, in full-blown mania, these symptoms become progressively exacerbated. In severe manic episodes, these symptoms may be obscured by other signs and symptoms characteristic of psychosis, such as delusions, hallucinations, fragmentation of behavior, and catatonia.^[5]

Trump is an unusual person but he is a person. He wants to believe the super-human images depicted in his digital trading cards and most recently in his brush with death from an assassin's bullet. His saying that he is better looking that Kamala Harris - who others have been depicting as Wonder Woman (see Google image search) - would bother him if he was aware of this.

Kamala herself is not about to authorize digital playing cards depicting herself the way Trump portrayed himself. Trump probably doesn't know it, but the comic book Wonder Woman (alias Diana Prince) actually ran for president. 

I just had the cover and hadn't read the comic so I had to do some research (here) to find out that she won.

Read: Holy voter suppression, Batgirl! What comics reveal about gender and democracy. 

While some of Trump's narcissism is frivolous, like saying he's better looking than Kamala, it is part and parcel of his need to believe he is better in every possible way than anybody else. It comes with the arrogance that he believes he knows more about every subject than anybody. Consider the now classic images from his talking about killing Covid with bleach and how Dr. Deborah Brix looked which he was proposing this. (Read what she thinks about this /  article)

I very much doubt Trump ever did the laundry and opened a bottle of bleach or he'd know how powerful the chlorine odor was so nobody would be stupid enough to drink it.

Jumping foward from then to now, we see a Trump more detached from reality and more arrogant than ever. One can use words like weird and mania but this can be dismissed as political rhetoric. In fact these decriptions should be looked at as a clinical assessment of his mental instability. 

If he becomes president if you think of what might have happened if Americans who came down with Covid swallowed bleach consider what could happen if he tells supporters to do something that they don't dismiss out of hand as stupid and life threatening. 

Even if Trump loses he still has the power to incite violence with his words. President or not, because of his personality he is the most dangerous person in America. As president he is the commander in chief of the armed forces. He has threatened to use them against civilians (read article). As a defeated candidate he will say he really won and still has an angry army he can order to do his bidding.

A President Trump who will no doubt implement the democracy destroying Project 2025 he is staggeringly dangerous.  A defeated candidate Trump may not be as dangerous, but he is still extremely dangerous.

Read recent blogs here.

Morning Joe says Trump's "fretting" about prison, but is he even capable of fretting?

 

By Hal Brown, MSW, Retired psychotherapist

There was a discussion on Morning Joe where Joe Scarbourgh said that there were reports that Donald Trump was "privately frettiing" over the propsect of going to prison.

Click to view

There it is, Trump "fretting" actually made the chryon so those who had their sound muted could see it. If Trump had the show on one of several TVs in his bedroom he could see it. He might have decided to turn off the sound on Fox News and watch MSNBC.

Here's some of what Joe said:

"He's the most insecure guy on the face of the earth behind that facade. He has to know what his fiercest defenders on Fox News say. Ninety-one counts – if he goes 90-1, he's going to jail for the rest of his life, 90-1. He could win 90 and lose one, every one of those counts, basically, at Donald Trump's age, that equals a life sentence, so, yeah, the guy is worried.

.... 

"I mean, we'd be throwing people's names around – 91 counts, every one of them is a life sentence. The guy, obviously, is cracking. I think he's losing it, which is why the last thing he wants to do, the last thing his lawyers want him to do, is go out and debate. He may give admissions, and his political people don't want him to lose his mind onstage." 

Trump wants to consider himself to be a rock star. Havig a big article in Rolling Stone is a milestone in a performer's career. I rather doubt Trump is happy that he and is mugshot are here:

There it is, that pesky word again.

I've heard Joe mention that he was aware that Donald Trump sometimes watched the show. I wonder what he would have thought if he watched this segment. Joe, Mika, and the crew have called Trump lots of things but saying he's insecure and that he's fretting over the chance of going to prison may get to him more than being called a buffoon or a clown.

As one of the top 1000 mental health experts (but then who's counting) who has publically expressed their opnion about Trump's psychopathology I feel complelled to correct the Morning Joe panel. 

If Trump was fretting it would be a rare indication that he had lapsed, not into florid psychosis, but into the realm of mental health.

If Trump worked in academia he'd be the Dean of Denial and be in charge of assuring that students only were taught things that they were comfortable with.

Photo adapted from illustration in Reed College students stage multi-day protest over video that showed a professor making racist remarks

This isn't the first time pundits have ascribed normal psycholgical reactions to Donald Trump. For example this was from March:

Trump is 'very anxious' about being finger-printed and asking for bail in Manhattan: NYT's Haberman

Plain and simple we don't know what Trump is experiencing. Is he anxious? Is he fretting? We just don't know. 

Denial is the most primative or basic psychological defense mechanism. Freud first postulated it as a way some people dealt with facing extremely difficult facts of their personal reality:

Denial is a psychological defense mechanism postulated by psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence.

The subject may use:

• simple denial: deny the reality of the unpleasant fact altogether
• minimisation: admit the fact but deny its seriousness (a combination of denial and rationalization)
• projection: admit both the fact and seriousness but deny responsibility by blaming somebody or something else

Wikipedia

You can see Trump using all three types of denial. The more he uses simple denial the more psychogically impaired he is. Judging a the capacity for reality testing is a measure used in psychology to determine how dysfuntional a person is. It is called reality testing and defined as follows:

Reality testing is the psychotherapeutic function by which the objective or real world and one's relationship to it are reflected on and evaluated by the observer. This process of distinguishing the internal world of thoughts and feelings from the external world is a technique commonly used in psychoanalysis and behavior therapy, and was originally devised by Sigmund Freud. Wikipedia

Most of you are familiar the Kübler-Ross model of grief, which describes the five emotions that people experience when they cope with death. (Wikipedia). The first stage is denial. Pyshologically healthy people go on throough the next three stages, anger, bargaining, and depression before reaching the final stage of acceptance.

Denial is the first because it is the very most basic defense. 

I wonder if we'll see Trump go through these stages if he is sentenced to prison. I have my doubts because he is far from being a psychogically healthy person.

If Trump is anxious, if he's fretting, it would mean reality is percolating into his conscious awareness. If he's repressing this thoughts and feelings he is at risk of them manifesting themselves in somatic ways. 

I'm a clinical social worker and not a physician but I think I am on firm ground in speculating that as the chance of being incarcerated increases Trump is at higher risk of succumbing to some of the stress related physical illnesses.

Update:

Far be it from me to dispute Mary Trump who is the only mental health professional who actually knows (or knew) Donald Trump up close and personal, buit I think she is describing him as if he was normal.

I doubt Donald Trump reads what his psychologist neices writes about him. If he reads this piece here's what I think would bother him the most (in bold)

"I’m sorry Donald, but calling Charles Koch a 'very stupid, awkward, and highly overrated globalist,; is a clear sign to me… You must be getting nervous that Koch has already raised more than $70 million to oppose you in the Republican presidential primary. And there’s more coming," she said. "I can only imagine how off-the-charts your anxiety is especially since you know there is so much more trouble coming your way. Your childish name calling can only take you so far."

Mary Trump added: 

"Even more transparent than your anxiety is your jealousy. Charles Koch is at least 24x richer than you. You really shouldn't let your emotions take over like this Donald. Your pattern of name-calling and grievance is wearing thin and it just makes you look like the weak loser you are.

Koch isestimated to be worth about $60 billion making him the 20th richest person in the world. Forbes estimates Trump's worth as a paulty $2 ½ billion.

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Prolonged stress puts your body in a continuous state readiness for physical action. When your body has no time to re-establish equilibrium, it becomes overworked and your immune system weakens, making you susceptible to sickness. Many essential bodily processes are disrupted and your risk of health problems increases.

Some common physical effects of stress include (reference):

• memory impairment
• depression
• skin conditions, such as eczema
• difficulty sleeping
• obesity
• heart disease
• digestive problems
• autoimmune diseases