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.

Is Trump's Medal of Freedom and Medal of Honor comparison merely asinine, or it it a sign of desperation or dementia? By Hal Brown, MSW

 

Shown above Medal of Freedom left, and the three Medals of Honor.

Click to read HUFFPOST article.

This story is getting considerable media coverage including on MSNBC Weekend today where, as I write this, Joy Reid is interviewing Khizr Khan, the father of a Muslim U.S. soldier killed in combat. He became well known after making a Democratic National Convention speech in 2016.

Click to enlarge image.

The reason Trump brought this up was that Miriam Adelson was in the audience and he wanted to praise her as someone he awarded the Medal of Freedom to. Of course, her contributions to the country didn't exist. Her "contributions" literally were monetary contributions to him. 

Considering the blowback this comparison has caused I have to wonder what Adelson is thinking. If she has any decency, which considering her support for Trump she may not, she'd regret that he said this.

Trump comparing a top civilian award with an award for extraordinary valor in combat is the very definition of asinine, i.e., extremely stupid and foolish.

I will leave aside J.D. Vance disparaging the military service of Tim Walz, also asinine. Read: 

'Shame on you': Marine vet J.D. Vance buried for defending Trump's smear of war heroes.

The question I have is: why on God's Green Earth would Trump make this comparison?

In order to attempt to figure this out I have to attempt to look inside of Trump's mind. This is something like voluntarily entering a computer simulation like The Matrix except that I can easily escape.

Why does Trump say things that will damage his chances of winning the election? 

In this instance it isn't just that the VFW had, as of 2018, only about 1.6 milli0n members. This is a drop in the bucket compared to the some 345 million population of the United States. It is that when you incur this organization's ire you will make the news. 

Click to enlarge. Here's the text from the VFW website.

Obviously not every former member of the military belongs to the VFW, but but when they lambast a candidate both people directly associated with the military and those who support the military will listen. Didn't Trump consider that a group like the VFW, or just the media in general, would zero in on how horrendous this comparison was before he blurted it out?

The most unkind explanation for Trump doing things like this is that he's a nasty narcissistic sadist who enjoys provoking people regardless of the untoward consequences to himself. 

The kindest explanation as to why Trump does things like this is that he acts on impulse and doesn't think of consequences before he speaks. 

My opinion is that Trump is best decribed as a nasty narcissistic sadist who also lacks impulse control. 

He's like the worse improv performer.

The best impov performers have a filter, but unlike most people, with them it works with almost instantaneous efficiency. This is from Wiki:

Improvisational theatre, often called improvisation or improv, is the form of theatre, often comedy, in which most or all of what is performed is unplanned or unscripted, created spontaneously by the performers. In its purest form, the dialogue, action, story, and characters are created collaboratively by the players as the improvisation unfolds in present time, without use of an already prepared, written script.

 (I'm lucky enough to know an improv comedian, he's my partner's nephew.) When an improv comedian says or does something in a show they don't do this without intentionality. While perfomances aren't scripted, they know their audience. They read the room. They play to the room. They don't want a reporter to write a scatching review saying that they insulted one group or another.

 You can read numerous articles about reading the room here.

The "room" Trump plays to is very much a creation of his own narcissistic mind. The "room" is populated only by those who matter to him because they will applaud everything he says. The literal room may be the one where his fans have gathered to hear him or it may be those who have subscribed to Truth Social or tuned in to Fox News or other far-right stations. 

The actual room is far larger. It is composed of everyone who voted for him in the past but now has doubts about whether to vote for him again.

Trump has done this and has gotten away with it for years. My impression is that he is doing it more frequently. This may be due to the fact that he is feeling desperate. It also could be a sign of dementia. It could be a combination of both.

Either way, desperation or dementia, Trump's mental health and his candidacy are in dire straits.

If, and as is growing more likely, when he loses the election I think we will see him flailing about in extreme ways so that more and more people who are honest with themselves and who tried to pretend he wasn't mentally unstable will be see and believe the evidence of their own eyes and ears.

These people will have a case of severe buyer's remorse to end all cases of buyer's remorse.

Unfortunately numerous people will stay in denial. It is difficult to admit that you've been gullible and were taken in by a con artist.

For those in the public eye who supported Trump I have my doubts if we'll hear a mea culpa from many of them. Whether we do or not will be a test of their character.

Recent blogs here.

 

Is Trump is spiraling into a delusional personal reality that could become outright psychosis? By Hal Brown, MSW, Retired psychotherapist

I posted the first comment to Jennifer Rubin's newsletter.

Trump’s decline: His interviews and lies get worse (I added the spiral background)

 Here's what I wrote:

There's a line between being unable to "handle reality" and being able to discern what is real from what isn't real. Trump may be engaging in wishful thinking and avoidance if this is the former, but if it is the latter he is clincally delusional. Mental health experts refer to "reality testing", ie, it is a concept in psychoanalytic theory in which the ego, or conscious self, recognizes the difference between the external, what is real, and internal world, what they wish was real. In other words, it is the ability to see a situation for what it really is, rather than what one hopes or fears it might be. If someone is unable to engage in reality testing they may be entering into a psychotic state.

RawStory has a good summary of Rubin's article here.

In the Rubin piece the words delusion or delusional are used three times.  Consider each of them in context:

•  As lawyer and anti-Trump commentator George Conway said on MSNBC, “He has completely lost it. This post is, beyond question, delusional. But is was also inevitable because he realizes … he’s not just running for the presidency, he’s running for his freedom.”
•  (Axios commented on his AI delusion: “Trump’s advisers and allies worry he’s spending so much time in an alternative reality that it’s undermining his real-world campaign.” How about asking hard questions about how a party can stand behind someone in an alternative reality?)
• With time, Trump’s delusions have gotten wilder, his thinking more scattered. The worse Trump gets, the more untenable the media’s unwillingness to level with voters becomes. Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, “[The] false claim by Trump that Harris is generating fake big crowds with AI was a true Captain Queeg moment, maybe the most bat-guano crazy thing I’ve seen in 40 years of covering presidential elections.”

George Conway says Trump has "completely lost it." I ask what is it that Trump has lost? Of course, Conway is saying that Trump has lost his connection with reality. If one is disconnected from reality they have to be looked at as having some kind of psychosis.

The Axios article references a party standing by someone who is living in an alternate reality. There is only one reality. Those who living in their own reality are suffering from a severe mental illness whether they see or hear things that aren't there or believe things that aren't real.

The word crazy - the Captain Queeg moment described above - can be used colloquially but in the case of the Queeg character played by Humphrey Bogart in "The Caine Mutiny" when he went off on "the strawberries" he was in the throes of a paranoid delusional psychosis.

For those who want look beyond the forest and analyze the tree this is from "Psychotic disorders in late life: a narrative review" published by the National Library of Medicine:

Abstract: Psychotic disorders are not uncommon in late life. These disorders often have varied etiologies, different clinical presentations, and are associated with significant morbidity and mortality among the older adult population. Psychotic disorders in late life develop due to the complex interaction between various biological, psychological, social, and environmental factors. Given the significant morbidity and mortality associated with psychotic disorders in late life, a comprehensive work-up should be conducted when they are encountered. The assessment should not only identify the potential etiologies for the psychotic disorders, but also recognize factors that predicts possible outcomes for these disorders. Treatment approaches for psychotic disorders in late life should include a combination of nonpharmacological management strategies with the judicious use of psychotropic medications. When antipsychotic medications are necessary, they should be used cautiously with the goal of optimizing outcomes with regular monitoring of their efficacy and adverse effects.

There is no way, aside from a complete psychiatric assessment, to diagnosis anybody with late-in-life onset psychosis. Since Trump lies all the time there's no way to discern how many of the lies he tells he believes. Lies are his stock in trade. He tells them and since millions of his supporters believe them there's no reason for his to stop.  If he believes the lies he is delusional.

It seems to me as a clincian that it isn't likely he is really psychotic. While Trump does meet the diagnostic criteria, or have many traits of, two personality disorders (narcissistic personaity disorder and anti-social, aka sociopathic disorder) these are not psychoses. 

If Trump did have a psychosis he could be successfully treated. There are highly effective medications for psychotic disorders often used with supportive psychotherapy. There are no treatments for the disorders Trump has.

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