Is Donald Trump Mentally Ill?

stumbler · Apr 6, 2020

Leading psychologists explain how Trump’s self-delusions make him stunningly effective at predatory deception

In practicing the art of lying while retaining a hold on the allegiance of his base, Trump utilizes a propaganda principle—the Big Lie—best explained by Hitler. Now, please note that we are not equating Trump and Hitler; they are very different people. However, like Hitler, Trump is involved in the business of selling himself as an angry, righteous savior to the masses, resulting in a growing number of cultic devotees. So, it may behoove us to consider Hitler’s explanation of why the Big Lie is more successful than mere untruths. Here’s his explanation of the principle in Mein Kampf:

[I]n the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation.

Consider just two of many possible examples of the Big Lie: Trump’s bizarre claim that the military was out of ammunition when he took office and his equally bizarre claim that the father of Ted Cruz was involved with the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, adding, “It’s horrible.” It is the outrageousness of the Big Lie that a listener normally expects would create self-conscious awkwardness in the liar. In turn, this results in a need for a great liar to hide any nervousness that might give away the fact that he is attempting to deceive his audience. In poker, the failure to hide completely the lie inherent in a bluff is called a “tell,” the subtle behavior unwittingly exhibited when bluffing.

Self-deception in the Service of Deception

In 1976, one of us (RT) proposed the evolutionary theory of self-deception in the service of deception. This now well-established principle is simple: If one has the ability to eliminate conscious knowledge of one’s deceptions, that would also eliminate even a subtle tell. Thus, if a liar can deceive himself into believing he is telling the truth, he will be far more effective in convincing others.

This does not just occur in human interactions. For example, a male dog about to attack will puff up his body (raised hackles) and growl menacingly. It is not uncommon for a smaller, more aggressive dog to bluff a larger dog into retreating. In order for the bluff to be convincing, the snarling aggressor must show no sign of fear or doubt about the outcome. Any apprehension must be removed from awareness. Of course, if the display is not successful and a fight ensues, the canine assailant may end up running away yelping in fright, completely unable to hide overwhelming anxiety. But the possibility of successful intimidation will be maximized if the attacker appears to be fully ready to follow through with utter abandon, that is, if there appears to be no awareness in the aggressor that failure and retreat is even a remote possibility.

An important part of the adaptive basis for the evolution of repression consists of removing from consciousness any awareness of one’s doubts, anxieties, true motives, or aims when one is trying to deceive, intimidate, or just influence others. In 1984, Trivers’ notion of self-deception in the service of deception was then used by one of us (MS) to illuminate the adaptive function of psychological repression. Social relationships are fraught with conflict. If certain motives can be removed from consciousness, one can be far more convincing in complex social negotiations. In one episode of The Apprentice, Trump explicitly spelled out how this strategy works. Challenging his apprentices to sell high-priced art, he told them, “If you don’t believe it, if you don’t really believe it yourself, it’ll never work.”

Adaptive, Functional Psychopathy

When a person specializes in such predatory deception, we sometimes use the label sociopath, antisocial personality disorder, or narcissistic personality disorder. But the notion of a “personality disorder” suggests that Trump’s behavior is maladaptive or somehow inferior. If that were so and psychopathy were a defect (a negative, maladaptive mutation), it should have been wiped out by natural selection.

There is, however, a new science emerging regarding psychopaths, suggesting that they have been shaped by natural selection, meaning that their sociopathic behavior was selected because it was adaptive. While they are rare—1-2% of the population—they are successful at that frequency. Evidence? There is a “psychopathy scale” in which the higher you score the more likely you are to favor close relatives over more distant ones—exactly what you would expect natural selection to produce; they show a greater tendency toward psychopathic behavior the lower their relatedness to their victims. Furthermore, psychopaths tend to disperse farther from their places of birth, that is, to live among less related people where their predatory, interpersonal strategy is less likely to harm relatives. All this suggests that psychopathy can be a successful adaptation when the victims are not relatives. And the evidence in turn suggests they do indeed reproduce as well as normal people.

Consider Trump’s psychopathy. He is a most uncommon organism (1% or less) but has multiple wives and five children. They are successful. He supports them and may indeed love them. For a while, it even looked like Ivanka was being groomed for her own presidential run. (Lately, it looks like the Trump mantle is being passed to Junior.) In turn, Trump is notorious for favoring more closely related people over all others. Indeed, if black, they come from “shithole countries,” whether Haiti or African countries such as Obama’s Kenya. Muslims are to be excluded en masse. Mexicans are murderers and rapists.

If the behavior of psychopaths entails an evolving, adaptive evolutionary strategy, then they are setting up a co-evolutionary struggle with the rest of us. Since they are only at 1% frequency, they must have been subject to strong selection pressures whenever they appeared. But the rest of us only experience them 1% of the time. Therefore, we were not strongly selected to spot and resist them. In short, Trump could fly upside down at full speed toward us spewing nonsense and many of us would scarcely know what was happening, while this could merely be a display, his reality TV impersonation of a powerful, alpha male.

Self-deception and Narcissism

This may not, however, completely explain Trump’s uncanny ability to look an audience directly in the eye and lie. Trump seems to know that many of the things he says are not true. After all, he did go along with the characterization by Tony Schwartz (the guilt stricken and repentant, actual author of Trump’s “autobiography,” The Art of the Deal) of his many lies as “truthful hyperbole. So, he does seem to have some partial awareness that what he says isn’t always quite so. How then does Donald Trump avoid being seen as a liar by his base? Why is he so convincing to so many? Why don’t people spot the telltale signs indicating Trump’s awareness of his own lies?

The answer appears to be that for Trump there is only one reality, one truth: Donald J. Trump is the world’s greatest genius and he, and only he, can solve the problems we face. Yes, that does sound crazy. But that’s precisely the nature of narcissistic personalities; they have delusional beliefs about their own importance and greatness. For Trump, that is the only significant truth. Anything said in support of that truth is … true. Like Hitler declaimed chanting the term Lügenpresse, Trump uses the same term to refer to any challenges to this great truth, “fake news.” There is no relevance to a correspondence notion of reality in which verbal descriptions of things must match empirical facts. The way things are has no importance if noting the reality would interfere in perceiving and promoting the One Great Truth.

Because of this, Trump consciously experiences no awkwardness when lying. Every word is judged against only one standard: Can this utterance convince my audience that they should support and follow me? If so, it is true (remember what the One Great Truth is). If not, it is false.

A Closer Analysis of Trump’s “Tell”

He has the kind of brilliance and charisma that is unique, rare, and captivating, although at times misunderstood. When he speaks one-on-one or to a crowd, you believe that you are the only star in his galaxy. [1]

Let’s look more closely at the self-deception Trump uses in order to deceive others. As with the growling dog, when Trump puffs himself up, he apparently eliminates any awareness of the possibility of failure. This is the narcissist’s sense of personal greatness and ability. It is self-deceptive in that Trump has only evidenced one truly superior talent: He is a highly competent, performance artist with a gift for reading his audience. Without any other special talent or ability, but with his willingness to break rules and deceive others, he has been able to parlay this one talent into some significant success as a fraudulent salesman, a reality TV star, and now President of the United States.

Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. (Trump accepting the Republican presidential nomination.)

It has become clear that Trump evidences the narcissist’s self-deceptive, grossly inflated self-appraisal. His endless swaggering knows no bounds. Just recently we learned that, in addition to his many extraordinary talents, he is an intuitive epidemiologist:

You know, my uncle was a great person. He was at MIT. He taught at MIT for, I think, like a record number of years. He was a great, super genius. Dr. John Trump. I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, “How do you know so much about this?” Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.

In order to avoid experiencing any challenge to his grossly bloated sense of himself, this is what Trump must also self-deceptively blot out of awareness: Reality matters. What he said yesterday is often the complete opposite of what he said today and there is little reason to believe he won’t do a 180-degree turnaround tomorrow. The algorithm is simple, at the moment he speaks, he says whatever he believes will best promote his brand; his words need have no relationship to what he said in the past or will say in the future. Remember, he is a great genius, probably greater than Einstein. Therefore, he can set aside general reality theory and focus instead on his special theory of reality: Trump alone is here to save the day.

With the notion that reality matters effectively removed from his awareness, Trump never concerns himself with whether the words he speaks jibe with objective reality. He then experiences no trepidation about whether the things he says are actually true. This is the reason he is so convincing to the many people who comprise his base: Donald Trump has no tell.

[1] Thomas J. Barrack Jr., real estate investor, longtime Trump friend, and Chairman of Trump’s Inaugural Committee. Quoted in A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig, Penguin Press, 2020.

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Daniel Kriegman, the former Chief Psychologist at the Massachusetts Treatment Center for Sexually Dangerous Offenders, is coauthor (with Malcolm Slavin) of The Adaptive Design of the Human Psyche: Psychoanalysis, Evolutionary Biology, and the Therapeutic Process. Dr. Kriegman has published extensively on the use of an evolutionary perspective in the theory and practice of clinical psychology, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis. His most recent project is a book, Crusades, Jihads, and Genocides: An evolutionary understanding of the Holocaust, ISIS, and the human history of perpetual war and mass murder.

Robert Trivers, the winner of the 2007 Crafoord Prize in Biosciences for “his fundamental analysis of social evolution, conflict and cooperation,” developed the highly influential theories of reciprocal altruism, parental investment and sexual selection, parent–offspring conflict, and self-deception as an adaptive evolutionary strategy. Dr. Trivers has been called “the preeminent living evolutionist of our times” by the Los Angeles Review of Books. According to Steven Pinker, Trivers is “one of the great thinkers in the history of Western thought … the fields of sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, Darwinian social science, and behavioral ecology are in large part attempts to test and flesh out Trivers’ ideas.” In 1976, Dr. Trivers first formulated the notion of self deception in the service of deception as a significant selective pressure shaping animal behavior.

Malcolm Slavin, a founder of the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis, is coauthor (with Daniel Kriegman) of The Adaptive Design of the Human Psyche: Psychoanalysis, Evolutionary Biology, and the Therapeutic Process. Dr. Slavin is an internationally renowned psychoanalyst with numerous publications applying an evolutionary perspective to depth psychology. He was the first to apply Robert Trivers’ understanding of the importance of self deception in the service of deception to an understanding of the role of repression in human social relations.

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Distant Lover · Apr 7, 2020

stumbler said: ↑

Leading psychologists explain how Trump’s self-delusions make him stunningly effective at predatory deception

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/le...-stunningly-effective-at-predatory-deception/
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The poorly educated people Trump pretends to love while privately despising lack the knowledge and the intelligence to evaluate evidence and assertions. Because they cannot do their own thinking they like for those they admire to do their thinking for them. For years Rush Limbaugh taught them to believe and obey, even though Limbaugh's lies have been documented since 1994. Part of the secret of becoming a credible liar is to tell credulous people lies they want to believe. Trump has built his career doing that. Hundreds of people wasted thousands of dollars on worthless lectures at Trump University, thinking they could become rich.

Dearelliot · Apr 7, 2020

For 3 years he doesn't mention the IG, nada, then comes the whistler blower scandal and then watchdog over trillions and suddenly the IG is incompetent.

stumbler · Apr 8, 2020

Expert: Trump’s ‘deadly’ coronavirus briefings display ‘anti-human’ psychology

Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee is leading a group of mental health professionals in urging a congressional intervention into President Donald Trump’s coronavirus response.

Dr. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine who also teaches at Yale Law School, has sounded the alarm over Trump’s mental health for years. Lee heads the World Mental Health Coalition, whose membership she says includes thousands of mental health professionals. The group has convened multiple panels to highlight concerns about the president’s handling of the country and the coronavirus pandemic. The organization recently issued a “prescription for survival,” calling for federal officials to take unprecedented action to block the president from leading public health policy during the crisis.

Lee, who authored the textbook “Violence,” often focuses on the connection between human psychology, culture, and societal violence in her work.

“We are facing a democide of genocidal proportions, because we have handed power to someone who is anti-human in psychology,” Lee told Salon. “The group he has isolated may not be ethnic, but it is his own cultural grouping of ‘non-voters’ or ‘critics,’ when he has withdrawn lifesaving equipment from states where governors have criticized him, such as New York, California, Washington or Michigan, while giving a surplus to states with sycophantic governors, such as Florida. When criminality combines with mental pathology, this kind of large-scale violence becomes possible. Eventually, it will be destructive to all.”

Lee spoke to Salon about Trump’s mental health, his daily coronavirus briefings and how the president’s response will affect the general public. Her views represent only those of the World Mental Health Coalition, of which she is president.

There have been several recent op-eds calling attention to Trump’s mental health, as you have done for years. Are they accurate?

Yes, I was both glad and sad to see them, for while they raise a critical issue, without expert input, underestimation and normalization are still the result. There were two articles in the New York Times, one describing pathological narcissism and the other sociopathy, both eloquent but with little understanding of these conditions. The earlier one calls mental health professionals merely “impassioned” — citing a political super PAC, when political activity actually forfeits professional status — and references attorney George Conway as the authority. The latter article did not seem to recognize that it was describing a mental health condition.

This is our predicament during a “death of expertise,” as Tom Nichols names his book. I asked Conway repeatedly to defer to experts, as legal professionals and courts are exemplary at doing, but he cited neither me nor the book he extensively drew from for his article. Imagine if I were to take up a legal topic, studied it a fortnight, and called myself an expert. It does not work, since you have to have an appreciation of what the topic means in context. I would not dare do it without full training, even though I have been teaching at a law school for 17 years. To be able to diagnose a mental health condition, you have to know about neurology and physiology and all the other conditions that could go into a person looking that way. It is not as simple as a checklist. Hence, while our country has some of the best mental health experts in the world, we are dying from a lack of access to that knowledge. Maybe the next book can be titled, “Death From Denial of Expertise.”

Trump’s coronavirus news briefings — unlike those of various governors around the country — have often contradicted top health experts. What do you make of Trump’s insistence that he is right about everything and the experts are the ones who are wrong?

I think we can now accept how deadly his symptoms are, and that mental pathology is different from health. Any other presidential candidate from 2016, of either party — even Mike Pence — would not have had the same pathological malice against Barack Obama so as to dismantle a global pandemic response system that experts lauded throughout the world. Many of us mental health professionals did not even have to hear actual reports to know what was happening with the coronavirus: His psychology already spelled it out. From the loose travel bans and the untrained personnel handling early carriers, to the poor testing and tracing, to the failure to implement a Defense Production Act or to deliver existing medical supplies, we see no interest in containing the infection, as we expected. The same disinterest in the disease is behind his touting unproven medications and dismissing calls to issue a nationwide stay-at-home order or to advise people to wear masks. Experts only get in the way of his emotional needs.

This bottomless need to place his own psychic survival above any protection of the public should rather be a warning. This means he would be equally inclined to destroy the nation or the world — which he has the power to do — if he were to feel humiliated from the loss of an election, for example.

What does it tell you when top health experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx appear to placate Trump and avoid saying things that contradict him?

Poor Dr. Fauci has had to function as a psychiatrist and competing media personality at the same time as lead infectious disease expert! Dr. Birx I understand less, but one should not underestimate the power of mental pathology; even the soundest minds give in to the most bizarre delusions under its pressure. This is how untreated, severe pathology from the top spreads and exhausts you, which is why in psychiatric settings the treatment is removal: we hospitalize the patient so the family can improve.

There have been growing calls for news outlets to stop airing the president’s briefings live. Do you support that? What effect do you think the briefings are having on the general public?

People once doubted whether the president’s rhetoric, when he said things like, “These aren’t people. These are animals” who “pour into and infest our country,” would cost lives. Violence is harder to tell, being relatively rare, but his words certainly translated into deaths, since probability for an individual turns into a percentage for a population. The same is true here. We can be certain that he is causing deaths, and for something as widespread as the coronavirus, it will be a large number.

What should the public and lawmakers do if the president’s words, as you say, cause deaths?

Listen to the experts! Mental health expertise is just as important as physical health expertise, if not more so, since a person’s mental problems are inversely proportional to the willingness of the person to admit that there is a problem. So it is obvious where we stand as a society. Even those who recognize that the president has a mental problem do not think to say, “Let’s call a doctor!” Like the coronavirus, the problem does not go away just because we avoid doing the testing.

What is important is prevention, as we have not seen the worst. Our “prescription for survival” lists all possible interventions. People feel needlessly helpless when there is a lot we can do: Citizens are mobilizing, even non-psychiatrist doctors. The 25th Amendment could be approached if overwhelming public opinion compelled it, and we have enormous data on presidential incapacity to educate about. A second impeachment would also be effective, with televised hearings on the president’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. We previously begged the speaker [Nancy Pelosi] to continue holding onto the articles of impeachment, as it was the one means we had of setting limits on the ballooned expectations from delaying impeachment for so long. Imagine what a different place we would be in if she had listened to us!

At a minimum, the House speaker could immediately establish an emergency crisis committee, calling on top CDC and Trump administration officials to answer all questions about the handling of the pandemic and what is being done to correct past errors. She would be demonstrating leadership in deferring to experts. With the information gathered over just a few days, the Congress can then assume its responsibilities in this dire emergency and not simply respond to the whims of a president whose briefings are nothing short of deadly.
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Jordanbaker · Apr 8, 2020

I love the Don. He is unapologetic about who he is. More people should be that way.

Dearelliot · Apr 8, 2020

Many probably most by far, people are unap0logetic about who they are, but most people are not like Trump so it is more reasonable for them to be unapologetic.

stumbler · Apr 9, 2020

Donald Trump is a ‘predator’ who ‘would be in prison’ if he hadn’t been born rich: clinical psychiatry expert

Most people find Donald Trump bewildering. His lies, cruelty, corruption, greed, delusions of godlike power and other unconscionable behavior seem unbelievable. If Trump were a character in a TV show, movie or comic book, the audience would laugh at his clumsy, obvious villainy. The whole story would be rejected as horrendously bad writing and a waste of time.

But Trump is not that in fact complicated or puzzling once his core motivations are understood and then accepted as basic facts: He appears to be a sociopath. As such, he lacks human empathy and a capacity for the norms of healthy human social relationships. In so many ways, Donald Trump is like a space alien who came to Earth and is (badly) impersonating a human being.

The coronavirus pandemic, and Trump’s cruel and callous reactions to it, have only served to amplify his gross defects in personality, behavior and values.

Writing at the Guardian, Lloyd Green summarizes Donald Trump’s emotional and cognitive defects as magnified by the coronavirus crisis:

On Sunday, initially at least, there was no White House briefing on the president’s public schedule. But the bad news kept coming. Coronavirus deaths continued to climb and reports of the heartland being unprepared for what may be on its horizon continued to ricochet around the media.

In the words of one administration insider, to the Guardian: “The Trump organism is simply collapsing. He’s killing his own supporters.”

Members of the national guard, emergency workers, rank-and-file Americans: all are exposed. Yet Trump appears incapable of emoting anything that comes close to heart-felt concern. Or just providing straight answers.

In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, Frank Bruni speaks to the human emptiness and lack of care, concern, empathy, and overall decency at the center of Donald Trump:

One more question: Do you remember the moment when President Trump’s bearing and words made clear that he grasped not only the magnitude of this rapidly metastasizing pandemic but also our terror in the face of it?

It passed me by, maybe because it never happened.

In Trump’s predecessors, for all their imperfections, I could sense the beat of a heart and see the glimmer of a soul. In him I can’t, and that fills me with a sorrow and a rage that I quite frankly don’t know what to do with….

And while I’m not looking to Trump for any panacea, is it too much to ask for some sign that the dying has made an impression on him, that the crying has penetrated his carapace and that he’s thinking about something other than his ratings? I watch. I wait. I suspect I’ll be doing that forever.

I recently spoke with Dr. Lance Dodes, a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and now a training and supervising analyst emeritus at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. We discussed the coronavirus pandemic and what this crisis has revealed about Donald Trump’s mental health and behavior.

Dodes was a contributor to the bestselling volume “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 37 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” and is a regular guest on MSNBC’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell”.

In this conversation, Dodes explains how the coronavirus pandemic offers further evidence of Trump’s predatory, sociopathic behavior and his lack of care or concern for other human beings. Trump’s programming and behavior, in fact makes him perhaps the worst person imaginable to lead the United States through the coronavirus crisis. Dodes also explains why too many people, especially in the news media, remain in a state of deep denial about Trump’s behavior and the depths of his mental pathologies.

If Trump had not been born into money, Dodes told me, he would have wound up in prison by now. Instead he is president of the United States and vigorously protected by the Republican Party and its supporters.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Is Donald Trump the freest man alive? He has no internal restraints — and increasingly no external restraints either.

I think he is the least free man. You and I have some degree of choice about how we’re going to behave and react to the world around us; we are complex and we make complex decisions because we have a conscience and we care about the effects of our actions on others. Donald Trump, in contrast, is very simple. Everything he says or does is for himself, either to have power over others or to hurt them in revenge against their disagreeing or standing in his way. Because he has shown himself to be incapable of either conscience or empathy, he is basically a predator, lacking the most essential parts of our humanity.

Despite this, he has two techniques that have allowed him to be successful in business and politics: He is a bully, and he lies continuously. Repeating his lies over and over is like the “big lie” technique made famous by Hitler. It works because when a lie is endlessly repeated, even decent people assume there must be some truth in it.

Donald Trump has lied at least 16,000 times. Why are there journalists, reporters, politicians and people among the general public who keep giving him the benefit of the doubt despite the overwhelming evidence that he is a compulsive liar?

People want to trust others. I, too, would rather believe that the president of the United States was an honest, decent, thoughtful person. For some people, having an authority figure be trustworthy is so important that they will not accept the obvious facts about Trump. Like other predators, or other sociopaths, Trump takes advantage of this very human quality by pretending to be trustworthy through endless lying about his real motivations and even his real actions.

Donald Trump has said and done many unconscionable things during his time in the White House. But his recent suggestion that doctors and nurses are stealing ventilators from hospitals is, even by standards, one of his most despicable comments. Is that just his instinct — to go to such an unbelievably dark place?

As my colleague Dr. John Gartner pointed out, if Trump were walking around wearing a tinfoil hat and talking about Martians controlling his mind, it would be easy for the public to recognize how severely ill he is. Trump is the most dangerous person we could have as a president precisely because his delusional core is not as obvious. When he makes these claims about ventilators and the coronavirus, they need to be understood as delusional beliefs that he summons from his imagination to protect himself, and which he is incapable of altering when presented with reality.

Donald Trump actually believes that he is a great president. I believe he is likely to win a second term. His entire presidency stands as an indictment of the American people, the news media, the political class and the country’s culture and values as a whole.

With respect to the political class, Donald Trump would have been removed from office already if the Republicans in Congress were not propping him up. If a Democrat were behaving like Trump, Republicans would certainly have impeached and convicted him already. Many decent Americans have been successfully conned by Trump, but there is no excuse for the Republicans in Congress. Trump’s decisions about the coronavirus are killing Americans and he will continue doing it. The Congress should remove him from office immediately.

If Trump was not born into wealth, what do you think would have happened to him?

People with Donald Trump’s very severe personality disorder are rare, which is good for civilization but helps explain why most people cannot understand his behavior. Sociopaths can be camouflaged by being successful in certain areas precisely because they get to the top by lying, cheating, bullying and manipulating, stepping on people who are in their way. Dictators, crime bosses and similar types of people are examples. But most sociopaths end up with criminal records. Donald Trump has committed multiple civil crimes that we know of. If he had not been born into money, it is likely that he would be in prison.

In terms of “metacognition,” is Donald Trump aware of what motivates and drives his behavior?

Donald Trump has made it clear that he processes reality in a different way than most human beings. When he says that if 100,000 people were to die from the coronavirus it would be a “victory” for him, he is revealing who he really is. He is showing that his perceived self-interest is the only thing that is ever on his mind. Insight into himself wouldn’t make any sense to him.

Given your expertise in mental health, do you find Donald Trump to be an interesting person to study?

I find Donald Trump to be boring because he’s so simple; it is always obvious what he’s going to do. In any situation, its merits or complexity will have no bearing on his statements or actions; he will simply say or do whatever he thinks will benefit himself. Part of that calculus, of course, is to act as though he actually cares about others. But with four years of experience, everyone now ought to be able to see through that. When he was first elected, many reporters and commentators wrote that they hoped he would change and become “presidential.” People with the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder do not change. This is just who Trump is.

What do you want the American people and the world to be prepared for, in terms of Donald Trump’s behavior?

No matter what happens with the coronavirus, Donald Trump is going to claim victory. He will say that he did the best job possible and use the “big lie” strategy to double down on this falsehood. He will blame his critics for his failures with the virus. If there is a truly horrible outcome, Trump will blame the Democrats, the doctors, the governors and anyone else he can imagine while, as he has already said, taking no responsibility himself.
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Distant Lover · Apr 9, 2020

I resent Trump's affluent supporters. They got their tax cuts. That is all they care about, not the national debt, and not the well being of those who lack their advantages. They embody this statement by John Kenneth Galbraith:

For Trump's lower income white supporters I feel ambivalence. On one hand they exasperate me. How can they be so blind and stupid to support such a man?

The other part of me feels compassion for what they have experienced since the late 1960's. Beginning in 1980 I have followed the religious right with interest and a degree of sympathy. The religious right never wanted to create an American theocracy, similar to the theocracy Puritans created in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, and the one John Calvin created in Switzerland during the sixteenth century.

At most the religious right wanted to restore the moral ethos that existed in the United States during the 1950's. I was a child back then. It was a nice time to be a child. Most Americans were affiliated with a church or synagogue. The crime rate was low. Rates of illegitimacy and divorce were low. A popular song captured the national mood with the lyrics, "Love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage." There is plenty of evidence that children raised to adulthood by both biological parents living together in matrimony tend to have many fewer problems in life than other children.

Nevertheless, in a country like the United States there is little the government can do to influence religious and sexual behavior. Therefore, they are not really political issues. This is why the religious right failed during the administration of Ronald Reagan, and why it is failing during the administration of Donald Trump. Also, the religious right has been unskilled at choosing presidents. In 1980 evangelicals abandoned the most sincerely Christian president the United States has probably ever had for a product of Hollywood who had divorced his first wife, signed a law as Governor of California legalizing abortion, and who seldom attended church. In 2016 they reached even lower into the basket of moral dis-rectitude and picked Donald Trump.

During the late 1960's, when the black ghetto riots threatened white urban ethnic neighborhoods, liberals told white blue collar workers that the real problem was not black crime; it was white racism. White racism, that is to say white racists, like white urban ethnics, were responsible. White workers who worked hard at jobs they often disliked to support their wives and legitimate children did not like having their taxes spent supporting the illegitimate children of men who would rather be "a sex machine with all the chicks," than a responsible husband and father.

Because of the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 white blue collar workers increasingly have had to compete with immigrants. By applying for jobs, immigrants enable employers to be stingy with pay raises. By applying for apartments, immigrants enable landlords to raise rents. For the well educated, the well paid, and the well connected, globalism has meant professional and investment opportunities, and inexpensive servants. For most American citizens, globalism has meant that good jobs are harder to find, harder to keep, and that they pay less while they last.

The well educated, well paid bi-coastal professionals who have come to dominate the Democrat Party (like Hillary Clinton) have been telling white blue collar workers that they should stop being so racist, and learn to appreciate the imperceptible advantages of diversity. Donald Trump has told white blue collar workers that their grievances are legitimate, and that he would fix things for them.

stumbler · Apr 9, 2020

Yale psychologist: Trump’s coronavirus failures happen when ‘you grant power to someone who cannot handle it’

Psychologist Dr. Bandy Lee noted Thursday that the coronavirus leadership failure we’ve seen in the White House is exactly what happens when power is given to someone who isn’t ready for it.

“We warned against delaying impeachment, and we warned against turning over the articles of impeachment so quickly. We also warned against having so few articles of impeachment,” she said on Twitter. “The reason we so urged the Congress to consult with us was not because they would not be able to do their political jobs; it was because the job that was needed was medical. An ‘airtight argument’ does not work when someone cannot even engage rationally in the first place.”

Lee was among the psychologists and mental health experts saying that the president isn’t mentally fit to handle the job as president. She along with many others signed onto a letter asking to invoke the 25th Amendment.

“Simply the time allowed to continue in office balloons into uncontrollable expectations, which is what we have seen. This is what happens when you grant power to someone who cannot handle it—and the same holds true between now and November,” she said.
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https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/ya...-grant-power-to-someone-who-cannot-handle-it/

stumbler · Apr 13, 2020

Yale psychiatrist says if Trump wasn’t president no one would think twice about having him evaluated

Yale psychiatrist Bandy Lee noted that if President Donald Trump wasn’t the president of the United States that no one would think twice about having him evaluated for a nursing home.

“If Donald Trump were not president, we might have wondered if these out-of-touch responses to reality warranted hospitalization or transfer to a nursing home. Because he is president, we followed them instead,” she tweeted Monday, with a video showing the disturbing trend of coronavirus cases.

Bandy X Lee, MD, MDiv @BandyXLee1

If Donald Trump were not president, we might have wondered if these out-of-touch responses to reality warranted hospitalization or transfer to a nursing home. Because he is president, we followed them instead.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=730-i0uIs8s&feature=youtu.be …

YouTube at ‎@YouTube

193
9:24 AM - Apr 13, 2020

While President Donald Trump was promising “it will go away, just stay calm,” the numbers were rising. While other countries were working to flatten their curve of infections, the United States was climbing.

She agreed with a Twitter user asking that if someone knew that a person was going to harm themselves, they would take action to protect someone from danger. Lee noted the same is true with Trump.

“When there is information about danger from any source, through any means, we have a responsibility to report, to warn, and to protect potential victims, whether they are already patients or not. Safety comes first,” Lee explained.

Bandy X Lee, MD, MDiv @BandyXLee1

This is correct. When there is information about danger from any source, through any means, we have a responsibility to report, to warn, and to protect potential victims, whether they are already patients or not. Safety comes first. https://twitter.com/PeggyTeixeira/status/1249671148473901057 …

Peggy Teixeira @PeggyTeixeira

Replying to @BandyXLee1

If you read on someone's FB page that they were going to harm others, the Goldwater Rule is moot; the person's own words and actions are the diagnostic criteria, and appropriate action would be taken to avert a crisis. Same with Trump.

139
9:13 AM - Apr 13, 2020
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https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/ya...would-think-twice-about-having-him-evaluated/

Distant Lover · Apr 14, 2020

stumbler · Apr 14, 2020

#TrumpMeltdown and #TrumpMadness trend nationwide after unhinged ‘propaganda session’ on coronavirus

President Donald Trump attacked two female reporters and claimed unfettered presidential powers during a Monday coronavirus briefing that lasted over two hours.

During the briefing, a campaign-style video was even shown, prompting criticism of North Korea-style propaganda.

The internet was shocked by Trump’s claims, with the hashtag #TrumpMeltdown trending nationwide on Twitter.

Here’s some of what people were saying:

Billy Baldwin ✔ @BillyBaldwin

Currently... #OMGTrump #PressBriefing #TrumpPressConference #TrumpMeltdown #SaveFauci

... are all trending on Twitter.

136
5:46 PM - Apr 13, 2020
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Rus McLaughlin ✔ @rusmclaughlin

The President does not have "total authority."

That's a King. That's a Dictator.

America. Defeats. Dictators.

It's what we do.#TrumpMeltdown #PressBriefing

16
6:00 PM - Apr 13, 2020

Dr. Dena Grayson ✔ @DrDenaGrayson

· 2h

Whoa. This @CNN chyron says it ALL: “Angry Trump Turns Briefing Into Propaganda Session.”#TrumpLiesAmericansDie #coronavirus #COVID19 #CoronavirusPandemic

Dr. Dena Grayson ✔ @DrDenaGrayson

This #COVID19 “briefing” is getting worse by the second for @realDonaldTrump.@CNN just changed its chyron to “Trump Uses Task Force Briefing to Try and Rewrite History on #Coronavirus Response.”#CoronavirusTimeline #TrumpLies #TrumpMeltdown

2,958
4:36 PM - Apr 13, 2020

Agi @agi818

#TrumpMeltdown #TrumpMadness
“Tens of thousands of Americans are dead… How is this rant supposed to make people feel confident in an unprecedented crisis?”

Trump responds with more egomaniacal ramblings.

2,107
5:01 PM - Apr 13, 2020

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https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/tr...r-unhinged-propaganda-session-on-coronavirus/

stumbler · Apr 24, 2020

Yale psychiatrist warns Trump will take millions down with him as his mental state disintegrates
Bandy X. Lee, DC Report @Raw Story - Commentary

As the most eminent mental health experts warned would happen since Donald Trump’s election, the office of the U.S. presidency has become a locus of grave psychological dysfunction. Seldom do we see our warnings realized in real life with such recurrent, precise confirmation, as if on schedule.

The president’s latest suggestion that injecting bodies with disinfectant, or irradiating them with ultraviolet light, could help with COVID-19 is only the latest, blatant example of his malady: His boundless willingness to place the nation in harm’s way for his slightest gain. Given our track record, the world should know that we were not speaking frivolously of his dangerousness and that, were Trump to continue in the presidency, not only the United States but the world would see vast, unnecessary increases in suffering and death.

Just as COVID-19 was exceeding 2 million confirmed cases across the world, Trump announced that he would freeze funding for the World Health Organization (WHO), the main agency that is in charge of helping the world to confront the pandemic. I have been consulting with the WHO since its launch of the landmark World Report on Violence and Health. On a shoestring budget, it does innovative and vital work around the world that saves lives in ways that no other agency can replace. For a global pandemic, which requires a concerted effort among nations, this funding means protecting ourselves in a closely linked world of international travel and interconnected economies.

The remaining nine months of Trump’s presidency are looking to be the most dangerous of all, for the United States and for the world.

This is especially true in the absence of U.S. leadership. We will never know to what degree the COVID-19 pandemic could have been attenuated or contained altogether, like other near-pandemics in the past, had Trump not disbanded the nation’s global pandemic response system two years earlier, out of pathological envy of his predecessor, President Barack Obama. It was a system that experts lauded throughout the world and voiced outcry for when it was dissolved.

Trump’s withdrawal of funding for the most important global health organization in the midst of the most serious global public health emergency in a century will likely have similar results as in the United States. When he depleted funding to another crucial public health institution, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), it eliminated the CDC staff stationed in China, exactly the group that was supposed to monitor threats like COVID-19, just months earlier. And when the crisis came, the CDC let the nation down. It sent out faulty test kits that took at least a month to correct, while Germany, South Korea, and other countries successfully developed test kits and went into large-scale testing weeks before the United States.

Scapegoating and Persecutions
We should recognize the president’s behavior for what it is: a mental problem. Mental health professionals have long ago recognized his patterns and his tendency to project his own unacceptable actions onto others, as he does when he scapegoats the Chinese people (even as he praised their leader Xi Jinping during the early coverup), state governors, hospitals, and now his top medical expert. It is all so as to deny his failures and weaknesses and to avoid accountability. The psychological pattern is the same as when he persecuted immigrants and desperate migrants to boost his party’s election chances in 2018, which led to unprecedented violence both domestically and abroad.

Allowing such a gravely impaired person to preside has given us the gravest failure of U.S. security in history, dwarfing the number of deaths at Pearl Harbor or September 11. The United States is now a staggering outlier with more than 50,000 deaths or 150 per 1 million population. South Korea has incurred 240 deaths, or 5 per million. Taiwan’s death toll stands at just six deaths, or 0.3 per million, and Singapore’s death toll stands at 12, or 2 per million. Many other countries have a similar record of lower death rates. Canada’s death rate is one-third of the U.S. The U.S. currently accounts for one of less than every four global COVID-19 deaths, even though the U.S. has one of every 24 persons on the planet.

Hypnotic Effect on Followers
His pathological drive to deflect blame and to attribute his errors to an outside “enemy” will continue to exert greater emotional force than any rational planning, as well as to have a powerful, hypnotic effect on his followers, as is the characteristic of pathology. As his other mismanagements contribute to what seems will be a Great Depression-level economic devastation, he has called for armed insurrection against Democratic governors who are unwilling to reopen the economy.

These are truly frightening developments that likely foreshadow potentially catastrophic international crises to come. Amid a worldwide economic depression on top of major misery and death from the pandemic, geopolitical confrontations that this president has already brought to a brink are likely to explode.

He Will Create New Crises
While it is likely he will use his presidential powers and the current health crisis to try to postpone the November elections or to annul the results, it is also likely that he will turn to creating new crises if this does not seem workable in his mind. We simply cannot risk these greater dangers while a seriously mentally compromised person is wielding the powers of the presidency. Past behavior is a reliable predictor of future behavior, and the remaining nine months of his presidency are looking to be the most dangerous of all, for the United States and for the world.

Because these patterns are familiar in mental health settings, thousands of mental health professionals have tried to fulfill our professional responsibility to protect society by speaking up. Recently, a giant in our field, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, has joined us in stating that the president is “crazy.” We believe that prevention is important, and we have issued a prescription. Just as we can choose whether to coordinate our fight against the novel coronavirus or stubbornly stay with a lethal course, we can choose whether to address the greatest mental health emergency of our time or not. The healthy choice seems clear.
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https://www.rawstory.com/2020/04/ya...n-with-him-as-his-mental-state-disintegrates/

stumbler · Apr 24, 2020

To: President Donald Trump
REMOVE TRUMP FROM OFFICE UNDER 25TH AMENDMENT DUE TO MENTAL ILLNESS

Campaign created by
Gary Goldstein

Donald Trump is unable to properly perform his duties as President due to impulses indicative of mental illness. We call upon the necessary government officers to execute the requirements of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution and remove him from office.
Mr. Trump will be removed and Vice-President Pence will assume the duties of acting President until such time as three independent mental health professionals certify that Mr. Trump is competent to resume his duties.
Immediate action must be taken in the interests of the national security of the United States of America.

Why is this important?
The President is a threat to our national security.

https://sign.moveon.org/petitions/remove-trump-from-office-1

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Is Donald Trump Mentally Ill?

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