Donald Trump's Mental Health Crisis is America's Problem

With the news waves inundated with coverage of Donald Trump's multiple indictments, debate avoidance stunts and general demagoguery and attacks on prosecutors, grand jurors, the FBI, - the list goes on and on - one topic not adequately discussed is Trump's severe mental illness in the eyes of numerous mental health experts and the threat he poses to American society and democracy.   Sadly, far too many Republicans continue to recognize Trump as the malignancy that he is and, instead, eat up the hatred and cruelty that he projects on his political and law enforcement foes to distract from his own moral and mental health failings. Throughout history similar figures have used Trump's tactics to gain and/or retain power often at great cost to the societies in which they lived. A long piece at Salon looks at Trump's mental illness issues and the continuing threat he poses, especially as his legal situation deteriorates.  His main goal is to distract his cultist followers and accuse others of that which he is guilty of himself.  The man is a true menace and America will be in danger as long as he continues to draw breath.  Here are article excerpts:

To properly respond to Donald Trump and the level of extreme danger he represents — especially as he faces multiple criminal prosecutions — requires understanding some specific aspects of Trump's behavior and motivations.

Trump has shown a wide range of pathological behavior over the past seven years or so. He has an unhealthy fascination with violence. He lacks impulse control and empathy. He revels in cruelty. He compulsively lies and exhibits traits of malignant narcissism. He is a confirmed sexual predator and misogynist. He has a tenuous relationship to reality, and increasingly retreats into victimology and a persecution complex. He believes himself to be almost literally superhuman and often behaves like a cult leader. 

In my many conversations with mental health experts during the Age of Trump, one of their consistent themes has been the suggestion that if the ex-president was not a rich white man he would likely have been arrested or otherwise removed from normal society decades ago.

Trump's pathological behavior is in no way separate from his role as leader of the neofascist MAGA movement and larger white right. One repeated error made by the mainstream media and the larger political class is to divide Trump's obvious mental health issues from his political behavior and the ascendancy of his movement.

Fascism and other forms of illiberal politics are not "merely" political problems. In reality, such things are a societal force and imaginary that both harness and generate collective mass sociopathy and other forms of physical, emotional, psychological, intellectual and spiritual pathology. Sick societies produce sick leaders; sick leaders have sick followers; in combination, those forces produce sick political movements. Collectively, these are manifestations of a condition of malignant normality that can all too easily end in societal destruction.

After four indictments on a wide variety of charges for which he potentially faces imprisonment, Donald Trump has reacted in entirely predictable fashion, lashing out at many of his perceived enemies, including President Biden,  Attorney General Merrick Garland, special counsel Jack Smith, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, the Democratic Party, the FBI and others he views as part of a "deep state" plot against him and his MAGA movement.

[Trump’s theme]: Biden and the Democrats and their voters are existential enemies of the nation, and the twice-impeached, four-times-indicted ex-president is the only person who can defeat them.

Rather than mocking or deriding these rants, it is better to understand them as problematic and dangerous. This is classic projection: Trump is projecting his inner views and pathological sense of self-identity outward onto others.

Trump's projections and his evidently unstable behavior may provide insight and map onto what he and his followers will do next — up to and including potential acts of political violence — in response to his impending criminal trials amid the 2024 presidential campaign. I asked Dr. Marc Goulston, a prominent psychiatrist, former FBI hostage-negotiation trainer and author of the bestsellers "Just Listen" and "Talking to 'Crazy'," for his insights into Trump's inflammatory rhetoric and what it reveals about the ex-president's state of mind. He responded by email:

If we took out the words "Joe" or "Biden"  from his rants and asked non-dictator world leaders to choose whom they seemed to describe more accurately, Biden or Trump, I'm guessing most would say it's a better description of Trump and what he is or would do to America.

I also asked Dr. Lance Dodes, a retired assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a training and supervising analyst emeritus at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, for his assessment of Trump's behavior and language. He also responded by email:

Donald Trump has always relied on primitive psychological defenses, including denial of reality, as in his long history of inventing "alternative facts" and fake news. Another of his primitive mechanisms is projection and its more severe form, "projective identification." In the latter case, he reverses identities to claim that those opposed to him have exactly the amoral traits that define himself, for example, calling President Biden "Crooked Joe." This dangerous capacity to project his identity onto another person, in order to shift responsibility and anger away from himself, is common in tyrants and would-be tyrants.

In a recent interview with Salon, Dr. Marcel Danesi, author of the new book "Politics, Lies and Conspiracy Theories: A Cognitive Linguistic Perspective," explained how fascists, authoritarians and demagogues use emotions and rhetoric in sophisticated ways to control their followers. I asked Danesi for his analysis of how Trump's attacks on Biden fit into that model:

This strategy is right from the Machiavellian playbook. In "The Prince," Machiavelli warned that any admission of wrongdoing is the death knell of the prince's rule and loosens his mind control over people. ... Trump's current attacks on the judiciary are a calculating, Machiavellian strategy of deflection by projection — blaming others for employing his own tactics. Interestingly, in an article Orwell wrote in 1940, he pinpoints the core of this strategy, writing that the manipulator portrays himself as a martyr, a victim, the "self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds." The intent is to portray himself as fighting against an invisible enemy — the same enemy that Trump's followers are purported to be fighting.

Trump's strategy is not new. It has always existed. In ancient Greece, the aristocrat Cleon was elected in 424 B.C., using oratory that resonated with people ... instilling a mistrust of intellectuals and even aristocrats opportunistically, despite the fact that he was an aristocrat himself. He called them liars, responsible for all the ills that were endemic to society.

Trump's attempt to cling on to power and avoid accountability is actually a simple one that has worked from time immemorial — blame the deep state (whatever that may be) as the enemy engaged in a takeover of the "real America." As Machiavelli wrote in various works, never admit any wrongdoing, accuse others of the wrongdoing, and do it over and over, and the prince will enhance his chances to keep people in a mind fog. 

Donald Trump's mental health and diseased mind are not likely to improve, given the pressures he now faces. And as goes Trump, so goes the Republican Party, the MAGA cult and the larger white right.

In total, Donald Trump's poor mental health and aberrant behavior amount to a political, social and legal crisis for America and the world. He must be defeated at the polls and prosecuted in the courts, but even that will not be enough.

To paraphrase historian Timothy Snyder, the Trump era is America's "collective malady." It will take years of collective hard work, grit and determination to get better.