Tag: Trump mental health

Mental health experts: Given Trump’s psychopathology, last week’s coup attempt was wholly predictable

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Of course, the media environment was set up for the likes of Trump. America is filled with racism, sexism, and hatred, and with mass media outlets like Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News that have no responsibility to the truth. The Fairness Doctrine, which used to protect us, was repealed decades ago by the Federal Communications Commission under Ronald Reagan, and in place of fairness jumped right-wing extremism. Social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and Parler, also played a major role.

Yet Trump posed a special challenge. Into the brew of hatred and racism came a mentally disordered individual with a knack for self-promotion. Trump was not merely conniving, and that’s the point. He suffers from severe impairments, including characteristics of sociopathy, pathological narcissism, and sadism. A mentally disordered leader in a country filled with inequalities and a mass media environment promoting extremism led to a terrifying situation.

Mental health professionals started to warn Americans about Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, but they were shut down by none other than a professional organization of their own, the American Psychiatric Association. The APA was unique among mental health associations to adopt the so-called Goldwater Rule, which resulted from Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, when some psychiatrists questioned Goldwater’s mental health fitness for office. After that, the APA decreed that it was unethical for mental health professionals to diagnose public figures without a personal examination and without consent. Continue reading.

Is Trump Cracking Under the Weight of Losing?

Getting the boot from the White House is an undeniable ego blow for a man who has never admitted defeat.

Donald Trump has never had a week like the week he just had. On the heels of the Supreme Court’s knock-back and the Electoral College’s knockout, some of his most reliable supporters—Mitch McConnell, Vladimir Putin, Newsmax—acknowledged and affirmed the actual fact of the matter. Trump is a loser.

Consequently, he is plainly out of sorts, say former close associates, longtime Trump watchers and mental health experts.

It’s not just his odd behavior—the testy, tiny desk session with the press, the stilted Medal of Freedom ceremony that ended with his awkward exit, the cut-short trip to the Army-Navy football game. It’s even more pointedly his conspicuous and ongoing absences. The narcissistic Trump has spent the last half a century—but especially the last half a decade—making himself and keeping himself the most paid-attention-to person on the planet. But in the month and a half since Election Day, Trump has been seen and heard relatively sparingly and sporadically. No–showing unexpectedly at a Christmas party, sticking to consistently sparse public schedules and speaking mainly through his increasingly manic Twitter feed, he’s been fixated more than anything else on his baseless insistence that he won the election when he did not. Continue reading.

20 days of fantasy and failure: Inside Trump’s quest to overturn the election

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The facts were indisputable: President Trump had lost.

But Trump refused to see it that way. Sequestered in the White House and brooding out of public view after his election defeat, rageful and at times delirious in a torrent of private conversations, Trump was, in the telling of one close adviser, like “Mad King George, muttering, ‘I won. I won. I won.’ ”

However cleareyed Trump’s aides may have been about his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, many of them nonetheless indulged their boss and encouraged him to keep fighting with legal appeals. They were “happy to scratch his itch,” this adviser said. “If he thinks he won, it’s like, ‘Shh . . . we won’t tell him.’ ” Continue reading.

Mike Pence gives a halting and evasive answer when pressed about reports on Trump’s mysterious hospital visit

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A new report from New York Times reporter Michael Shmidt’s book about Donald Trump has refocused attention on the president’s unexpected visit last November to Walter Reed Medical Center, a trip that has never been fully explained.

The White House claimed that the president was simply going in early for the first phase of his annual physical, though as many people pointed out, that’s not a thing. And Schmidt reported that Vice President Mike Pence was told to be on standby to take over the duties of the presidency in case the president went under anesthesia, though reportedly that step was not necessary.

Fox News host Bret Baier brought up the reporting Tuesday night during an interview with Pence, seeming to catch the vice president off-guard. Pence clearly wanted to avoid answering the question, and when pinned down, claimed he didn’t “recall” being on “standby” — extremely evasive language that suggests he may be relying on technicalities to justify essentially lying to the public. Continue reading.

New info deepens the mystery around Trump’s unexpected and suspicious hospital visit

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On Saturday, November 16, 2019, President Donald Trump made an unexpected visit to Walter Reed Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. That visit is among the many things that author Michael S. Schmidtdiscusses in the new book, “Donald Trump v. the United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President.”

New York Times reporter Gabriel Debenedetti, discussing Schmidt’s book, notes that it “reports the White House wanted Mike Pence ‘on standby to take over the powers of the presidency temporarily if Trump had to undergo a procedure that would have required him to be anesthetized.’ The vice president never had to take this step.”

The fact that Trump’s visit to Walter Reed in November 2019 was unannounced raised questions about the president’s health. But Dr. Sean Conley, Trump’s physician, described the visit as “routine” that month and wrote, in a memo, that it was only kept secret because of “scheduling uncertainties.” And Trump described the visit as a “very routine physical.” Continue reading.

New documentary raises alarms about Trump’s mental health and exposes his ‘all-consuming narcissism’

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Whatever the outcome in November — whether voters elect former Vice President Joe Biden and vote President Donald Trump out of office or give him four more years in the White House — a long list of pundits, journalists and political insiders will no doubt continue to dissect and analyze Trump’s presidency for years to come. Much of the analysis of Trump will take place from a policy standpoint, but the documentary “#Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump” mostly analyzes him from a mental health standpoint. And long-time Chicago Sun-Times film critic Richard Roeper, in an article published this week, explains why he is recommending “#Unfit.”

Roeper, despite his high opinion of the film, acknowledges that “#Unfit” is unlikely to turn Trump’s hardcore MAGA base against him.

“Some might even sit through all the arguments and watch the presentations making the case Trump is unfit and react by saying, ‘And that’s exactly why you’re all so scared of him and he’s the greatest president of all time!” Roeper writes. “Nevertheless, we are recommending ‘#Unfit’ not for any political reason — in fact, the film is not about Trump’s policies, but about his personality — but because it offers some valuable insights into Trump’s behavior.” Continue reading.

Mary Trump, niece of the president, says she’ll do ‘everything in my power’ to elect Joe Biden

 

Washington Post logoMary L. Trump, whose best-selling book calls her uncle President Trump “the world’s most dangerous man,” said in an interview with The Washington Post that she plans to do “everything in my power” to elect Democrat Joe Biden as president, but hasn’t yet talked to his campaign.

Speaking Monday on The Post Live program with reporter Robert Costa, the president’s niece acknowledged that she had not obtained permission to use a series of incendiary quotes from her aunt Maryanne Trump Barry. In the book, Mary Trump quotes Maryanne as saying that Donald Trump was a “clown” who would never get elected.

Asked whether Maryanne knew her quotes would be in the book, Mary Trump said that they came from conversations that took place before she planned to write a book. She said that she hadn’t talked to Maryanne since the book was published and said she would not be surprised “if she never contacted me, and I think that’s fair. I understand why she would not want to.” Continue reading.

I’ve taken the cognitive test, too. We need to talk about it

AlterNet logoI was reading a community diary story today that you really should read, if you haven’t already, about the writer’s experience taking the cognitive assessment test. I have had difficulty processing Donald Trump’s answer regarding this matter to Fox News in a way that I hadn’t really come to terms with until reading that diary and thinking about how it made me feel.

I had my first MOCA test years after rehab recovering from a violent crime assault, and, unfortunately, since then for the past 25 years, I’ve had a version of this test given to me with decreasing regularity. The point of a cognitive test isn’t to “ace” it or prove how much of a smart person you are: The point is to track whether or not you are experiencing a negative trend in your ability to function, which can be caused by time, disability, or even medication. As the president bragged about his test results, one question kept popping up: Why brag? This test is easy. Only once, due to a bad drug interaction, did I ever suffer difficulties. It was that one time, though, that was a clue to doctors around me that something was wrong, resulting in changes to my medication. A follow-up test showed me, I guess in Trump’s terms, “acing the test” with “unbelievable” results. I don’t know if I would call them unbelievable, because they were to be expected. At the time of my traumatic brain injury (TBI), the MoCA didn’t exist. Still, the goal of neurologists was the same. It wasn’t to determine if I was smart—it was to determine if brain trauma was having a degenerative effect, or if the damage had stopped. Continue reading.

Investigative journalist who’s covered Trump for 35 years explains why you need to take Mary’s Trump’s book seriously

AlterNet logoMary Trump’s book deserves your close attention because the president’s niece has two advantages that the small band of us who have studied Trump closely over the years do not.

First, she’s family. No one knows you like your family. Your family knows how you behaved at crucial moments when life changing events occur — births, deaths, divorces, medical emergencies and weddings — as well as mundane events like Saturday breakfast.

The 55-year-old daughter of Donald Trump’s older brother is the first Trump family insider to go public about his behavior since he announced his run for the presidency more than five years ago. Her most chilling anecdote is about how as first son Fred Trump Jr. was rushed to a hospital where he died, Donald and his sister Elizabeth went to the movies and the parents stayed home. Continue reading.

 

Trump’s worldview forged by neglect and trauma at home, his niece says in new book

Washington Post logoA tell-all book by President Trump’s niece describes a family riven by a series of traumas, exacerbated by a daunting patriarch who “destroyed” Donald Trump by short-circuiting his “ability to develop and experience the entire spectrum of human emotion,” according to a copy of the forthcoming memoir obtained by The Washington Post.

President Trump’s view of the world was shaped by his desire during childhood to avoid his father’s disapproval, according to the niece, Mary L. Trump, whose book is by turns a family history and a psychological analysis of her uncle.

But she writes that as Donald matured, his father came to envy his son’s “confidence and brazenness,” as well as his seemingly insatiable desire to flout rules and conventions, traits that brought them closer together as Donald became the right-hand man in the family real estate business. Continue reading.