Donald Trump

Rolling Stone - Donald Trump has proposed a fascist plan to deploy military forces against U.S. citizens who oppose him on Election Day.“I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within,” the former president told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo when she asked if he expects “chaos on Election Day” from immigrants. “We have some very bad people, some sick people, radical left lunatics…. And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.” 

Trump called his Arizona crowd "Asserasians" because his teleprompter malfunctioned

Ariella Cook-Shonkoff, San Francisco Chronicle - During the 1964 presidential campaign, a magazine polled psychiatrists about Republican candidate Barry Goldwater’s mental fitness, and the majority pronounced him “unfit” for office.  Did that influence public opinion? You bet.

Therefore, in cautious response, the American Psychiatric Association passed the Goldwater Rule barring psychiatrists from diagnosing or offering professional opinions about the mental health of any person they have not personally examined. The Goldwater Rule makes sense to prevent wild speculation and smearing of those in the public eye. It puts the brakes on unscrupulous labeling, diagnosing and scandalizing.

But the rule backfires when psychiatrists are unable to communicate their professional knowledge when a presidential candidate poses a significant threat to American civilians. Could the ethical solution lay somewhere between?

As a matter of course, in op-eds and on broadcast news programming, experts in nearly every other profession are asked to share their considerable perspectives and opinions to help inform the voting public, policymakers and government officials. But not so for psychiatrists, and by extension, for other health professionals or organizations mired in (or hiding behind) the Goldwater Rule.

When psychiatrists are muzzled and disempowered to speak out, it harms society’s best interests. And what of an exception to the rule? Trump represents an exceptional candidate. I know I speak for dozens, perhaps hundreds, of mental health professionals in calling upon the American Psychiatric Association to reconsider the limitations of the Goldwater rule.  Rules must evolve alongside society, not die in stuffy air chambers. Freedom of speech should not be so rigidly stifled. 

Trump: "Do you want the black president or the white president?"

Trump urges using military to handle ‘radical left lunatics’ on Election Day 

Trump announces he will withhold disaster relief aid from California if they don’t obey him as president: “If you don’t do it we’re not giving you [aid]"

NBC News - Tens of thousands of evangelical Christians gathered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Saturday to pray for America’s atonement and for Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Organizers of the event, billed “A Million Women,” described the gathering — and next month’s presidential election — as “a last stand moment” to save the nation from forces of darkness. For hours, the gathered masses sang worship songs, waved flags symbolizing their belief that America was founded as an explicitly Christian nation and prayed aloud for Jesus to intercede on behalf of Trump in November.

... Lou Engle, the self-described prophet who organized the event, said God told him in a dream to call on a million women to march on Washington in order to restore God’s dominion over the nation. Engle is a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation, a movement of charismatic Christians who for years have portrayed U.S. politics as a spiritual clash between good and evil and Trump as a flawed leader anointed by God to redeem the nation.

Dan P. McAdams, New Lines Mag-
Americans today see two contradictory futures looming in the middle distance: In one scenario, Donald Trump is convicted of serious crimes and sent to prison. In the second, he returns to the presidency in 2025.The urgent uncertainty of it all may be a reason why, in recent weeks, Trump has summoned forth some of the most incendiary rhetoric ever employed by an American presidential candidate....And yet Trump is cruising to a third consecutive Republican presidential nomination.... 

How is it possible that a twice-impeached former president facing 91 criminal counts can now be favored to return to the Oval Office? Why do his supporters not recoil when Trump promises to unleash an authoritarian regime as president and to assume the role of dictator on Day One? What explains his enduring appeal?

Questions like these have been raised ever since Donald Trump began to gain political traction in early 2016. Back then he claimed, quite presciently, that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue in New York City and not lose a single vote. Since then, countless observers have puzzled over the unshakable hold he exerts on a vast swath of the American electorate. Many factors — economic, political, cultural, psychological — are surely at play in shaping Trump’s abiding relationship with his supporters.

My argument, as strange as it might sound, is that Trump’s enduring appeal stems from the perception — his own and others’ — that he is not a person. In the minds of millions, Trump is more than a person. And he is less than a person, too.

In 1962, a prominent Harvard psychologist published a scholarly paper titled “The Personality and Career of Satan.” Henry A. Murray examined how, for over 2,000 years, Western theologians and other writers have depicted the mythical figure of Satan, projecting onto him human traits perennially designated as evil.

It is worth noting that Murray’s characterization of Satan bears an uncanny resemblance to the psychological portrait of Trump painted by many psychologists today. A malignant narcissism rages at the core of Satan’s personality. Cast out of heaven for his overmastering pride, Satan wants to be God, resents the fact that he is not God and insists that his supreme worth entitles him to privileges that nobody else should enjoy while undergirding his reign as sovereign of the mortal world below. Wholly self-centered, cruel, vindictive and devoid of compassion and empathy, Satan nonetheless possesses substantial charisma and charm. Completely contractual in his approach to interpersonal relationships, he has perfected the art of the deal, as when, in the Gospel of Luke, Satan tempts Jesus with earthly powers and riches in return for his adulation: “If thou will therefore worship me, all shall be thine.”

Situated in a middle ground between God and human beings, Satan is a liminal figure. He is like a person but not quite a person. For one, he is gifted with superhuman powers of the sort, Murray writes, that children have always imagined they might possess in the furthest reaches of their wish-fulfilling fantasies. But he does not possess certain qualities that adults especially value and recognize as part of the human condition. He lacks wisdom, for example, and love. He is not troubled by a complex inner life, by the doubts, ambivalences and moral quandaries that routinely run through the consciousness of mature humans. He is instead like the modern conception of a superhero. Satan is one-dimensional and mythic, an idealized personification, rather than a fully articulated person.

Donald Trump sees himself in the same way. While Trump insists that he is a force for good rather than evil, he truly perceives himself to be qualitatively different from the rest of humankind. He has often compared himself to a superhero. He has famously described himself as a “stable genius” who has never made a mistake. He is not lying when he makes these outrageous claims, for Trump truly believes them to be true, just as he believes he won the 2020 election.

At the same time, Trump is incapable of describing an inner psychological life or of identifying traces of reflection, emotional nuance, doubt or fallibility. Even though he talks about himself all the time, Trump has never been able to explain his inner world or to narrate stories about how he has come to be the person he is, as frustrated interviewers and biographers have repeatedly noted.

In my book “The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning” (2020), I argue that Trump lacks a narrative understanding of himself in time. A well-established line of psychological research shows that human personhood is tied up with narrative and storytelling. People understand their lives as narratives evolving over time. But Trump is the curious exception, in that there seems to be very little by way of a story in his head about who he is and how he came to be. He is instead what I call “the episodic man,” living outside of time in the eternal moment, fighting in the here and now to win the battle at hand, episode by episode, day by day. At the center of Trump’s personality lies a narrative vacuum, the space where the self-defining life story should be but never was. As such, Trump is rarely introspective, retrospective or prospective. There is no depth, no past and no future. MORE

Dan P. McAdams is a professor at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy and the author of “The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning”