By Ad astra
Don’t get me wrong. Trump is not the dilemma to which I’m referring. His behaviour is no longer a quandary. With every word he utters, with every tweet, he confirms that his mental state continues to deteriorate to the point where commentator after commentator expresses astonishment and alarm at his outlandish reactions to the social and political environment in which he finds himself. He has become predictably unpredictable.
Read any article about him, listen to any comment, and you will hear the same assessment. Trump is dangerously insane.
Writing in Stat Justin A. Frank, a clinical professor of psychiatry at George Washington University Medical Center and author of Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President (Avery/Penguin Random House, September 2018), gives this assessment after hearing him speak on Fox and Friends as far back as September 2018.
This half-hour revealed how destabilized the president can become and showed many of the disturbing patterns seen elsewhere in Trump’s actions and writing. Three of the most striking were his deep-seated feelings of victimhood, repeating himself, and difficulty answering questions or staying on point.
Writing in Salon in April, David Masciotra says:
The United States of America is now an abusive household. Donald Trump is the lunatic authority figure stalking and traumatizing the victims – the American people. It becomes increasingly evident, that with Trump’s every social media post, public utterance and policy directive, our president suffers from a severe form of mental illness. His insanity threatens millions of lives, and has become particularly dangerous during the most devastating public health crisis in the last 100 years.
If you still need more evidence, read an article by Bess Levin in the March 13 issue of Vanity Fair: The 12 Most Insane Moments From Trump’s National Emergency Presser: Germ-Swapping, Corporate Sponsors, “Big Words”.” Here is an extract:
On Friday afternoon, Donald Trump addressed the nation for the second time this week, and if you chose not to watch in an effort to protect your mental health, the quick summary is that it went as well as you might have expected, if you expected the press conference equivalent of a flaming bag of dog crap wrapped in the used bed sheets of a coronavirus patient. While his remarks didn’t cause the markets to have their worst trading session since Black Monday like they did on Wednesday, the address was somehow even more chilling.
Every day more evidence of Trump’s deranged mental state emerges: A report published by CNN from Carl Bernstein – who broke the Watergate stories with Bob Woodward, shared claims from those in Mr Trump’s inner circle that the President was “delusional” and ill-prepared for phone calls with world leaders. In addition, he was “abusive to leaders of America’s principal allies” – including Scott Morrison. Here is some of the CNN report:
Bernstein’s lengthy report claims Mr Trump “regularly bullied and demeaned” leaders of nations including the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada and Australia, in ‘numerous’ phone calls.
“Everything was always personalised, with everybody doing terrible things to rip us off – which meant ripping ‘me’ – Trump – off. He couldn’t – or wouldn’t – see or focus on the larger picture,” one US official reportedly said. Another reportedly called the phone calls “abominations”, while a German official said they were “so unusual” and “very aggressive”.
So if Trump is not the dilemma to which this article refers, what is?
To my mind, the most disturbing dilemma is: Why did voters in the US vote him into office, as they may well do again in November? They must know him by now; they must have read or heard the damaging assessments that are emerging day after day, the most recent being that of his former national security adviser, John Bolton in The Room Where it Happened.
There has to be an explanation. The purpose of this short piece is to canvass your opinion. Please let us have your considered views in Comments.
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