Analyzing Donald Trump as He Faces Criminal Indictments

“Cockroaches, Sleazeballs, and Lowlifes”

Notice that I use the term “analyzing” and not “diagnosing”.  This clarification is necessary, as the American Psychiatric Association (APA) sold the public a bill of goods when it dubbed our alerting the public to dangers—which is a fulfillment of our societal responsibility—as “diagnosing”.  Every honest psychiatrist understands the distinction; the public didn’t.

The APA inaugurated a new building in Washington and received unprecedented federal funding, but the public experienced a blackout of mental health expertise.  Since mental health experts were all but banned from major media following the APA’s actions, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment could not move forward, the two impeachments were ineffective without addressing the most crucial issue, and more than a million Americans unnecessarily died.  Not only that, “Trump Contagion”—which is the spread of mental symptoms through exposure—has become almost uncontrollable.

This is why I have warned from the start that Donald Trump was a great danger to the nation and to the world.  With Covid-19, I declared him to be a serious public health menace, greater than the viral pandemic itself.  I have said he should be properly evaluated, even if involuntarily, which is the procedure under mental health law—under which even a First Citizen deserves the medical standard of care.

Instead, he was allowed the formidable powers of the presidency of the United States, including authority over the nuclear “football”.  He was allowed to stay in office, to continue his rallies, to spread his symptoms, and even to “infect” the population with the idea that he was cheated of an election—so much so as to cause a violent insurrection and the breakdown, if you will, of democracy.

What has happened is not a mystery to mental health professionals.  It is a natural consequence of placing power in the hands of a severely mentally-impaired person who cannot handle power.  What is unusual is that such a person was granted power and was allowed to continue in that power.  What is also unusual is that those who are best qualified to deal with such persons, and routinely handle their behavior as a part of their professional work, are precisely those the public will never hear from.

The first signs of the APA going against science and practice standards to support a dangerous president, immediately after his inauguration, are what prompted us psychiatrists to hold our conference at Yale.  Just a few months later, our book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, was published, and since that time, every prediction we made with respect to the evolution of his presidency has come true, in the exact time course we estimated.

Now, just as Donald Trump worked relentlessly hard before the culminating coup attempt on January 6, 2021, he is clearly setting the stage to defy all the looming criminal indictments and to prevail, one way or another, in the 2024 election. Mental health professionals do not “predict” in the sense of knowing the future, but in the sense of gauging probability of behavior given patterns over time, in the context of decades of scientific research and the hundreds of clinical cases we see.  We also understand that behavior, especially in the cases of impairment, becomes rigid and all the more predictable.

Earlier this month, after masterfully manipulating CNN to essentially get a supposedly “liberal” network to sponsor a “Trump Rally” for him, Donald Trump unleashed this one-liner about the Democrats:

”THEY ARE SCUM, LIKE COCKROACHES ALL OVER WASHINGTON, DC.”

A few days later, twisting the Report resulting from Donald Trump’s disgraced Attorney General, William Barr, who had appointed John Durham to “investigate” the FBI back in 2019, Trump ranted:   

“I WAS BEING FRAMED BY THE FBI AND THE DOJ.  NOW IT CONTINUES WITH THE BOXES HOAX, THE ‘PERFECT’ PHONE CALL IN ATLANTA, THE MANHATTAN D.A., AND THE NEW YORK STATE A.G. SCAM.  WHAT A GROUP, BUT ALL REPORT TO THE DOJ IN WASHINGTON.  IT’S JAMES COMEY AND THE SLEAZEBAGS ALL OVER AGAIN.

Donald Trump does not have to be a master showman or even to be articulate.  When the mind is “captured” by symptoms, we psychiatrists know that almost nothing matters, be they facts, evidence, contradictions, or even one’s own physical demise.  But in this sui generis case, we are not dealing with danger to family, friends, or coworkers—we are dealing with escalating dangers to the entire country and entire world.

Donald Trump is in my opinion far more dangerous now than he was when we wrote our book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.  This is because, as I mentioned since the very beginning, danger, unlike diagnosis, is not about just the individual but about the context.  Trump Contagion has now spread, unmitigated.  Trump will do what he does: strenuously prepare to defy all legal indictments, upend basic American institutions, and attempt to capture the White House again, or even to manipulate public opinion to claim he won when he did not.  But he will achieve far more: this time, he might cause permanent damage to the very fabric and cohesion of American democracy.  In this regard, Trump added this preemptive verbal missile as he readies for the next election, now only seventeen months away:

“THEY ARE PLAYING ELECTION INTERFERENCE IN 2024 THROUGH ILLEGAL LAW ENFORCEMENT AGAINST REPUBLICANS, IN PARTICULAR YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT, ME.  THESE ARE CHEATING LOWLIFES, BUT WE WILL WIN. OUR COUNTRY IS GOING TO HELL!”

What I have been calling Trump Contagion continues to spread, infect, and endanger.  We can imagine what a different course the country might have taken, had he been exposed, stopped, contained, and treated back in the very beginning—when we psychiatrists and other mental health experts repeatedly warned about the need to contain his psychological dangers.  Indeed, had the things we advocated been done in the beginning of the Covid pandemic, most Americans now dead of the disease would be alive today (see our “Prescriptions for Survival,“ which we began issuing the very first month of the pandemic).  Psychological pandemics are little different.

If a good publisher can quickly be found, a new book about Trump Contagion: The More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump would be able to urgently inform the public, as well as those empowered in Washington, of what needs to be done in these increasingly dangerous times.