Donald Trump ‘Not a Well Man’ … ‘Insane’?

How Much do We Need to Recognize that He is Unqualified?

“Donald Trump is not a well man.  If you want to understand his psychology, you need to start by taking a book on abnormal psychology off the shelf and reading it.  Whether he’s a pathological narcissist, a sociopath or, as some mental health experts claim, a psychopath, something is not right with his mind and behavior.” - Norman Eisen

“You see a man that is literally, I think, literally losing his mind.  I don’t even mean that metaphorically.  I think he’s actually going insane.” - Adam Kinzinger

Donald Trump is now printing “Never Surrender” under the mugshot of himself surrendering to authorities at the Fulton County, Georgia, jail.  Not only that, he is selling T-shirts, mugs, beverage coolers, bumper stickers, and other merchandise with this image.

Psychiatrists who are honest will know that I have never diagnosed Donald Trump.  They will also know that I never broke “the Goldwater rule,” as it was originally conceived: to improve the community and to better public health. 

A “diagnosis” is for individual treatment, and we do not diagnose anyone who is not our patient, not just public figures.  Warning against “danger”, however, is for societal safety, and one of our primary obligations when there is any danger, not just of existential proportions to the human species.

By conflating “diagnosis” and “danger” to gaslight the public, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has committed one of the gravest acts of institutional betrayal in the Trump era.  Not only that, it wrongly misled that any comment—any comment displeasing to Dear Leader, that is—was “unethical”.  This had the effect of silencing conscientious professionals trying to educate and protect the public, and consigning us to the current situation in which we find ourselves today.

As a result, much of what we predicted would happen in the absence of proper intervention, we are observing now: the chaos and threats of violence, the failure of institutions, and the decline of democracy.  Indeed, the self-rule of democracy is unthinkable when so large a portion of the population is unable to think for itself.  Rational debate is no longer possible when so many people are irrational.  And self-preservation is precarious when much of our nation is driven to self-destruction.  This is the experience of living in pathology, in a “Death Spiral,” after “Trump Contagion” (a shared psychosis) has widely spread.

My own motivation for speaking publicly about Donald Trump was because of the dangers to society I and my colleagues were able to detect from the disturbing actions, statements, mannerisms, and sworn, firsthand testimonies of others who worked closely with the man, and the vast powers and public exposures he would have through the office of the American presidency.  We already had decades of observable behavior, speech, and stream-of-consciousness reports of his thoughts—not to mention his actual demonstrations of danger against the nation.

With the knowledge and insights we had about him, juxtaposed against our understanding of these kinds of patterns of individual and group behavior, we turned out to be extremely accurate in our probability predictions about how much danger he would pose to the nation and when, to the “t”, to this day.

Indeed, these are the reasons why I and my colleagues immediately concluded it was our professional as well as our civic responsibility to hold our first conference on the subject at Yale School of Medicine, shortly after Donald Trump became president, and to rush to publish our major book, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a few months later.  These are the reasons why many members of Congress invited us to meet with them, as they considered ways of invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment through an “other body,” as the Amendment provides, to avert the danger to our safety and welfare.  This is written about in Norman Eisen’s and Richard Painter’s chapter in the second edition of my book, which they entitled: “Congress Should Establish an Alternative Body to Assess the President.”

The second edition of The Dangerous Case was launched with a major interdisciplinary conference at the National Press Club, “The Dangerous State of the World and the Need for Fit Leadership,” where we in 2019 already covered much of what I have discussed recently in “The Abyss Ahead” and “The Abyss Ahead Part 2.”

Eisen, quoted above, was co-counsel for the House Judiciary Committee during the first impeachment of Donald Trump in 2020.  He served as White House special counsel under Barack Obama, and is board chair of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW).  Adam Kinzinger, also quoted above, is a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard and former U.S. Congressman from Illinois, who did not seek reelection after he publicly broke with Trump and served on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, along with fellow Republican Liz Cheney.

Both have lent their critical and admirable voices to the crisis of our nation, from their fields of expertise, but neither is a psychiatrist.  In view of the unprecedented dangers our country is facing, with much talk of impending violence including “civil war,” with major criminal trials ahead for Donald Trump, and with his continuing to hold a commanding lead to become the Republican nominee for president, more rigorous voices are needed.

Is Donald Trump not a well man?  If he is unwell enough for laypersons to recognize it, then this is precisely when we need experts more, not less!  If a person had cancer advanced enough that masses are bulging out of his abdomen, would we simply say, “It does not take an oncologist to see that he has something seriously the matter with him,” and walk away?  No!  Yet, this is essentially what we have done with Trump.  Is he actually going insane?  Mental health experts might have explained how he might have met the legal definition of “insanity” since the very beginning, and urged referral for an evaluation.  But we would have added, more importantly for the public was the question: is he dangerous?  This was, is, and has always been the central question we psychological professionals were obligated and eager to answer, for which the answer would have been a disqualifier: “Yes”.