The More Dangerous State of the World, the Need for Fit Leadership, and the Much More Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, Part 4

A Still Continued Summary of Expert Opinions by U.S. Security and Mental Health Professionals

Below is a still continued summary review of the critical themes from our major National Press Club conference offered to us by Dr. Sally Adnams Jones, author, psycho-educator, and therapist. Video headings are credited to Dr. Madeline Taylor, also author, psycho-educator, and therapist.

Eight mental health specialists, and a human rights expert, then followed the panel of security experts.  Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a lecturer in Psychiatry at Columbia University, professor at John Jay College, and founding member of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, emphasized the malignant normality to which everyone is exposed by Trumpists.  This made routine and ever-present the serial falsehoods of Trump, creating a “solipsistic reality," whereby evidence was ignored.  He only seeks what is needed by his sense of self.  This solipsism has increased, and is now repetitious, as he is a serial liar.  His physical and mental state has been further impaired by the attempted assassinations on him.  He is left with a sense of ‘having been wounded’ psychologically and physically, and this leads to wilder falsehoods and general deterioration, including “people eating pets.”  Factual truth cannot be altered.  This is different from ideological or religious beliefs, which can be altered.  Trump needs ever-new lies to cover over the previous lies.  But we can have confidence in the importance of our efforts to recognize this and speak to it. 

Dr. Judith Herman, senior lecturer in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and author of Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence, from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, made the point that whatever psychological or cognitive disorders a person has, power always amplifies them.  They predicted in their 2017 book that, given a position of power, Trump’s grandiosity could morph into delusions of grandeur; that his paranoid tendencies could become fully-fledged paranoid delusions; and that his impulsivity and failures of judgement could get worse when there were no limits or consequences set upon his erratic behavior.  And all that has unfortunately come true, and we are seeing not an amplification of psychopathology but also of dangerousness, due to cognitive decline, as evidenced by tangential ideas, faking an ability to stay on subject, failure to form complete sentences, misuse of words, reduced vocabulary, confusion of names and places, and even evidence of lack of orientation to time and place.  We cannot make a definitive diagnosis from a distance, but the evidence is alarming on the amplification of dangerous symptoms.  It is established in law that high ranking military officers who have access to the nuclear codes are required to have a full physical and mental health evaluation for fitness for duty, conducted by independent experts, and we should be requiring the same of anyone who proposes to be commander-in-chief.  She added that amongst the populations that demagogues appeal to, there is a sense of humiliation as a common thread, people who feel they are “losing out” to others, that their social group is being devalued, or that they are losing undeserved privileges.  This is the common appeal of authoritarian leaders.  They cannot really offer freedom or prosperity, so they offer people “restoration of a glorious past,” in which they will be “on top.”  This plays into the deeply-embedded “lost cause” mythology of the confederacy, especially in the red states, and with some of the white working class people who migrated up to Indiana and Ohio to work in the factories that have now closed.  We must reach out to Trump followers with an attitude of respect, rather than calling them a “basket of deplorables,” which allows their humiliated rage to find an expression in the cult of Trump. 

Dr. James Gilligan, clinical professor of psychiatry and adjunct professor of law at New York University and former chair of President Clinton’s National Campaign against Youth Violence, said there is a double standard between the mass media’s focus on signs of aging in President Biden, and not on Trump’s glaring disabilities to fashion complete sentences, arguments, or answers to questions.  Clearly Trump has many more symptoms of dementia than Biden ever had.  But whether he is demented or not, there is a more important question.  How are we to understand his habit to constantly tell falsehoods.  It is calculated that he has spoken at least 30,000 false statements.  There are two logical possibilities here: either 1) he believes these falsehoods or 2) he doesn’t.  If he believes them, he is by definition out of touch with reality, which is one definition of psychosis.  He is suffering from delusions of persecution by the election board, and by immigrants, including from Latin America, Muslims, and now the Jews.  He has delusions of grandeur, such as, “I’m a stable genius,” and other self-congratulations.  But if he does not believe in these falsehoods and keeps saying them, that means he is telling lies.  People who habitually tell lies reveal symptoms of antisocial personality disorder, which often coexists with narcissistic personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder, etc.  This is public evidence, as he has revealed more of himself publicly than do patients privately in clinics.  The most serious issue is his dangerousness.  People can be mentally ill without being dangerous or violent.  The most dangerous mass murderers in history are Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Mussolini, who probably never killed anyone themselves, But they have gone down in history as the worst mass murderers, because they incited their millions of followers to commit millions of murders for them.  His dangerousness is not what he can do as an individual, but his capacity to engage millions of followers to support him in whatever he wants to do.  The real danger is within the psychology of the Trump voters, with multiple causal mechanisms.  One of which is “folie à deux”—when one dominant member of a family has a crazy delusion and then a dependent, influenceable member agrees they are correct.  When separated, however, the dependent can drop the delusion.  An example of this occurred in Germany when Hitler had delusions of persecution, and wanted to exterminate the Jews.  Millions of people with no history of criminality believed it and acted accordingly.  Once Hitler lost the war and committed suicide, the Germans were no longer genocidal, but were once again sane and rational and built a more stable democracy even than our own.  This is a “collective psychosis” but is not an independent paranoid delusion.  If we can get Trump out of the picture, then supporters will regain their sanity.  How has Trump done this? He has softened them up.  The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or Stalinist, but the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, or truth and falsehood, no longer exists.  If you lose distinctions between reality and falsehood, you can believe anything.  It is now up to the voters to separate the dominant psychotic family member Trump from the dependent ones.  If they reelect him, you can only tremble for the whole world.  He added that Trump also appeals to a sense of humiliation with his rhetoric.  For example, Trump said “the Democrats have made America the laughingstock of the world.”  He was echoing the rhetoric of Hitler that led the people to vote for him under the shame of the Peace Treaty of Versailles.  Trump has said this repeatedly, and then presents himself as the one to restore pride and undo the shame and humiliation.  He repeats that “the American people have suffered.”  It is understandable, given who the Trump voters are: usually white, male, high school- or less-educated; and those who feel they have lost relative status because of the increase in democratization that has occurred in America, with civil rights legislation.  Blacks’ segregation was outlawed, disenfranchisement was outlawed, and women’s status has increased with the women’s movement.  A lot of white males feel they have lost relative superiority and status, and Trump comes along and says, “I will restore it.  I will make America great again, like it was in the past,” before civil rights laws and the changes that undid misogyny, sexism, homophobia, and so forth.  If we are to understand the psychology involved, we need to understand this and recognize his supporters as intelligent, not inherently psychopathic, but just followers of a psychopath.  We need to be understanding, generous, and respectful. 

(To be continued.)

A notable article, mentioning a class by Dr. Bandy Lee, is here. The conference summary video is here.  The videos of speeches from the conference are here. The book that was released with our major conference is here.  The conference website will have regular updates.  Please continue to support our getting out our critical message, for, as our conference revealed, we may not survive another dangerously unfit presidency in this very dangerous world!