The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Threat to American Democracy and All Humankind, Chapter Two

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Chapter Two

‘The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump’ in 2017

When Donald Trump came onto the national scene, I was at the height of my career.  After finishing my studies at Yale and Harvard, I was offered a professorship at the latter in global health and social medicine, but Larry Summers was still there, and a university’s investments in companies such as Halliburton disillusioned me.  I therefore returned to Yale, where grateful alumni donations gave it the largest endowment in the country, without such investments.  There was no global health program, but I would become one of the few medical faculty who helped erect it from scratch (now, it is one of the best known in the country).  My Yale College course, “Causes and Cures of Violence,” was the most popular in the program and drew students from all over the country, so that I had seventy students lining up in the hallways for a seminar capped at twenty.  I joined the forensic psychiatry division but was invited to teach courses in five different schools, including multiple prestigious lectureships, which I was obliged to share with some of the most senior faculty on campus.