Trump Contagion 2024
Identifying the Problem
2024—this may well be a decisive year, not only for our country but for the world.
That is why I started off the week, with “Doomsday Clock 2024,” the precursor to this Newsletter that I am writing today. Also, I began the new year with an extensive interview that has had almost a half million views in five days. The first interview I did on the same program exceeded a million views.
This gives hope, because the more we understand the problem, the better able we will be to solve it. This is why we must not turn away from our dangerously chaotic and multi-theater, maybe World War-pregnant, international situation. A few days after my Doomsday Clock essay, the World Economic Forum, to convene in Davos this coming week, issued a dire “Global Risk Report,” warning that our world faces growing and imminent threats of global catastrophes. Indeed, 30 percent of the elite surveyed forecast that a world catastrophic event will take place in the next two years, 70 percent in the ten-year period ahead. That is without yet knowing if Donald Trump would be U.S. president again; any dangerous global situation would become exponentially more dangerous, as has happened with the Covid pandemic, which may have been stopped at the epidemic stage under a rational president, and certainly a vast majority of 1.2 million Americans would not have needed to die. While the Davos group highlighted climate breakdown, disinformation dangers, and economic perils, Nuclear Doomsday and the escalations of so-far regional wars already underway in Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific were conveniently de-emphasized.
As I wrote with respect to both our world and our country last week: We cannot solve a problem unless we confront it. Avoiding naming a problem does not make it go away but causes it to grow.
So, first it is necessary to identify “the problem.” If we can do that properly, candidly, and honestly, then—believe it or not—we will have solved most of it! Many recognize that we are facing an unprecedented, maybe catastrophic situation here in our own endangered country. But do we recognize what is happening? Can we identify what is taking place here in the United States that is making our own situation so dangerous, as 2024 gets underway?
As a medical professional, I think in terms of assessment, treatment, and future course, and this is currently urgently necessary for our nation. This is because our nation is not in a state of full health, so that it can pursue its actual goals and desires. And, of course, as a mental health professional, I can only say that the degree of compromise to our collective mental health can be gauged by the degree to which the nation avoids psychiatrists, psychologists, and all other experts who could really get to the root of its problems and offer solutions. This is why, with individual patients, the prognosis is determined not by the severity of symptoms but by the presence of insight (awareness of the illness).
Identifying the Problem
Let me first turn toward what I believe is the overall problem and why so many Americans, especially those with authority in Washington, are avoiding it or misunderstanding it.
I and my colleagues have strenuously tried to warn against the underlying problem, ever since Donald Trump was unexpectedly elected president. Even though it was occurring in the political realm, we tried to explain that what we were calling attention to was something more basic—that is, mental fitness, without which even politics could not operate. Indeed, the dangerousness that would result from mental unfitness placed the nation in existential peril, in which case it was a public health emergency. We identified the problem right away and predicted what would happen if there were not proper and immediate intervention.
Now, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) aggressively interjected, not because we were “unethical”, as it tried to advance in its disinformation campaign, but precisely because we were correct and effective. Our New York Times bestseller catapulted us to becoming the number one topic of national conversation within three months, and we had more than fifty members of the U.S. Congress consulting with us. Under an administration that rewarded scientific organizations in direct proportion to their willingness to defy science, the APA after silencing us received windfalls in federal funds and moved its headquarters to the swankiest neighborhood in DC, where it would be shoulder-to-shoulder with Washington lobbyists. The recent scandal that contributors to the APA’s diagnostic manual, the “Bible” of psychiatry, got 14 million dollars from industry is a case in point. And I was terminated from my seventeen-year professorship at Yale, precisely because industry and other donors needed to shut down an inconvenient truth.
However, as noted, silencing does not make the problem go away. Now, seven years later, the untreated symptoms have only become more virulent and more difficult to treat. That is why I have been writing about two key concepts that need to be understood and undone: “Trump Contagion” and “Death Spiral.”
In my next Newsletter, I will outline: “Why the Problem Has Spread So Fast,” and “How the Problem Can be Contained Now.”
In a book I published a few months before the 2020 election, Profile of a Nation: Trump’s Mind America’s Soul, I predicted that, regardless of the outcome of the election, Donald Trump would be incapable of accepting his loss and would use any and every means to stay in power, predicting in fact the violent insurrection that was to come. An Independent article commented in 2022 regarding our 2017 New York Times bestseller, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: “Almost all of their predictions about Trump’s behaviour and more widespread discord came true.” And, of course, Mother Jones the same year titled a major article: “The Psychiatrist who Warned Us that Donald Trump would Unleash Violence was Absolutely Right.” Obviously, we did not predict correctly because we are fortune tellers. We did so because expertise matters, and it is the kind that matters now.
Thank you Dr Lee. One of the things you taught us is that a feature of malignant narcissism is destructiveness. We've seen that play out throughout his entire life - he destroys everything he touches: today's example is his own company, but ranges from a professional football team, to his bankrupt casinos, to golf courses, to various federal agencies, to sadly, as you referenced, the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans who died from Covid. It was my hope that he would self-destruct and take the Republican Party with him. Regrettably, that has not happened. His cult and command are stronger than ever. It remains to be seen whether he will self destruct first or will it be democracy and us who will fall victim to his madness. We know the diagnosis. The treatment that you've suggested in the past is to "remove" him from public and political life, and that the "shared psychosis" will be "cured". I don't think that we can rely on the courts and our legal system to remove him, though that's the hope. I don't think we can rely on the media to remove him. As a fellow physician, I am anxious to hear what your treatment plan is.
Thank you again. I continue to reference your work with the World Mental Health Coalition when I comment to pertinent articles in the New York Times and HuffPost, with a link to the worldmhc.org website. I get "recommends" and "thumbs-up" to those comments from other commenters, so I hope in some way that it gets the word out.