Trump Contagion Leading to Civil War

Spread Can Have No Limit without Containment

In the latest Rasmussen Reports, a national survey found that 41 percent of likely U.S. voters believe that it is probable the United States will experience a Second Civil War in the next five years, including 16 percent who consider such a scenario very likely.  Forty-nine percent do not think another civil war is likely in the next five years.  These are frightening indicators, since contrary to most people’s notions, violence does not usually begin with an actual outside threat but the perception of threat, or paranoia.  And this paranoia, mistrust, division, and breakdown of society are all symptoms that emanated from the former president’s impaired mind.

In the absence of mental health knowledge, with every Donald Trump-created crisis and every Trump anomaly, the media have generated endless discussion but have advanced minimal understanding and much less solutions.  The problem is that, when there is a critical situation as a mental health pandemic, which I have been calling, “Trump Contagion,” exposure without protection simply contributes to the spread.  The current condition has now reached a point where Trump has been calling for a civil war—an outpicturing of his internal agitation—and the nation is being conditioned right into it.

Far from being afraid or indifferent, thousands of conscientious and concerned mental health experts have been eager to speak about Donald Trump and his followers but are blacked out from the media.  This has been devastating to the public’s safety and wellbeing, during what is actually a national mental health crisis (this has been well-illustrated in the article, “Muzzled by Psychiatry in a Time of Crisis”).  The powers that be have instead helped entrain the public to submit to psychological abuse and to become ammunition for psychological warfare.

When the 2017 book I edited, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, catapulted us to the number one topic of national conversation and had more than fifty U.S. Congress members consulting with us, “self-aggrandizing” psychiatrist (the appellation he projected against us) Jeffrey Lieberman, now disgraced and removed from his chair at Columbia, crusaded against us. He stated that Trump was “just a jerk.”  Others like Allen Frances, who agreed with our assessment of Trump’s dangers but simply could not refrain from denigrating us. He insisted that Trump “does not have narcissistic personality disorder”—which is an actual example of unethically diagnosing.

These psychiatrists up front in the media belied the fact that there was an unequivocal medical consensus among all responsible psychiatrists and mental health professionals—including “living legends” of the field—that Trump was a danger to our country because of severe mental impairments.  The fact is, there is a lot that mental health expertise can inform based on probability, through objective observation of patterns of behavior and collateral reports, numerous under sworn testimony, not to mention direct surveillance of Trump’s effects on his followers and the nation.  The trope that every psychiatrist needs to do a personal interview before one can say anything about him is easily disprovable as disingenuous.  It is akin to saying that no legal expert can speak about any aspect of his legal cases without personally representing him and seeing his entire file first, before speaking about him only under his permission.  What understanding would we have, then, of his four indictments and ninety-one criminal charges?

We were able to predict, from Donald Trump’s mental impairments and the influence bestowed him alone, the severity and timeline of dangers spreading.  We can now see the results from the actual fighting that is erupting on campuses, with further agitation from outsiders—with people like Alan Dershowitz provoking it to the maximum—and an inability to see others’ point of view that seems a precursor to some kind of “civil war.”

Additionally, the psychological stage is being set for Trump to use military force to take control and put down any opposition.  Indeed, just a couple weeks ago the Senate minority leader along with twenty-five of his Republican colleagues have urged, demanded in fact, that federal troops be used to take control of major American universities to prevent student and faculty protests.  Trump Contagion has already spread throughout our society, greatly weakening our democratic institutions, our system of “checks and balances,” and the considerable restraints on presidential use of military force at home, if not abroad.

But now the stage is set.  Even if Donald Trump loses the election, now less than six months away, he will never accept it, will claim he has won or would have won, if not for all the “election interference.”   In that case, civil war could in fact result, with the Democratic president having to turn to military force and martial law.  If Trump wins, he has already broadcast the kinds of retribution he would like to pursue, and it is a given that he will try to invoke “the insurrection act” and declare martial law, by saying that he is using the military to safeguard against crime and enforce law and order....  And in that case, he will be able to refer to the National Guard having deployed to New York City and to the many senators demanding federal troops to take over our universities.

What is currently extremely significant is that, as Donald Trump is being tied up in criminal court, we observe a visible shift in what I have been calling, “Trump Contagion.”  For example, House Speaker Mike Johnson broke with him for the first time, and his followers have been more subdued.  This is the kind of dramatic shift seen in prison and state hospital settings, when a severely symptomatic “leader” is removed from exposure, such as when they are captured and taken from a street gang, separated from a prison block, or hospitalized and removed from a family: the followers who had taken on the mentally-compromised leader’s symptoms return to their previous states of function.  We saw this also with the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.  While he was hiding in a bunker, his influence diminished, and he even said he may need to concede if he did not win the election.  We saw it again when he was removed from all social media following the January 6, 2021, insurrection, when Congress members denounced him and many of his followers felt disillusioned.  This lasted only a short while, as he was “re-platformed.”  Herein lies the key to the current mental health pandemic.  I explain these dynamics in detail in my new book, The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Threat to American Democracy and All Humankind, which is currently being made available by paid subscription.  The first half will be a description of the problem (as understanding the problem is a prerequisite to a solution), and the second half will be an outline of the solution (since solutions are a natural consequence of understanding).