Trump Contagion, Past and Future

Preparations to Use the Insurrection Act and the National Guard

Since publishing in 2017 The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President and becoming the number one topic of national conversation, I was invited to meet with over fifty Congress members, who were seriously considering ways of invoking the Twenty-Fifth Amendment in order to remove a mentally unable president.  They urged me to continue educating the public medically, as only then, they told me, would they be able to act politically.  Less than two years ago, I learned for the first time that even the White House chief of staff, Four-Star General John Kelly, had secretly bought my book and was using it as a kind of “owner’s manual” on how to control and constrain the dangerous new president.  Kelly even revealed how he applied the principles outlined in the book to restrain Donald Trump from using nuclear weapons, a dramatic shift that we indeed detected from the outside as the result of some kind of intervention.  Yet, after all these revelations, Trump Contagion continues to spread without effective mitigation—in large part because of the sidelining of mental health experts during a mental health pandemic.

After all these years, the public is still learning for the first time even more critical insider details of just how close our country came to an unconstitutional coup, designed to keep Donald Trump in the White House.  After losing the election, Trump was manipulating persons and events in multiple ways, so as to make it possible to invoke the Insurrection Act, which he then intended to claim would authorize him to use the military legally to put down any and all protests against his claim that he, not Joe Biden, actually won the election.  Simply said, we almost lost our democracy completely.  

“Well, Pat, that’s what the Insurrection Act is for.”

In the White House, as Donald Trump obsessively and incessantly maneuvered to keep himself in power, that quote is what Jeffrey Clark—the Justice Department official Trump planned to name attorney general—said when he was warned by a long-time friend, Deputy White House Counsel Pat Philbin, that what Trump was planning to do leading up to January 6, 2021, would result in riots in every major American city.   

Only in March this year, when Philbin had to testify under oath in a legal proceeding about the disbarment of Clark, did we learn this critical detail of how close we were to Donald Trump’s using the Justice Department to invoke the Insurrection Act.  Trump's plan was to invoke that rarely used legislation, going back to the founding of this country, to legalize his presidential use of the National Guard and the military to keep himself in power.  Politico called this revelation: “A remarkable new account more than three years after a mob of pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol in his name.”  The first-hand details are new, but the degree of treachery and deceit we have speculated on for some time, even though, I must point out, the Department of Justice and the Biden Administration have never actually charged Trump, as they should have done, with trying to foment an insurrection so as to use the Insurrection Act.

All this said, now more than three years after that situation, and more than seven years since our bestselling public-service book proceeded from our ethics conference at the Yale School of Medicine, shortly after Donald Trump became president, we are in even greater dangers from the same Trump Contagion he has galvanized and mesmerized to do his bidding.  In fact, he and his contagion are not the same—they are far worse and far more dangerous now, just as mental health experts since the very beginning predicted they would become, if not properly contained.  Decades of clinical practice and a century and a half of professional knowledge prompted us to hold that conference and to urge proper understanding and intervention for the protection of the public.   

Donald Trump is not the most severe case of dangerous personality pathology that I and many of my colleagues have encountered in our careers; indeed, in my work specializing in treating violent offenders, he is among the most mundane.  But he is by far, sui generis, the most dangerous personality who has achieved and maintained the most powerful position in America, precisely because our society, including the psychiatric establishment, has allowed and facilitated his avoidance of being properly treated and contained, according to the existing norms and standards of medicine and law, including mental health law.  By placing an individual above natural law, as untouchable by mental health as he has been by criminal accountability, we have allowed his pathology to balloon in grotesque ways to infect the rest of American society.  What America needs to know is that the ultimate goal of pathology is destruction and death, and there will be no limit until this end is achieved.  Trying to ride the wave and profit off of his seeming political “effectiveness”, or simply going along in order to align oneself with presidential authority and power, will only feed the drive toward our common destruction.

Never before has such a person, who has been electorally removed from power but nevertheless clings to the claim that he has actually won the election, a person who has been charged with multiple felony crimes as well as is mired in major civil litigations, a person who has wreaked greater havoc on the nation than any other president in history when he caused more than a million American deaths and tried to overturn democracy, been poised to return to the White House!  All this is the result of our repeated warnings against Donald Trump’s dangerous psychology and mental impairments not being heeded and acted upon. I explain the underlying psychological dynamics of our time in my new book, The Psychology of Trump Contagion: An Existential Threat to American Democracy and All Humankind, which is currently available by paid subscription.  If we are to find effective solutions in the current emergency, we must first have an in-depth understanding of the problem, so that we do not end up applying bandages where major surgery is necessary.  Also, there are more solutions available to us than we know—education is what allows us to gain knowledge of possibilities and of our own power.