Trump Contagion: What is It? What are the Symptoms?

Why Can’t It be Reduced to a Political Phenomenon?

“And on June 14, 1946, God looked down on his plan Paradise, and said: ‘I need a caretaker.’  So God gave us Trump.  God said: ‘I need somebody willing to get up before dawn.  Fix this country.  Work all day.  Fight the Marxists.  Eat supper.  Then go to the Oval Office and stay past midnight.  And a meeting of the heads of state.’  So God made Trump.”

In any other era, the above statements of a Trump rally video would have evoked for most people a psychiatric patient warranting hospitalization for claiming to hear the voice of God that is telling him he is the “chosen” one.  In contemporary America, the subject of the video is securing a landslide win in the Iowa caucuses, leading by double digits into the New Hampshire Republican primaries, and superseding all other candidates in his bid for the U.S. presidency.

I have been using the term, “Trump Contagion,” for quite some time.  I have been writing about what it is, why it is important to understand it, and how it is different from politics as usual.  And, because of the lack of proper intervention and mitigation, it will dangerously persist, whether or not Donald Trump is in the White House, at Mar-a-Lago, or in prison a year from now.

When I wrote the introduction to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President, in 2017, I emphasized that our warnings were purely for the protection of public health.  We warned that the psychological dangers an unfit man was bringing to an influential office would progress into becoming social, cultural, geopolitical, and civic dangers if not contained.  We were warning against Trump Contagion, which has now come to pass.

The foremost field that could have assessed, explained, and prevented the “Death Spiral” we have entered was mental health.  However, instead of leading the way in a time of crisis, psychiatry became emblematic of what happens with institutional corruption: rather than fulfill its function, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) has abused its authority to do great harm.  This is what happened when the APA “rubber stamped” Donald Trump’s presidency, when it shut down all criticism by mental health experts through disinformation and defamation.  I suspected political and financial motivations at the time, and indeed, in addition to the windfalls in federal funds the APA has received, the recent scandal that contributors to the APA’s diagnostic manual, the “Bible” of psychiatry, got 14 million dollars from industry—primarily the pharmaceutical industry—settles the matter.

In the context of this failure of the psychiatric establishment to keep with its own primary ethical principle—stated clearly in the Preamble of the APA’s own ethics code as our “responsibility to patients … as well as society”—to mislead that psychiatrists did not have a societal responsibility, has placed the public in a position of having to fend for itself.  Like “the blind leading the blind,” an ailing populace must reinvent the wheel in the midst of ailment, handicapped further from the fact that mental infirmity is measured by the degree to which the infirm deny the infirmity.

Here are just a few ways in which “Trump Contagion” has spread, at the onset of what I have referred to as a “mental health pandemic”:

• Weakened nation’s mental health: our collective state of mental health is diminished when Donald Trump’s impairments are normalized and his severe symptoms—such as delusions, grandiosity, paranoia, and violence-proneness—are allowed to spread.

• Subverted institutions: democracy unravels when Donald Trump’s emotional need to subvert reality—to make his insanity “sane” and his criminality “innocent”—results in a widespread undermining, delegitimizing, and discrediting of core institutions.

• Rise of mini-Trumps: imitators arise when Donald Trump’s incompetence, criminality, and dangerousness in political office go unaccounted for, such that similarly incompetent, criminal, and dangerous individuals seek power at all levels of government and in the military.

• Spread of dictatorships: dictatorship is authorized when Donald Trump’s emotional affinity for brutal authoritarians around the world breaks political taboos and sets new norms for how anyone can autocratically take over through the use of lies, threats, and violence.

• Escalating violence: security and civilization unravel when Donald Trump’s desire to undermine the Rule of Law so that he could exonerate himself and escape accountability encourages escalations in petty theft, carjackings, mob attacks on retail stores, and corporate crimes.

• Spiraling geopolitical instability: the World Order is jeopardized when Donald Trump’s internal chaos and disorder is externalized, in part by emboldening those with similar belligerence as he, such as Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Xi Jinping, while breaching traditional alliances.

• Increasing Doomsday dangers: humanity’s continued survival is imperiled when Donald Trump’s inner drive for destruction is translated into an outer “Death Spiral” that has exacerbated climate destruction, nuclear endangerment, international conflicts, and unsustainable levels of structural violence.

There are many other ways in which Trump Contagion has manifested, including in the curtailment of basic free speech—in newsrooms, at universities, in the courtroom, and inside Congress—resulting from Donald Trump’s need to detach from reality.  As a consequence, those of similar psychology, such as Alan Dershowitz—one of the principal spreaders of Trump Contagion—are wielding fear of career and social retribution as weapons against professors, students, journalists, and politicians who remind them of unwanted realities.  “Dershowitzism is the new McCarthyism.”

Those who believed that the egregiousness of Donald Trump’s errors—from his causing more than a million preventable American deaths, to attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election, to jeopardizing national security by mishandling classified documents, to bringing the human race much closer to extinction through his reckless nuclear and climate policies—would diminish his popularity, are in for a great surprise as he is on track to becoming the Republican presidential nominee.  This, in fact, is a natural consequence of Trump Contagion.  Since his “popularity” spreads via suppression of reality, reason, evidence, and civil discourse are replaced with threats and intimidation against anyone who holds a contradictory view.  Historians have recorded this phenomenon, political scientists have observed it in horror, and politicians have fallen in line, but the main professionals who have assessed and intervened with it in their daily practice—albeit at smaller scale—have been sidelined in a time of unprecedented need.  It is therefore incumbent on the American public to understand what is really occurring, how dangerous it is, and to protect itself against a Pied Piper whose irresistible call is to inevitable demise.