This Unwell President

This Unwell President

I am not a mental health professional. I am neither a psychologist nor a psychiatrist. I make no claim to being able to make a professional diagnosis of anyone’s mental health, not even Donald Trump’s. Yet one need not have had professional training in mental health issues to notice a mental health deficiency when a person’s words and actions are just plain abnormal. When a person speaks and behaves in obviously abnormal ways any intelligent, observant person can draw some well-founded conclusions about that person’s mental health. Sadly, President Donald J. Trump’s words and behavior are so obviously and extremely abnormal that it is apparent to me and to any observant, reasonably healthy and informed person that he is psychologically unwell. I want here to consider some of the ways in which he appears to me to be psychologically unwell. Those ways include at least the following:

He lies with almost every public word he speaks. He does not operate within the categories true and false. He operates (or at least appears to operate) within the categories “I think it’s beneficial to me” and “I think it’s not beneficial to me.” Whether what he says is true or false is irrelevant to him; and what psychologically healthy people perceive as true is so often not beneficial to him that he utters falsehood after falsehood. It matters not to him that what he says is untrue. It matters not to him that one of his falsehoods can easily be shown to be false or that one of them has already been shown to be false. All that matters to him is that he believes a statement to be beneficial to him.

His disregard for truth and falsehood is one way in which Trump fails to deal constructively with reality. Another way in which he will not deal with reality is the way so many of his statements against people and facts he doesn’t like address (and attack) the person who has said something he doesn’t like rather than addressing the truth or falsity of what the person has said. That is, he constantly engages in ad hominem attacks rather than rather than addressing what a person has actually said. The problem is not only that ad hominem attacks are a classical logical and rhetorical errors. A deeper problem is that his constant use of them suggests that he is incapable of actually dealing with reality at all. At the very least it suggests that he is unwilling to deal with reality. There are many reasons why a person may be unable or unwilling to deal with reality. She may be afraid of actual reality. Or perhaps his reality actually is very different from other people’s reality as is the case with people suffering from dementia. Or perhaps a person avoids reality by resorting to ad hominem attacks simply because he either doesn’t understand their logical and rhetorical fallacy or because he thinks they will be more convincing to people he wants to convince than dealing with reality would be. Donald Trump may well be avoiding reality because reality as other people perceive it is often so harmful to him. Perhaps he thinks (sadly probably correctly) that his badly informed or misinformed but fanatical supporters will find ad hominem attacks more convincing than actually addressing the facts would be. Moreover, Trump’s ad hominem attacks are often so vicious and so factually ungrounded that they seem more to be lashing out from a place of deep psychological insecurity than anything else. In any event his refusal to address actual reality certainly seems abnormal to me and perhaps to a lot of other people as well.

Beyond that, Trump is a narcissist. By that I mean that he cares only about himself. He may also be a sociopath or have borderline personality disorder. By that I mean that he seems utterly incapable of caring about anyone but himself. Of course it takes a huge ego for anyone to think they could be president of the United States. It may be the most difficult and the most sensitive job in the world. But having a big ego or an overabundance of self-confidence doesn’t have to mean that a person cares only for him or herself. Yet in the case of Donald Trump that seems to be precisely what it means. He repeatedly uses the power and prestige of his office for his own personal and political aggrandizement. To him being president is more about him than it is about the country of which he is chief executive.

Finally let me return to a point that I at least suggested above in my comments about his constant ad hominem attacks on his critics. Donald Trump simply comes across as psychologically unstable. He lashes out apparently without having considered the consequences of what he says and does. He operates from emotion not from considered contemplation of the matters before him. He sees no need actually to be informed about the matters he addresses. He seems to become uncontrollably angry at times. He seems incapable of considering that people who disagree with him or who criticize him are simply acting in good faith because they have a different view of a matter than he does. Our political system depends on a give and take between different political, economic, and social perspectives. Donald Trump seems incapable of working within that system. It’s not always easy for me to do either, but I at least understand that our political processes involve disagreements between people of good faith. Trump can’t see that anyone who opposes him is acting in good faith. Criticism threatens him, so he goes into emotional outbursts that can hardly be the products of a well-developed, healthy psyche.

All of these points along with several more that could perhaps be raised establish that President Donald Trump is not psychologically well. He is so psychologically unwell that Vice President Pence and the Cabinet would be well justified in removing him from office under Amendment 25 to the US Constitution. They won’t do that of course. Trump put them in the positions they hold. The benefit from his presidency and aren’t about to give those benefits up. Still, Donald Trump is psychologically unfit to be president.

We have two ways of getting rid of him, impeachment or the election of someone else to the presidency next year. Impeachment is preferable because it could happen more quickly and because it would be a statement by Congress that Trumpism is not our norm. It could be a reassertion of traditional American political values. It could be a solid defense of the Constitution that Trump has sworn to protect and defend but which he violates daily. Either way, the important thing is that we be rid of him absolutely as soon as possible. The future of our nation and of the world demands no less.