Well, at least they're taking a stand on paper, in a book. We've got the
University at Berkley proudly giving a platform to one Trump toady after
another in the name of free speech in the academy, The New York Times giving a
permanent column to a right wing conservative climate denier, everyone waiting
for Muller to find the truth about Trump and Russia when he is the person who
hid and whitewashed CIA torture, Trump permanently appointing one right wing
judge after another, our EPA and Education Department being completely
dismantled, the Muslim ban about to be completely approved by the Supreme
Court, Trump lowering the number of immigrants allowed into the US to a figure
below that of 30 or 40 years ago, and a majority of people on the left thinking
that our big problem is Russia.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Sunday, September 17, 2017 11:29 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Bill Moyers: Renowned Psychiatrist Warns That
Trump Is a Danger to Us All
You've got to be kidding me! It took "the work of 27 psychiatrists,
psychologists and mental health experts to assess President Trump’s mental
health"?
So when are they planning to seek an audience with the Emperor and share their
findings with him?
Here's a news flash to those 27 dedicated Shrinks: We already knew the mental
status of Donald Trump! What we need to have, is a plan for what we can do
about it. And reading Hillary Clinton's book is not part of the answer.
Carl Jarvis
On 9/16/17, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Alternet
Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org) Home > Bill Moyers:
Renowned Psychiatrist Warns That Trump Is a Danger to Us All
Bill Moyers: Renowned Psychiatrist Warns That Trump Is a Danger to Us
All
By Bill Moyers [1] / BillMoyers.com [2]
September 15, 2017, 2:25 PM GMT
There will not be a book published this fall more urgent, important or
controversial than The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump [3], the work of
27 psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health experts to assess
President Trump’s mental health. They came together last March at a
conference at Yale University to wrestle with two questions. The
first, “What’s wrong with him?” The second was directed to their own
code of ethics: “Does professional responsibility include a duty to
warn” if they conclude the president to be dangerously unfit?
As mental health professionals, these men and women respect the
long-standing “Goldwater rule” which inhibits them from diagnosing
public figures whom they have not personally examined. At the same
time, as explained by Dr. Bandy X Lee, who teaches law and psychiatry
at Yale School of Medicine, the rule does not have a countervailing
rule that directs what to do when the risk of harm from remaining
silent outweighs the damage that could result from speaking about a
public figure — “which in this case, could even be the greatest
possible harm.” It is an old and difficult moral issue that requires a
great exertion of conscience. Their decision: “We respect the rule, we
deem it subordinate to the single most important principle that guides
our professional conduct: that we hold our responsibility to human life and
well-being as paramount.”
The foreword is by one of America’s leading psychohistorians, Robert
Jay Lifton. He is renowned for his studies of people under stress, in
books such as Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima [4] (1967), Home
from the War:
Vietnam Veterans — Neither Victims nor Executioners [5] (1973) and The
Nazi
Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide [6] (1986).
The Nazi Doctors was the first in-depth study of how medical
professionals rationalized their participation in the Holocaust, from
the early stages of the Hitler’s euthanasia project to extermination
camps.
The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump [3] will be published October 3 by St.
Martin’s Press.
Here is my interview with Robert Jay Lifton.
Bill Moyers: This book is a withering exploration of Donald Trump’s
mental state [3]. Aren’t you and the 26 other mental health experts
who contribute to it in effect violating the Goldwater Rule? Section
7.3 of the American Psychiatrist Association’s code of ethics flatly
says: “It is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional
opinion [on a public figure] unless he or she has conducted an
examination and has been granted proper authorization.” Are you putting your
profession’s reputation at risk?
Robert Jay Lifton: I don’t think so. I think the Goldwater Rule is a
little ambiguous. We adhere to that portion of the Goldwater Rule that
says we don’t see ourselves as making a definitive diagnosis in a
formal way and we don’t believe that should be done, except by
hands-on interviewing and studying of a person. But we take issue with
the idea that therefore we can say nothing about Trump or any other
public figure. We have a perfect right to offer our opinion, and that’s where
“duty to warn” comes in.
Moyers: Duty to warn?
Lifton: We have a duty to warn on an individual basis if we are
treating someone who may be dangerous to herself or to others — a duty
to warn people who are in danger from that person. We feel it’s our
duty to warn the country about the danger of this president. If we
think we have learned something about Donald Trump and his psychology
that is dangerous to the country, yes, we have an obligation to say
so. That’s why Judith Herman and I wrote our letter to The New York
Times [7]. We argue that Trump’s difficult relationship to reality and
his inability to respond in an evenhanded way to a crisis renders him
unfit to be president, and we asked our elected representative to take
steps to remove him from the presidency.
Moyers: Yet some people argue that our political system sets no
intellectual or cognitive standards for being president, and
therefore, the ordinary norms of your practice as a psychiatrist
should stop at the door to the Oval Office.
Lifton: Well, there are people who believe that there should be a
standard psychiatric examination for every presidential candidate and
for every president. But these are difficult issues because they can’t
ever be entirely psychiatric. They’re inevitably political as well. I
personally believe that ultimately ridding the country of a dangerous
president or one who’s unfit is ultimately a political matter, but
that psychological professionals can contribute in valuable ways to that
decision.
Moyers: Do you recall that there was a comprehensive study of all 37
presidents up to 1974? Half of them reportedly had a diagnosable
mental illness, including depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder.
It’s not normal people who always make it to the White House.
Lifton: Yes, that’s amazing, and I’m sure it’s more or less true. So
people with what we call mental illness can indeed serve well, and
people who have no discernible mental illness — and that may be true
of Trump — may not be able to serve, may be quite unfit. So it isn’t
always the question of a psychiatric diagnosis. It’s really a question
of what psychological and other traits render one unfit or dangerous.
Moyers: You write in the foreword of the book: “Because Trump is
president and operates within the broad contours and interactions of
the presidency, there is a tendency to view what he does as simply
part of our democratic process, that is, as politically and even ethically
normal.”
Lifton: Yes. And that’s what I call malignant normality. What we put
forward as self-evident and normal may be deeply dangerous and
destructive. I came to that idea in my work on the psychology of Nazi
doctors — and I’m not equating anybody with Nazi doctors, but it’s the
principle that prevails — and also with American psychologists who
became architects of CIA torture during the Iraq War era. These are
forms of malignant normality. For example, Donald Trump lies
repeatedly. We may come to see a president as liar as normal. He also
makes bombastic statements about nuclear weapons, for instance, which
can then be seen as somehow normal. In other words, his behavior as
president, with all those who defend his behavior in the
administration, becomes a norm. We have to contest it, because it is
malignant normality. For the contributors to this book, this means
striving to be witnessing professionals, confronting the malignancy
and making it known.
Moyers: Witnessing professionals? Where did this notion come from?
Lifton: I first came to it in terms of psychiatrists assigned to
Vietnam, way back then. If a soldier became anxious and enraged about
the immorality of the Vietnam War, he might be sent to a psychiatrist
who would be expected to help him be strong enough to return to
committing atrocities. So there was something wrong in what
professionals were doing, and some of us had to try to expose this as
the wrong and manipulative use of our profession. We had to see
ourselves as witnessing professionals. And then of course, with the
Nazi doctors I studied for another book — doctors assigned, say, to
Auschwitz — they were expected to do selections of Jews for the gas
chamber.
That was what was expected of them and what for the most part they did
— sometimes with some apprehension, but they did it. So that’s another
malignant normality. Professionals were reduced to being automatic
servants of the existing regime as opposed to people with special
knowledge balanced by a moral baseline as well as the scientific
information to make judgments.
Moyers: And that should apply to journalists, lawyers, doctors —
Lifton: Absolutely. One bears witness by taking in the situation — in
this case, its malignant nature — and then telling one’s story about
it, in this case with the help of professional knowledge, so that we
add perspective on what’s wrong, rather than being servants of the
powers responsible for the malignant normality. We must be people with
a conscience in a very fundamental way.
Moyers: And this is what troubled you and many of your colleagues
about the psychologists who helped implement the US policy of torture after
9/11.
Lifton: Absolutely. And I call that a scandal within a scandal,
because yes, it was indeed professionals who became architects of
torture, and their professional society, the American Psychological
Association, which encouraged and protected them until finally protest
from within that society by other members forced a change. So that was
a dreadful moment in the history of psychology and in the history of
professionals in this country.
Moyers: Some of the descriptions used to describe Trump — narcissistic
personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, paranoid
personality disorder, delusional disorder, malignant narcissist — even
some have suggested early forms of dementia — are difficult for lay people to
grasp.
Some experts say that it’s not one thing that’s wrong with him — there
are a lot of things wrong with him and together they add up to what
one of your colleagues calls “a scary witches brew, a toxic stew.”
Lifton: I think that’s very accurate. I agree that there’s an
all-enveloping destructiveness in his character and in his
psychological tendencies. But I’ve focused on what professionally I
call solipsistic reality. Solipsistic reality means that the only
reality he’s capable of embracing has to do with his own self and the
perception by and protection of his own self. And for a president to
be so bound in this isolated solipsistic reality could not be more
dangerous for the country and for the world. In that sense, he does
what psychotics do. Psychotics engage in, or frequently engage in a
view of reality based only on the self. He’s not psychotic, but I
think ultimately this solipsistic reality will be the source of his
removal from the presidency.
Moyers: What’s your take on how he makes increasingly bizarre
statements that are contradicted by irrefutable evidence to the
contrary, and yet he just keeps on making them? I know some people in
your field call this a delusional disorder, a profound loss of contact with
external reality.
Lifton: He doesn’t have clear contact with reality, though I’m not
sure it qualifies as a bona fide delusion. He needs things to be a
certain way even though they aren’t, and that’s one reason he lies.
There can also be a conscious manipulative element to it. When he put
forward, and politically thrived on, the falsehood of President
Obama’s birth in Kenya [8], outside the United States, he was
manipulating that lie as well as undoubtedly believing it in part, at
least in a segment of his personality. In my investigations, I’ve
found that people can believe and not believe something at the same
time, and in his case, he could be very manipulative and be quite
gifted at his manipulations. So I think it’s a combination of those.
Moyers: How can someone believe and not believe at the same time?
Lifton: Well, in one part of himself, Trump can know there’s no
evidence that Obama was born in any place but Hawaii in the United
States. But in another part of himself, he has the need to reject
Obama as a president of the United States by asserting that he was
born outside of the country. He needs to delegitimate Obama. That’s
been a strong need of Trump’s. This is a personal, isolated
solipsistic need which can coexist with a recognition that there’s no
evidence at all to back it up. I learned about this from some of the
false confessions I came upon in my work.
Moyers: Where?
Lifton: For instance, when I was studying Chinese communist thought
reform, one priest was falsely accused of being a spy, and was under
physical duress — really tortured with chains and in other intolerable
ways. As he was tortured and the interrogator kept insisting that he
was a spy, he began to imagine himself in the role of a spy, with spy
radios in all the houses of his order. In his conversations with other
missionaries he began to think he was revealing military data to the
enemy in some way. These thoughts became real to him because he had to
entered into them and convinced the interrogator that he believed them
in order to remove the chains and the torture. He told me it seemed
like someone creating a novel and the novelist building a story with
characters which become real and believable.
Something
like that could happen to Trump, in which the false beliefs become
part of a panorama, all of which is fantasy and very often bound up
with conspiracy theory, so that he immerses himself in it and
believing in it even as at the same time recognizing in another part
of his mind that none of this exists.
The human mind can do that.
Moyers: It’s as if he believes the truth is defined by his words.
Lifton: Yes, that’s right. Trump has a mind that in many ways is
always under duress, because he’s always seeking to be accepted,
loved. He sees himself as constantly victimized by others and by the
society, from which he sees himself as fighting back. So there’s
always an intensity to his destructive behavior that could contribute
to his false beliefs.
Moyers: Do you remember when he tweeted that President Obama had him
wiretapped, despite the fact that the intelligence community couldn’t
find any evidence to support his claim? And when he spoke to a CIA
gathering, with the television cameras running, he said he was “a
thousand percent behind the CIA,” despite the fact that everyone
watching had to know he had repeatedly denounced the “incompetence and
dishonesty” of that same intelligence community.
Lifton: Yes, that’s an extraordinary situation. And one has to invoke
here this notion of a self-determined truth, this inner need for the
situation to take shape in the form that the falsehood claims. In a
sense this takes precedence over any other criteria for what is true.
Moyers: What other hazardous patterns do you see in his behavior? For
example, what do you make of the admiration that he has expressed for
brutal dictators — Bashar al-Assad of Syria, the late Saddam Hussein
of Iraq, even Kim Jong Un of North Korea — yes, him — and President
Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who turned vigilantes loose to
kill thousands of drug users, and of course his admiration for
Vladimir Putin. In the book Michael Tansey says, “There’s considerable
evidence to suggest that absolute tyranny is Donald Trump’s wet
dream.”
Lifton: Yes. Well, while Trump doesn’t have any systematic ideology,
he does have a narrative, and in that narrative, America was once a
great country, it’s been weakened by poor leadership, and only he can
make it great again by taking over. And that’s an image of himself as
a strongman, a dictator.
It isn’t the clear ideology of being a fascist or some other clear-cut
ideological figure. Rather, it’s a narrative of himself as being
unique and all-powerful. He believes it, though I’m sure he’s got
doubts about it. But his narrative in a sense calls forth other
strongmen, other dictators who run their country in an absolute way
and don’t have to bother with legislative division or legal issues.
Moyers: I suspect some elected officials sometimes dream of doing what
an unopposed autocrat or strongman is able to do, and that’s demand
adulation on the one hand, and on the other hand, eradicate all of
your perceived enemies just by turning your thumb down to the crowd.
No need to worry about “fake media” — you’ve had them done away with.
No protesters. No confounding lawsuits against you. Nothing stands in
your way.
Lifton: That’s exactly right. Trump gives the impression that he would
like to govern by decree. And of course, who governs by decree but
dictators or strongmen? He has that impulse in him and he wants to be
a savior, so he says, in his famous phrase, “Only I can fix it!”
That’s a strange and weird statement for anybody to make, but it’s
central to Trump’s sense of self and self-presentation. And I think
that has a lot to do with his identification with dictators. No matter
how many they kill and no matter what else they do, they have this
capacity to rule by decree without any interference by legislators or
courts.
In the case of Putin, I think Trump does have involvements in Russia
[9] that are in some way determinative. I think they’ll be important
in his removal from office. I think he’s aware of collusion on his
part and his campaign’s, some of which has been brought out, a lot
more of which will be brought out in the future. He appears to have
had some kind of involvement with the Russians in which they’ve
rescued him financially and maybe continue to do so, so that he’s
beholden to them in ways for which there’s already lots of evidence.
So I think his fierce impulse to cover up any kind of Russian
connections, which is prone to obstruction of justice, will do him in.
Moyers: I want to ask you about another side of him that is taken up
in the book. It involves the much-discussed video that appeared during
the campaign last year which had been made a decade or so ago when
Trump was newly married. He sees this actress outside his bus and he
says, “I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her,”
and then we hear sounds of Tic Tacs before Trump continues. “You
know,” he says, “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just
start kissing them. It’s like a magnet, just kiss, I don’t even wait.”
And then you can hear him boasting off camera, “When you’re a star,
they let you do it. You can do anything, grab them by the…. You can do
anything.”
Lifton: In addition to being a strongman and a dictator, there’s a
pervasive sense of entitlement. Whatever he wants, whatever he needs
in his own mind, he can have. It’s a kind of American celebrity gone
wild, but it’s also a vicious anti-female perspective and a caricature
of male macho. That’s all present in Trump as well as the solipsism
that I mentioned earlier, and that’s why when people speak of him as
all-pervasive on many different levels of destructiveness, they’re
absolutely right.
Moyers: And it seems to extend deeply into his relationship with his
own family. There’s a chapter in The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump
with the heading, “Trump’s Daddy Issues.” There’s several of his
quotes about his daughter, Ivanka. He said, “You know who’s one of the
great beauties of the world, according to everybody, and I helped
create her? Ivanka. My daughter, Ivanka. She’s 6 feet tall. She’s got
the best body.”
Again: “I said that if Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be
dating her.” Ivanka was 22 at the time. To a reporter he said: “Yeah,
she’s really something, and what a beauty, that one. If I weren’t
happily married — and, you know, her father…”
When Howard Stern, the radio host, started to say, “By the way, your
daughter —” Trump interrupted him with “She’s beautiful.” Stern
continued, “Can I say this? A piece of ass.” To which Trump replied,
“Yeah.” What’s going on here?
Lifton: In addition to everything else and the extreme narcissism that
it represents, it’s a kind of unbridled sense of saying anything on
one’s mind as well as an impulse to break down all norms because he is
the untouchable celebrity. So just as he is the one man who can fix
things for the country, he can have every woman or anything else that
he wants, or abuse them in any way he seeks to.
Moyers: You mentioned extreme narcissism. I’m sure you knew Erich
Fromm —
Lifton: Yes, I did.
Moyers: — one of the founders of humanistic psychology. He was a
Holocaust survivor who had a lifelong obsession with the psychology of
evil. And he said that he thought “malignant narcissism” was the most
severe pathology — “the root of the most vicious destructiveness and
inhumanity.” Do you think malignant narcissism goes a long way to explain
Trump?
Lifton: I do think it goes a long way. In early psychoanalytic
thought, narcissism was — and still, of course, is — self-love. The
early psychoanalysts used to talk of libido directed at the self. That
now feels a little quaint, that kind of language. But it does include
the most fierce and self-displaying form of one’s individual self. And
in this way, it can be dangerous. When you look at Trump, you can
really see someone who’s destructive to any form of life enhancement
in virtually every area. And if that’s what Fromm means by malignant
narcissism, then it definitely applies.
Moyers: You said earlier that Trump and his administration have
brought about a kind of malignant normalcy — that a dangerous
president can become normalized. When the Democrats make a deal with
him, as they did recently, are they edging him a little closer to
being accepted despite this record of bizarre behavior?
Lifton: We are normalizing him [10] when the Democrats make a deal
with him.
But there’s a profound ethical issue here and it’s not easily
answered. If something is good for the country — perhaps the deal that
the Democrats are making with Donald Trump is seen or could be
understood by most as good for the country, dealing with the debt
crisis — is that worth doing even though it normalizes him? If the
Democrats do go ahead with this deal, they should take steps to make
clear that they’re opposing other aspects of his presidency and of him.
Moyers: There’s a chapter in the book entitled, “He’s Got the World in
His Hands and His Finger on the Trigger.” Do you ever imagine him
sitting alone in his office, deciding on a potentially catastrophic
course of action for the nation? Say, with five minutes to decide
whether or not to unleash thermonuclear weapons?
Lifton: I do. And like many, I’m deeply frightened by that possibility.
It’s
said very often that, OK, there are people around him who can contain
him and restrain him. I’m not so sure they always can or would. In any
case, it’s not unlikely that he could seek to create some kind of
crisis, if he found himself in a very bad light in relation to public
opinion and close to removal from office. So yes, I share that fear
and I think it’s a real danger. I think we have to constantly keep it
in mind, be ready to anticipate it and take whatever action we can
against it. The American president has particular power. This makes
Trump the most dangerous man in the world. He’s equally dangerous
because of his finger on the nuclear trigger and because of his mind
ensconced in solipsistic reality. The two are a dreadful combination.
Moyers: One of your colleagues writes in the book, “Sociopathic traits
may be amplified as the leader discovers that he can violate the norms
of civil society and even commit crimes with impunity. And the leader
who rules through fear, lies and betrayal may become increasingly
isolated and paranoid as the loyalty of even his closest confidants
must forever be suspect.” Does that sound like Trump?
Lifton: It’s already happening. We see that it’s harder and harder to
work for him. It’s hard enough even for his spokesperson to affirm his
falsehoods. These efforts are not too convincing and they become less
convincing from the radius outward, in which people removed from his
immediate circle find it still more difficult to believe him and the
American public finds it more difficult. He still can appeal to his
base because in his base there is a narrative of grievance that
centers on embracing Trump without caring too much about whether what
he says is true or false. He somehow fits into their narrative. But
that can’t go on forever, and he’s losing some of his formerly loyal
supporters as well. So he is becoming more isolated. That has its own
dangers, but it’s inevitable that it would happen with a man like this as his
falsehoods are contested.
Moyers: You bring up his base. Those true believers aren’t the only
ones who voted for him. As we are talking, I keep thinking: Here we
have a man who kept asking what’s the point of having thermonuclear
weapons if we cannot use them; who advocates using torture or worse
against our prisoners of war; who urged that five innocent young
people here in New York, black young people, be given the death
penalty for a sexual assault, even after it was proven someone else
had committed the crime; who boasted about his ability to get away
with sexually assaulting women because of his celebrity and power; who
urged his followers at political rallies to punch protesters in the
face and beat them so badly that they have to be taken out on
stretchers; who suggested that maybe some of his followers might want
to assassinate his political rival, Hillary Clinton, if she were
elected president, or at the very least, throw her in prison; who
believes he would not lose voters if he stood in the middle of Fifth Avenue
and shot someone.
And over 63 million people voted to elect that man president!
Lifton: Yes, that’s a deeply troubling truth. And I doubt the people
who voted for him were thinking about any of these things. What they
were really responding to was a call for change, a sense that he was
connecting with them in ways that others never had, that he would
express and represent their interests, and that he would indeed make
this country one dominated again by white people, in some cases white
supremacists. But as you say, these people who embraced that narrative
unquestioningly are a lesser minority than the ones who voted for him.
And of course, he still didn’t win the popular vote. But it’s true —
something has gone wrong with our democratic system in electing a man
with all these characteristics that make up Donald Trump. Now we have
to struggle to sustain the functional institutions of our democracy
against his assault on them. I don’t think he’ll succeed in breaking
them down, but he’s doing a lot of harm and it’ll take a lot of effort
on the part of a lot of people to sustain them and to keep the
democracy going, even in its faltering way.
Moyers: He still has the support of 80 percent of Republican voters —
4 out of 5. And it seems the Republican Party will tolerate him as
long as they’re afraid of the intensity of his followers.
Lifton: Yes, and that’s another very disturbing thought. Things there
could change quickly too. What I sense is that the whole situation is
chaotic and volatile, so that any time now there could be further
pronouncements, further information about Russia and about obstruction
of justice, or another attempt of Trump to start firing people,
including Mueller, and that this would create a constitutional crisis
which would create more pressure on Republicans and everybody else. So
even though that is an awful truth about the Republicans’ hypocrisy in
continuing to support him, that could change, I think, almost
overnight if the new information were sufficiently damning to Trump
and his administration.
Moyers: Let’s talk about the “Trump Effect” on the country. One aspect
of it was the increase in bullying in schools caused by the rhetoric
used by Trump during the campaign. But it goes beyond that.
Lifton: I think Trump has had a very strong and disturbing effect on
the country already. He has given more legitimacy to white supremacy
and even to neo-fascist groups, and he’s created a pervasive
atmosphere that’s more vague but still significant. I don’t believe
that he can in his own way destroy the country, just as he can’t
eliminate climate awareness, but he can go a long way in bringing —
well, in stimulating what has always been a potential.
You mentioned Erich Fromm. I met him through [the sociologist] David
Riesman. David Riesman was a close friend, a great authority on
American society. He emphasized how there’s always an underbelly in
American society of extreme conservatism and reactionary response, and
when there’s any kind of progressive movement, there’s likely to be a
backlash of reaction to it.
Trump is very much in that backlash to any kind of progressive
achievement or even decent situation in society. He is stimulating
feelings that are potential and latent in our society, but very real,
and rendering them more active and more dangerous. And in that way,
he’s having a very harmful effect that I think mounts every single day.
Moyers: Some people who have known Trump for years say he’s gotten
dramatically worse since he was inaugurated. In the prologue to The
Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, Dr. Judith Lewis Herman writes this:
“Fostered by the flattery of underlings and the chants of crowds, a
political leader’s grandiosity may morph into grotesque delusions of
grandeur.” Does that —
Lifton: That’s absolutely true. It’s absolutely true. And for anyone
with these traits — of feeling himself victimized, of seeking to be
the strongman who resolves everything, yet sees truth only through his
own self and negates all other truth outside of it — is bound to
become much more malignant when he has power. That’s what Judith
Herman is saying, and she’s absolutely right. Power then breeds an
intensification of all this because the power can never be absolute
power — to some extent it’s stymied — but the isolation while in power
becomes even more dangerous. Think of it as a vicious circle. The
power intensifies these tendencies and the tendencies become more
dangerous because of the power.
Moyers: But suppose that if Donald Trump is crazy, as some have said,
he’s crazy like a fox, which is to say all this bizarre behavior is
really clever strategy to mislead, distract and deceive others into
responding in precisely the manner that he wants them to.
Lifton: I don’t think that’s quite true. I think that it’s partly
true. As I said before, Trump both disbelieves and believes in
falsehoods, so that when he did thrive on his longstanding and perhaps
most egregious falsehood — the claim that Obama was not born in the
United States — he’s crazy like a fox in manipulating it because it
gave him his political entrée onto the national stage — and also,
incidentally, was not rejected by many leading Republicans. So he was
crazy like a fox in that case. But it’s more extreme even than that.
In order to make your falsehoods powerful, you have to believe in them
in some extent. And that’s why we simplify things if we say that Trump
either believes nothing in his falsehoods and is just manipulating us
like a fox or he completely believes them. Neither is true.
The combination of both and his talent as a manipulator and falsifier
are very much at issue.
Moyers: You may not remember it, but you and I talked l6 years ago
this very week — a few days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. ll —
and PBS had asked me to go on the air to talk to a variety of people
about their response to those atrocities.
Lifton: I haven’t forgotten it, Bill.
Moyers: And in our discussion [11], we talked about your book,
Destroying the World to Save It [12], about that extremist Japanese
religious cult aum shinrikyo that released sarin nerve gas in Tokyo
subways, you compared their ideology to Osama bin Laden: “He wanted to
destroy a major part of the world to purify the world. There was in
this idea, or his ideology, a sense of renewal.” We saw it in that
Japanese cult. So the issue I am getting at is that such an aspiration
can take hold of any true believer — the desire to purify the world no
matter the cost.
Lifton: It is a very dangerous aspiration, and it’s not absent from
the Trump presidency, although I don’t think it’s his central theme. I
think it’s a central theme in Steve Bannon, for instance, who is an
apocalyptic character and really wants to bring down most of advanced
society as we know it, most of civilization as we know it, in order to
recreate it in his image. I think Trump has some attraction to that,
just as he had attraction to Bannon as a person and as a thinker, and
that influence is by no means over. He’s still in touch with Bannon.
So there is this apocalyptic influence in the Trumpean presidency: The
world is destroyed in order to be purified and renewed in the ideal
way that is projected by a Steve Bannon.
And there is a sense of that when Trump says we’ll make America great
again, because he says it’s been destroyed, he will remake it. So
there is an apocalyptic suggestion, but I don’t think it’s at the very
heart of his presidency.
Moyers: So our challenge is?
Lifton: I always feel we have to work both outside and inside of our
existing institutions, so we have to really be careful about who we
vote for and examine carefully our institutions and what they’re meant
to do and how they’re being violated. I also think we need movements
from below that oppose what this administration and administrations
like it are doing to ordinary people. And for those of us who
contributed to this book — well, as I said earlier, we have to be
“witnessing professionals” and fulfill our duty to warn.
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Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/books/bill-moyers-renowned-psychiatrist-warns-
trump-
danger-us-all
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/bill-moyers
[2] http://billmoyers.com/
[3]
https://us.macmillan.com/thedangerouscaseofdonaldtrump/bandyxlee/97812
501794
56/
[4] https://www.uncpress.org/book/9780807843444/death-in-life/
[5]
https://books.google.com/books/about/Home_from_the_war.html?id=aeshAAA
AMAAJ [6] https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Nazi_Doctors.html
[7]
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/opinion/protect-us-from-this-danger
ous-pr
esident-2-psychiatrists-say.html
[8] http://billmoyers.com/story/lest-we-forget/
[9] http://billmoyers.com/story/trump-russia-timeline/
[10]
http://billmoyers.com/story/dangerous-normalization-donald-trump/
[11]
http://billmoyers.com/content/moyers-conversation-robert-jay-lifton/
[12]
https://us.macmillan.com/destroyingtheworldtosaveit/robertjaylifton/97
808050
65114/
[13] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?subject=Typo on Bill Moyers: ;
Renowned Psychiatrist Warns That Trump Is a Danger to Us
All&body=URL:http://www.alternet.org/books/bill-moyers-renowned-psychi
atrist
-warns-trump-danger-us-all
[14] http://www.alternet.org/
[15] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
