Donald Trump. (photo: Mark Seliger)
The Madness of Donald Trump
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
19 September 17
The pressures of the presidency have pushed Trump to the edge, but is he crazy
enough to be removed from office?
Evening, August 22nd, 2017, a convention center in Phoenix. It's Donald Trump's
true coming-out party as an insane person. It looks like the same old Trump up
there on the stage: same boxy blue suit, same obligatory flag pin and tangerine
combover, same too-long reddish power tie swinging below his belt line like a
locker-room abomination. Earlier this year there were efforts to make Trump
stop wearing his suit jackets open – designer Joseph Abboud said buttoning up
was a "very visible way of showing he knows how serious the job is" – but
Donald Trump doesn't take advice, not even the gently benign kind.
That makeover was undone just as quickly as it was done, leaving the Donald
with the same old tie-on-bulging-duodenum look from the campaign. He even
sounds the same now, kicking off the event with a go-to favorite: "What a
crowd!" he shouts. (A week from now, he will shout, "What a crowd, what a
turnout!" from atop a truck in Corpus Christi, Texas, on the occasion of a
deadly hurricane.) But the embattled president who takes the stage tonight is a
different man from the barnstorming revolutionary who ripped through the
American political process a year ago. That Donald Trump enjoyed himself, to an
obscene degree. Watching Trump lean over a podium on the road to the presidency
was like watching a stud boar hump a hole in the wall.
He said monstrous things and lied with stunning disinhibition, and when the
civilized world recoiled in horror, he seemed to take sadistic pleasure in
every minute – win or lose, the run was pure glory for him, a Sherman's March
of taboo politics and testosterone fury that would leave a mark on America
forever.
There was one more thing. Candidate Trump may have been crazy, but it was
craziness that on some level was working. Even at his lowest and most
irrational moments – like his lunatic assault on the family of fallen soldier
Humayun Khan, in which he raved to the grieving Gold Star parents about how it
was he, Trump, who had "made a lot of sacrifices" – you could argue, if you
squinted really hard, that it was strategy, a kick to the base.
Or even if he wasn't doing these things on purpose, he must have been able to
feel their impact, as the revolutionary force of his campaign demolished the
160-year-old Republican Party and barreled toward the gates of Barack Obama's
White House.
Now, it's different. Now, he just seems crazy. And it's his own administration
that is crumbling, not any system.
After a disastrous and terrifying August, which among other things saw him
defend the "very fine people" among neo-Nazi protesters in a Charlottesville,
Virginia, march, it's Trump's mental state – not his alleged Russia ties, nor
his failure to staff the government or pass any major legislation – that has
become the central problem of his presidency.
Is this man losing his mind? And if so, what can be done about it? We've had
some real zeros in the White House before, but we've never had a chief
executive who barked at the moon or saw ghosts – at least, not one who was so
public about it.
In Phoenix, which is technically a campaign event, the idea seems to be to
surround the chief with an enthusiastic audience to boost his spirits after the
fiasco of Charlottesville. Put him on the stump in the heart of MAGA country,
let him feel that boar-with-a-boner high again.
It doesn't work. The crowd is big and boisterous enough, maybe 10,000 Sheriff
Joe-lovin', Mexico-hatin' 'Muricans, but Trump looks miserable. He's not the
insurgent rebel anymore but a Caesar surrounded by knives. He's got a special
prosecutor crawling up his backside, and there are numerous prominent
politicians, including at least two in his own party, who are questioning his
sanity in public amid growing whispers of constitutional mutiny. Moreover,
after shrugging off a thousand other scandals, Trump seems paralyzed by the
Nazi thing. He can't let it go. Say one nice thing about Nazis, and it's like
people can't get over it. Unfair!
He plunges into a 77-minute rant on this subject, listing each offending news
outlet by name. In a nicely Freudian twist, he starts with The New York Times,
which incidentally is the same paper that nearly a century ago identified "Fred
Trump of 175-24 Devonshire Road" – the president's late father – as a detainee
from a 1927 Ku Klux Klan rally in Queens. Back then, "native-born American
Protestants" were railing against "Roman Catholic police" – essentially the
dirty-immigrant Irish, last century's Mexicans. Not much changes in this
country. Maybe the father of the 2072 Republican nominee is here tonight in a
MAGA hat.
That old family shame might be why the president, who's always denied Fred
Trump was a Klansman ("Never happened"), is having such a hard time with
Charlottesville and race. He rails against the "Times, which is, like, so bad,"
moves on to the "Washington Post, which I call a lobbying tool for Amazon" and
winds up with "CNN, which is so bad and pathetic, and their ratings are going
down."
CNN's ratings aren't down. The network's second-quarter prime-time viewers just
cracked a 1 million average, its most-watched second quarter ever, largely due
to the blimp wreck of the Trump presidency. It's the one incontrovertible
achievement of this administration. The network tweets as much shortly after
Trump says the line. The Phoenix audience doesn't care. "CNN sucks!" they
chant. "CNN sucks!"
I was late to the event and actually standing outside the press pen, so when
the crowd turns to scream and hiss at the media, I'm on the angry-zombie side
of the line. A man taps my shoulder.
"Fuck those people!" he shouts.
I smile, zip up my jacket to hide my lanyard, then turn around to give him a
thumbs up. The crowd escalates:
"Tell the truth! Tell the truth!"
Trump goes on, raging against "very dishonest media" and trying to rekindle the
spirit of the campaign. He self-plagiarizes a little, reviving the "little
Marco" dig for "little George" Stephanopoulos.
The audience seems into it for a while. But it goes on too long. During the
campaign, Trump was expert at keeping a hall buzzed with resentment for an hour
or so. But he hits weird notes now. He goes off on a tangent about his enemies,
it's not clear which ones. "They're elite?" he says. "I went to better schools
than they did. I was a better student than they were. I live in a bigger, more
beautiful apartment, and I live in the White House, too, which is really
great."
Polite applause.
"You know what?" he goes on. "I think we're the elites. They're not the
elites."
No one is counting fingers, but you can tell people are having trouble making
the math work. We're elite because you have a nice apartment? Campaign Trump
bragged endlessly about his wealth – "I have a Gucci store that's worth more
than Romney" was a classic line – but back then he was selling a vicarious
fantasy. Trump's Ferrari-underpants lifestyle was the silent-majority vision of
how they would all live once the winning started. But candidate Trump was never
dumb enough to try to tell debt-ridden, angry crowds they were already living
the dream.
At one point, Trump ends up standing with a piece of paper in hand, haranguing
all with transcripts of his own remarks on Charlottesville. To prove that he's
been misquoted or misunderstood, he goes through the whole story, from the
beginning. It gets quiet in the hall.
It's an agonizing parody of late-stage Lenny Bruce. The great Sixties
comedian's act degenerated into tendentious soliloquies about his legal
situation (he had been charged with obscenity). Bruce too stood onstage in his
last years for interminable periods, court papers in hand, quoting himself to
audiences bored to insanity by the spectacle.
This is exactly Trump. Even his followers are starting to look sideways at one
another. In a sight rarely seen last year, a trickle of supporters heads for
the exits. Then Trump cracks.
"The only people giving a platform to these hate groups is the media itself,
and the fake news," he says, to tepid applause.
He stops and points in accusing fashion at the press riser.
"Oh, that's so funny," he says. "Look back there, the live red lights. They're
turning those suckers off fast out there. They're turning those lights off
fast."
We reporters had seen this act before. On October 10th of last year, in
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, at one of the most massive rallies of the campaign,
Trump accused CNN of shutting down the feed because he was criticizing their
debate coverage. In that case, a camera light really did flicker, but CNN was
actually turning the live feed on, not off. That was possibly an honest
mistake. Possibly also it was Trump just pulling the media's tail, tweaking us
with a line of bull, as he had with countless other provocations. The general
consensus of attendant journalists that night was that Trump was messing with
us.
Phoenix is different. Trump seems to believe what he's saying. He really thinks
that not just CNN, but all of the networks are shutting down their feeds,
overwhelmed by the power of his words. "Boy, those cameras are going off," he
says, coming back to the subject. "Oh, wow. Why don't you just fold them up and
take them home? Oh, those cameras are going off. Wow. That's the one thing,
they're very nervous to have me on live television..."
The president of the United States is seeing things. He might as well be
shooing imaginary ants off his suit. His followers still love him, but even
they're starting to notice. They come for the old standards, but this new Trump
material gets mixed reviews.
Outside, a fan gives the speech a half-hearted thumbs up. "I liked 'Lock her
up,'" the man says with a shrug. "They did that for a little while."
"[He's saying] 'I don't
promote racism, that's
just the media trying to
fuck
with me,'" says Rich
Yukon, a biker from a Tempe-based club called the
Metalheads. "But he gets a little out of hand here and there, he says some
shit."
After the event, Trump tweets, "Beautiful turnout of 15,000 in Phoenix
tonight!" Later, he reportedly fires the organizer of that same "beautiful"
event, longtime aide and RNC contractor George Gigicos, apparently for not
delivering a terrifyingly massive enough crowd. Sources told Bloomberg that
Trump saw open floor space in TV shots before he took the stage, and this put
him in a "foul mood" from which he never recovered.
Trump has never had much use for facts, or decorum, or empathy, or sexual
discretion, or any of the hundred other markers we normally look at to gauge
mental wellness. But he's never been like this. This guy is lost, and as he
flails for a clue, he keeps struggling violently against the conventions of his
own office. The presidency has become a straitjacket.
We deserve Trump, though. God, do we deserve him. We Americans have some good
qualities, too, don't get me wrong. But we're also a bloodthirsty Mr. Hyde
nation that subsists on massacres and slave labor and leaves victims half-alive
and crawling over deserts and jungles, while we sit stuffing ourselves on
couches and blathering about our "American exceptionalism." We dumped 20
million gallons of toxic herbicide on Vietnam from the air, just to make the
shooting easier without all those trees, an insane plan to win "hearts and
minds" that has left about a million still disabled from defects and disease –
including about 100,000 children, even decades later, little kids with
misshapen heads, webbed hands and fused eyelids writhing on cots, our real
American legacy, well out of view, of course.
Nowadays we use flying robots and missiles to kill so many civilians and women
and children in places like Mosul and Raqqa and Damadola, Pakistan, in our
countless ongoing undeclared wars that the incidents scarcely make the news
anymore. Our next innovation is "automation," AI-powered drones that can
identify and shoot targets, so human beings don't have to pull triggers and
feel bad anymore. If you want to look in our rearview, it's lynchings and race
war and genocide all the way back, from Hispaniola to Jolo Island in the
Philippines to Mendocino County, California, where we nearly wiped out the Yuki
people once upon a time.
This is who we've always been, a nation of madmen and sociopaths, for whom
murder is a line item, kept hidden via a long list of semantic self-deceptions,
from "manifest destiny" to "collateral damage." We're used to presidents being
the soul of probity, kind Dads and struggling Atlases, humbled by the terrible
responsibility, proof to ourselves of our goodness. Now, the mask of
respectability is gone, and we feel sorry for ourselves, because the sickness
is showing.
So much of the Trump phenomenon is about history. Fueling the divide between
pro- and anti-Trump camps is exactly the fact that we've never had a real
reckoning with either our terrible past or our similarly bloody present. The
Trump movement culturally represents an absolute denial of our sins from
slavery on – hence the intense reaction to the removal of Confederate statues,
the bizarre paranoia about the Washington Monument being next, and so on. But
#resistance is also a denial mechanism. It makes Trump the root of all evil,
and is powered by an intense desire to not have to look at the ugliness, to go
back to the way things were. We see this hideous clown in the White House and
feel our dignity outraged, but when you really think about it, what should
America's president look like?
Trump is no malfunction. He's a perfect representation of who, as a country, we
are and always have been: an insane monster. Frankly, we're lucky he's not
walking around using a child's femur as a toothpick.
When it's not trembling in terror, the rest of the world must be laughing its
ass off. America, land of the mad pig president. Shove that up your
exceptionalism.
A week in Trump time is like a century, and the week after the Phoenix fiasco
felt like a thousand years. First, he slipped in a prime-time pardon of Sheriff
Joe Arpaio – Trump's Ghost of Christmas Future, an envelope-pushing birther and
demented prairie fascist who looked destined to spend his eighties in jail.
Then, Trump held a joint press conference with Finnish President Sauli
Niinistö. The diminutive Scandinavian stood trying not to reach for his cyanide
pill as Trump proudly explained to the press that he'd timed the Arpaio pardon
with coverage of Hurricane Harvey for maximum ratings impact. The poor Euro
looked like a Belgian nun forced to bunk up with Honey Boo Boo.
Trump spent much of the week expressing morbid excitement about Harvey, as
though the sheer size of the storm somehow reflected upon him personally.
"HISTORIC rainfall," he gushed. Then, he went to Texas and said a slew of
inappropriate things, celebrating crowd turnout and continually popping wood
over the killer storm's "epic" dimensions – "nobody's ever seen this much
water," he raved. He repeatedly forgot to express empathy for victims, but
doled out a major attaboy to FEMA administrator Brock Long, who "really became
famous on television the past few days."
Then, Trump went somewhere, fell asleep, woke up and decided first thing to
take a Twitter leak on nuclear belligerent Kim Jong-Un, who just days before
had shot missiles over northern Japan. "The U.S. has been talking to North
Korea, and paying them extortion money, for 25 years," Trump wrote. "Talking is
not the answer!"
After enough weeks and months of behavior like this, it's become axiomatic in
many circles that Trump simply must go, for whatever reason. Our desperation as
a nation to get back to "normal" – that is to say, back to being able to
pretend we're a civilized people with justified hegemonic authority – has hit
such a fever pitch that there is now real energy behind a pair of long-shot
efforts to remove our mad king from the throne ahead of schedule.
The problem is that Trump might just live in an awful sweet spot – a raving,
dangerous embarrassment, about the worst imaginable, but safe under the law
absent new information. Depending on whom you ask, we may have to break
democratic rules to be rid of him – something we've never had a problem doing,
of course, but this is no desert sideshow, this would be center stage with the
whole world watching.
Impeachment, now favored by upwards of 43 percent of voters, is one track. Many
thought Trump was impeachable from Day One thanks to ethical conflicts and
other issues. But successful impeachment would not only require significant
defections from a Republican-controlled Congress, but proof of high crimes and
misdemeanors, so far elusive.
There's a widespread misconception that impeachment is a purely political
matter, that it can and should happen the instant a two-thirds majority of the
Senate deems it necessary. Some of this has been fueled by social-media
discussions quoting figures like Gerald Ford, who as a minority congressman
once said, "An impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House of
Representatives considers it to be."
But many legal experts disagree. "That was the worst thing that Ford could have
said," says Jonathan Turley, law professor at George Washington University.
While, superficially, impeachment is a political decision, to get all the way
to the finish line the effort "has to meet the legal standard of high crimes
and misdemeanors."
Merely being an inappropriate, racist, unethical, sociopathic embarrassment,
even on the Trump level, doesn't necessarily rate as an impeachable offense.
The president must be caught committing a crime, and it must be serious.
Impeachment is going to be tough political sledding in almost any case. Part of
Trump's purpose in going to Arizona was to start digging the grave of
Republican senator and open Trump antagonist Jeff Flake, who is up for
re-election in 2018. Flake is polling far behind a Trump-backed primary
challenger, Dr. Kelli Ward, thrilling the mad regent. "WEAK on borders, crime,
and a non-factor in the Senate," Trump tweeted of Flake. "He's toxic!"
In the wake of Charlottesville, Trump surrogates like longtime friend Roger
Stone argued that the president shouldn't back down at all to global outcries,
but instead run back on offense by going after a "scalp" in his own party. By
helping to blow up Flake, whose approval rating among voters in his own state,
according to one poll, is down to 18 percent, Trump can demonstrate he still
wields life-or-death power over most GOP elected officials. This will surely
chill any effort to try to shorten Trump's term.
Still, five different investigations into Trump's relationship with Russia are
currently underway, and there's little question that the undisguisedly sweeping
nature of the inquiry is freaking Trump out. It was not difficult to notice
that a predawn FBI raid on the home of former Trump campaign manager Paul
Manafort took place just before Trump's disastrous response to the
Charlottesville tragedy. If you think special counsel Robert Mueller is in
Trump's head, he probably is.
Mueller, who is wielding the biggest pitchfork in this thing, is roaming
promiscuously into all sorts of areas of inquiry, from Manafort's finances to
the dismissal of former FBI chief James Comey to God knows what else. Mueller
is exactly the kind of person Trump doesn't need sniffing his sheets: a
graying, hatchet-faced moralist who, while Trump was spending decades romping
with models and partying with TV stars, was quietly building – on a government
salary – a reputation for being "incorruptible" and having "extraordinary
integrity." As a former FBI chief, he is a veteran of massive undertakings,
having led one of the biggest investigations in the bureau's history after
9/11. He can be expected to have grand juries sprouting across the country like
mushrooms, and if there's evidence Trump so much as farted across state lines
once, it will be in Mueller's report.
And likely none of it would
have happened had Trump
had enough self-control
to let
Comey's probably far narrower probe run its course. It was remarkable
to hear recently
deposed Trump adviser Steve
Bannon say this out loud. The
alt-right guru told Charlie
Rose that firing Comey was the biggest mistake in
"modern political history," and "we would not have the Mueller investigation
and the breadth that clearly Mr. Mueller is going for."
But Mueller's investigation would almost certainly have to be a direct hit to
Trump to result in removal from office. And there have been ominous signs for
those who have hopes on this front. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, ranking member on
the Judiciary Committee and senior member on Intelligence, as plugged-in a
politician as there is on the Democratic side, stunned a San Francisco audience
at the end of August by saying that Trump "is going to be president most likely
for the rest of this term." She suggested – to cries of "No!" – that Trump "can
be a good president."
Trump's catastrophic August, which saw his approval ratings drop to a
preposterous 35 percent, was marked by two devastating unforced errors: his
Phoenix speech and the similarly id-exposing Trump Tower presser about those
"very fine people" among the Nazis. The press narrative since those incidents
has been focused far less on impeachability than on the other road to early
removal: a declaration of "inability to discharge duties" under Section 4 of
the 25th Amendment.
This is a form of legalized mutiny that could theoretically take place if
enough people in Trump's orbit were to conclude he were mentally unfit. (There
is a congressional removal scenario under this provision, too, but it's complex
and even more of a long shot.) There's buzz about this coup-like scenario in
both parties. Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin has introduced a bill to set up an
independent commission to gauge Trump's fitness. Twenty-eight Democrats have
since signed the resolution.
In the Senate, Tennessee's glad-handing, six-faced, wanna-be Napoleon,
wheelerdealer Republican Bob Corker, who as recently as June was seen golfing
with Trump and Peyton Manning, questioned Trump's "stability" and "competence"
in a statement that was widely interpreted as a reference to the 25th
Amendment. This came after Democratic Sen. Jack Reed was captured on a hot mic
saying to Republican Sen. Susan Collins, "I think he's crazy." Collins replied,
"I'm worried."
Even some of the president's chief foes on the Russia front, including "deep
state" types like former director of national intelligence James Clapper, have
pivoted to the unfitness theme. The day after Phoenix, Clapper told CNN that
Trump's speech was the most "disturbing" thing he'd ever seen from a president.
But the 25th Amendment process, adopted in 1967, offers faint hope to
anti-Trumpers. "It's the new Hail Mary," says the law professor Turley. It can
be instigated in a few ways, none simple. The most likely would involve Veep
Mike Pence (rumored to be preparing a 2020 run) and the bulk of Trump's Cabinet
writing a letter to Congress asserting that Trump is unable to perform his
duties. Presumably such an effort would also include the coterie of
missile-lobbing uniform fetishists surrounding Trump, people like John Kelly,
H.R. McMaster and James Mattis. These half-bright military men, upon whom so
much of Washington has pinned hopes as the "axis of adults" in Trump's
loony-bin administration, would likely have to defy their commander in chief.
A letter to Congress from this crew would begin a process that would put Pence
in the Oval Office as the acting president. Under the 25th Amendment,
incidentally, the president is never removed, but merely sidelined. Imagine
still-technically-President Trump's serene, imperturbable behavior as he
watches his "temporary" replacement Pence in the White House. A two-thirds
majority in both houses of Congress would eventually be needed to secure the
play.
As with impeachment, there is a misconception that a Section 4 declaration can
be a purely political gambit. In fact, the procedure specifically can't be
about politics. John Feerick, a Fordham law professor who helped work on the
original bill with senators such as Indiana's Birch Bayh and authored a book
titled The 25th Amendment, goes out of his way to point out the many things
that do not qualify as "inability" under this law. The list reads like Trump's
résumé.
The debates in Congress about the amendment, Feerick writes, make clear that
"inability" does not cover "policy and political differences, unpopularity,
poor judgment, incompetence, laziness or impeachable conduct." When asked about
the possibility of invoking the amendment today, Feerick is wary. "It's a very
high bar that has to be satisfied," he says. "You're dealing with a president
elected for four years."
"It has to be very serious," agrees Turley, who adds that an inability effort
would probably require "sworn statements from psychiatric professionals."
The president, again, cannot be merely a disordered, inappropriate,
incompetent, destructive embarrassment. He has to be genuinely "unable" to
work. For Trump to be impeachable, he probably has to be responsible for
crimes. To be declared unfit, he probably has to be demonstrably insane. He
probably can't be both. Is he either?
Unless the Russia investigation pans out, the question of whether Trump
survives to 2020 – Vegas betting houses started putting the odds below 50
percent after Charlottesville – hangs on a single question: Is Donald Trump
insane?
It's actually not easy to answer, even conversationally. Is he crazy? On one
level, of course he is, hell yes. Trump has been mad as a sack of bees since he
launched his campaign. Put simply, Trump believes things that aren't there. He
made it to the White House in a delusional bubble of his own creation, and his
brain is clearly a denuded mush of paranoid, self-aggrandizing fictions he
probably couldn't part with even if some brave confederate were to force him to
try.
People pay the most attention to Trump's political deceptions: that 3 million
"illegal" voters lost him the popular vote, that Hillary Clinton wants to
"release the violent criminals from jail," that Ted Cruz's father was linked to
the JFK assassination, and so on. "We are the highest-taxed nation in the
world" was a notable recent whopper.
But those lies may be strategic, and Trump probably isn't married to them
anyway, given that he doesn't appear to have real beliefs. Trump picks his
political positions like ties: whatever's on the rack. Under duress, and with
no way to escape, he will sometimes cop to being full of it, like the time he
finally admitted, "Obama was born in the United States," after five years of
bleating the opposite.
But sit him in front of a doctor and see what happens when you ask: Who had the
larger inaugural crowd, him or Obama? Or: Would he ever admit the Boy Scouts
never called to tell him his speech was the "greatest ever"? Trump might
struggle here. It's the countless little fairy tales he tells himself about his
power and infallibility to which he clings like a dope fiend to a $10 bill.
Everyone with half a brain and a recent copy of the DSM (the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, used by shrinks everywhere) knew the
diagnosis on Trump the instant he joined the race. Trump fits the clinical
definition of a narcissistic personality so completely that it will be a shock
if future psychiatrists don't rename the disorder after him.
Grandiosity, a tendency to exag
gerate achievements, a preoccupation with
"fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty
or ideal love," a
belief in one's specialness (which can only be understood by other special
people), a need for excessive admiration and a sense of entitlement – sound
like anyone you know?
Trump's rapidly expanding list of things at which he's either a supreme expert
or the Earth's best living practitioner would shame even great historical
blowhards like Stalin or Mobutu Sese Seko.
As the "world's greatest person" at restricting immigration, who is "good at
war" and "knows more about ISIS than the generals," and who is the "least
racist person" with "the best temperament" who knows "more about renewables
than any human being on Earth," insists "nobody reads the Bible more than me,"
and even knows more about New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker "than [Booker] knows
himself," Trump by his own description is not a splenetic rightwing basket case
at all, but just a cleverly disguised cross of God, Norman Schwarzkopf, Coretta
Scott King, Gloria Steinem, Pope Francis and, apparently, Cory Booker's mother,
Carolyn.
The president's ludicrous grandiosity was a running joke throughout the
campaign season, but having a personality disorder is not a disqualifying
feature in a president. Even his most vocal critics in the mental-health
community concede that being a narcissist, even a very sick one, does not make
him unfit for office.
"As someone who's studied Trump, as someone who's met Trump, who's interacted
with him socially, I can say with absolute confidence that he suffers from
severe personality disorders, perhaps a cluster of disorders," says Ben
Michaelis, a New York-based psychologist who has run into Trump over the years.
"But to get a sense of outright psychotic behavior ... There's some
possibility, but you really need to examine him in a clinical setting."
This holdup – that merely being disordered isn't enough to justify removal,
particularly when so many people endorsed these characteristics with a vote –
has been one logistical problem stopping the "unfitness" Hail Mary. Another has
been the American Psychiatric Association's so-called Goldwater Rule, an
ethical dictum that discourages mental-health professionals from diagnosing
public figures from afar.
John Gartner, a psychologist who trained residents at Johns Hopkins, has found
a way around both problems. The Goldwater Rule he just ignores, because, he
argues, the graveness of the Trump threat renders it quaint. Lots of his
colleagues seem to agree, as Gartner has managed to gather more than 62,000
signatures from self-described mental-health professionals attesting that Trump
"manifests a serious mental illness that renders him psychologically incapable
of competently discharging the duties of president of the United States."
Gartner's argument is relatively simple. Add paranoia, sadism and antisocial
behavior to narcissistic personality disorder and you have a new diagnosis:
"malignant narcissism." Trump, he says, is no paranoid schizophrenic who walks
the streets claiming to be the Son of God – no one "so grossly ill" could be
elected. However, the president's increasing tendency to obsess over
persecution theories – and not just parrot meaningless stupidities like the
inaugural crowd story but seemingly believe them – shows that he's crossing a
meaningful diagnostic line into psychotic delusions, common among malignant
narcissists.
"We're not talking about a gross psychotic disorder," Gartner says. "We're
talking about a way in which people with severe personality disorders can
regress to what they call transient psychotic states." He adds, "It's a more
subtle kind of psychosis, but it goes over the boundary into psychosis."
The term malignant narcissist is said to have been invented by Holocaust
survivor Erich Fromm, who used it to explain Hitler. It's now become a
catch-word on the Internet to describe Trump, and almost inevitably – in much
the same way that language from the Steele dossier bled from the Internet to
pop culture to the rhetoric of elected officials – it has begun to be
circulated within the Democratic Party. California Rep. Jackie Speier actually
used the term to describe Trump after Charlottesville, in an interview in which
she also called him "unhinged" and "unfit."
But this all has the feel of a duel between court experts. If the argument
comes down to whether Trump is a garden-variety narcissist or a malignant
narcissist, the from-afar diagnosis may not cut it as an excuse to sideline an
elected president.
Nor should it, says Turley, who believes Trump's opponents are playing with
fire. He particularly points the finger at Democrats, whom he calls
"constitutional shortsellers." During the eight years of Obama, Turley says,
Democrats continually boosted executive power, only to regret it once Trump was
elected. Now, he says, toying with scenarios like a 25th Amendment ploy could
come back to bite them.
"They're doing this without thinking of the long-term implications," he says.
"It could be their president the next time."
Trump wasn't always crazy. He wasn't even always obnoxious. Many Americans
don't remember, but the Donald Trump who appeared on TV regularly in the
Eighties and Nineties was often engaging, self-deprecating, spoke in complete
sentences and (verbally, anyway) usually lived up to his expensive schooling.
He'd say things like, "These are the only casinos in the United States that are
so rated," and use words and phrases like "a somewhat impersonal life" and
"money isn't a totally essential ingredient."
The difference today is striking. Trump has not only completely lost his sense
of humor, particularly about himself, but he's a lingual mess. In his current
dread of polysyllables – his favorite words include "I," "Trump," "very,"
"money" and "China" – he makes George W. Bush sound like Vladimir Nabokov. On
the page, transcripts of his speaking appearances often look like complete
gibberish.
"When I did this now I said, I probably, maybe will confuse people, maybe I'll
expand that," he said to Lester Holt in May, "you know, I'll lengthen the time
because it should be over with, in my opinion."
The difference even since last year is hard to miss, and why not? The
presidency severely ages and stresses even healthy people. From Obama to Bush
to Jimmy Carter, presidents on their last day of office often look like
med-school cadavers. President Trump already looks older, has a lower
frustration threshold and seems only to have two moods, rage and sullen
resignation (a.k.a. pre-rage).
He also can barely speak anymore, but without a close-up examination it's
impossible to say if this is a neurological problem or just being typically
American. As the psychologist Michaelis puts it, one major cause for loss of
cognitive function is giving up reading in favor of TV or the Internet, which
is basically most people in this country these days.
"In someone of his economic background and age, [the decline] is somewhat
uncommon," he says. "Then again, it's a trend. People of my generation got more
information from TV than books, and people of the next generation get more
information from the Internet, and that exercises less of your cognitive
reserve."
This is a huge part of the problem of trying to gauge whether or not Trump is
mentally unfit for office. It isn't just that 63 million people specifically
endorsed his nuttiest behaviors with a vote. It's also that maintaining modern
American media habits can make most anyone seem like a victim of organic brain
damage.
In a kind of awful satire of the current American experience, part of what got
Trump elected is the camaraderie he shared with other reality-averse Americans
who similarly chose to live in castles of self-aggrandizement, denial and
blameshifting, a journalistic product we offer to just about everyone these
days.
Trump is almost certainly worse than most of his voters. He's likely more
grandiose, less empathetic and less capable of handling criticism. But his
phobias about science or history or inconvenient facts, along with his
countless conspiratorial hatreds and prejudices, are things he shares with
millions of people. They voted for this, which creates as confounding and
ridiculous a conundrum as has ever been observed in an industrial democracy.
Can a country be declared unfit?
Tuesday, August 30th, Springfield, Missouri. Fresh off his "no more talking"
tweet about North Korea that again puts the world on nuke alert, Trump flies to
this sleepy little Ozark hub for a bit of image rehab. The play is transparent:
Unspool plans for a monster corporate tax giveaway to pull nervous
rank-and-file Republicans back toward the rubber room of Trump's presidency,
and grope a prominent piece of Americana – the birthplace of Route 66 – for the
benefit of a voter base that may have been confused by the previous week's
Howard Beale act.
The speech is to be delivered at the Loren Cook Company, a maker of many
things, including "laboratory exhaust systems," which seems ominous somehow.
The giant warehouse slowly fills with the usual crowd of elderly flag-wavers
and squirrelly white dudes with bad facial hair and ill-fitting jeans. If there
are protesters anywhere in the area, they're likely very far away, probably
surrounded by .30-caliber machine guns.
Every Trump event is must-see TV now, because no one ever knows when he's going
to go on one of his unscripted ape-rants. It doesn't happen today. Today we get
Clonazepam Trump, Prozac Trump. He stands in front of a big flag, perches
between his two teleprompters and reads prepared remarks virtually from
beginning to end – a relative rarity for this president, who hates scripts as
much as he hates buttoned suit jackets. Trump reading a speech always looks
like a hostage. In stark contrast to the vibrant rage of Phoenix, in Missouri
he slowly spits out each lifeless cliché like it's a dead bird.
"In difficult times such as these," he says, "we see the true character of the
American people: their strength, their love and their resolve. We see friend
helping friend, neighbor helping neighbor, and stranger helping stranger..."
"Jeez," moans a reporter in the press section, smacking a forehead.
Trump goes on to insinuate to the crowd that the state's Democratic senator is
holding back much-needed tax reform.
"And your senator, Claire McCaskill, she must do this for you," he says
robotically. "And if she doesn't do it for you, you have to vote her out of
office."
Muted cheers. After the event, the crowd files out in a patriotic mumble. A
mustachioed man who identifies himself only as "Chuck Chuck" says the lifeless
speech doesn't bother him.
"He told us about Claire McCaskill, that was good enough," he says.
A week or so later, Trump will strike a deal to raise the debt ceiling with
Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer that leaves members of both parties stunned. His
would-be enemies in The New York Times publish the breathless analysis they
never gave to Bernie Sanders: "Bound to No Party, Trump Upends 150 Years of
Two-Party Rule."
This is the paradox of Trump. He is damaged, unwell and delusional, but at
critical moments he's able to approximate a functioning human being just long
enough to survive. He is the worst-case scenario: embarrassing, mentally
disorganized and completely inappropriate, but perhaps not all the way insane.
Maybe crimes will soon be discovered and he'll be impeached, or maybe he'll run
naked down Pennsylvania Avenue this fall, or nuke someone, and be declared
unfit. Until then, he's just the president we deserve, dragging our name down
where it belongs. He is miserable, so are we, and we're stuck with each other.
Karma really is a bitch.
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