After two hours of habitual lying, Donald Trump finally said one truthful thing before signing off of X (formerly Twitter) with Elon Musk. He said that this is the most important election in American history. With all due respect to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, he just might be correct. This election will determine whether we will continue as a democracy, honor the rule of law, and have a future with free and fair voting.
For me personally, all interviews with Trump are a source of outrage, and in my weaker moments, rage. For seven years now, I have witnessed someone not only mentally unfit for command, but mentally unfit to hold the lowest rank in the United States military.
What’s insulting to me personally as a career military officer, and a dishonoring of all those who have paid the ultimate sacrifice, is the ignorance (or feigned ignorance) of those who support him, especially GOP leadership. Attorney General Barr resigned rather than be part of a coup, Mike Pence refused to follow an illegal order, Mitch McConnel, Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy all made speeches blaming Trump for the January 6th insurrection, and Elaine Chou and Betsy Devos resigned from the cabinet January 7. None of this is my opinion, all of it is American history. But starting January 8, 2021, they have all betrayed their oath of office, and betrayed the American people, by their silence or their endorsing the man who tried to overthrow the government of the United States.
READ: The MAGA Movement Betrays the United States Military
The biggest surprise of the Elon Musk interview was discovering that Elon, a man whose wealth is 44 times that of Donald Trump, took such a subordinate role. Musk behaved more like a 14-year-old boy thrilled to be in the presence of his sports idol. He simply gave Trump an open platform to express all of his worn-out, fictional beliefs (how he would fix everything quickly from the border crisis to each and every international conflict throughout the world (Ukraine, Middle East, North Korea).
After six years of his redundant diatribes, I had hoped that the public would have figured out that he is mentally ill. But since personality disorder is the least known mental illness it is still not part of our national dialogue. This is unfortunate. It is a long-overdue discussion because almost all sex-offenders fall within the parameters of this diagnosis. It is no coincidence that Trump is also a sex offender.
We have a separate psychiatric discharge for this particular pathology. They come to our attention due to their illegal actions, not because they seek military mental health. They are what is called “ego-syntonic” meaning that they feel normal; and they will explain their crimes as if they are normal. Trump has done this with every issue: infidelity, election interference, tax evasion, fraudulent charity, fraudulent university, Russian collusion (to coordinate with the intention to deceive), the fictional Deep State and Big Steal, and finally his attempted insurrection. To this day he talks about all of these things, including his felony conviction, as if the opposite is reality. In fact, what is so pathological is the audacity and veracity of his push-back (something never allowed in a military environment). We don’t entertain a soldier telling us that the judge and jury at his court martial were corrupt, not him. It seems ludicrous but this is what we are allowing to occur—which is why, in the end, this must be seen as mental pathology to finally end this national nightmare.
Highlights from the interview:
- “People within our own government are more dangerous than China and Russia.” Trump is referring to members of the opposition party (fellow Americans, many in uniform) versus two enemy states who have institutionalized the violation of human rights. Trump has said this at rallies, that the greatest threat is not China or Russia, but us, the United States.
- Trump told Elon that he would close the department of education. He claimed that the United States was near the bottom in education and that China was near the top. In fact, the U.S. is ranked #1 worldwide and China is ranked 35th. But the important point is his belief that a dictatorship with state-controlled media and school systems devoted to party propaganda are superior. It reveals his deviant thinking and his betrayal of our constitutional freedoms (and Project 2025 is a plan to institute party-controlled propaganda in the United States).
- Trump bragged to Musk how he gets along with dictators: “I get along with these guys. I got along with Kim Jong Un. We had dinner together and you know he’s in absolute control! I saw things you wouldn’t even want to know about.” This statement is completely diagnostic. It is the precise lack of empathy that eliminates a personality disorder from military service. A recruit, at a minimum, must be able to distinguish us from our enemies. Trump telegraphed this many years ago when he praised the Chinese Communist government for the Tiananmen Square massacre. He said that “they put it down with strength.” It is why he helped a Saudi Prince cover up the murder and mutilation of a bridegroom in Turkey, and why he pardoned a Navy Seal for war crimes and invited him to Mar a Lago and hailed him as a great warrior.
- Personality Disorders will contradict themselves frequently and Trump is no exception. He put economic sanctions on Russia as punishment for actions he claims never happened and are a hoax. After a long discussion with Elon Musk about the rapists and murderers and terrorists invading our southern border. He told Elon that some, from Venezuela, escaped with their lives “and if you go back you are killed.”
Trump and Musk went on about how unsafe our cities were and gave examples of immigrants going toe to toe with police officers, both of them appalled at the level of violence—the elephant in the room was the violent assault on law enforcement that Trump ordered on January 6th that left 140 officers injured and the death of Brian Sicknick.
Trump and Musk talked a lot about energy, the oil industry, solar, nuclear power. Musk tried (the one and only time in two hours) to be the voice of reason on global warming and explain why he started a company for electric vehicles; but to placate Trump (who said that climate change might not be a problem for 500 years), Musk said, “We don’t need to panic” and that we still have at least another five years.
People like to pretend that they will never understand how the German people let Adolph Hitler rise to power with his idea of “the final solution.” We are witnessing similar power plays. Project 2025 is a plan to turn all government bureaucracy under the control of the president. The military will be decapitated of generals and admirals and the barrier between church and state slowly removed.
The only good thing about a malignant narcissist is that they frequently telegraph what they are going to do—even brag about it. The simple truth is that Donald Trump is planning to slowly turn the United States of America into Trumpland. He has already divided us into Red and Blue, Democrat and Republican, Christian nationalists and those who are against “God’s plan” for America (as Trump declared at the Republican convention after the assassination attempt).
Many psychiatrists have written about malignant narcissists like Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and now Trump. Their rise to power was slow and methodical and they needed a lot of help and a lot of people accepting the unacceptable. Neville Chamberlain had no imagination for evil. Let us hope that America can activate its imagination before it is too late.
