Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation where an abuser or manipulator repeatedly denies facts, twists the truth, or invents scenarios. The goal is to make the victim doubt their own memory, perception of reality, or sanity. Over time, victims become confused and increasingly dependent on the perpetrator.
When I wrote my book “American Carnage, An Officer’s Duty to Warn,” my working title was, “The Molestation of America.” I later decided that title was too crude despite its accuracy. I was aware of the multiple accusations of sexual assault by Donald Trump, and had heard the “Access Hollywood” tape, where he admits to being a sex offender and then gaslighted the American public, renaming criminal behavior as locker room banter.
One of my assignments, in a 30-year military career, had been Chief of Mental Health for a regional military prison in the Northwest. I had 33 sex offenders on my personal caseload. Listening to Donald Trump frequently gave me flashbacks to my interviews with convicts, especially his deposition in the E. Jean Carroll rape case. Almost all sex offenders are personality disorders and personality disorder is an obligatory discharge from the military. We certainly have never had one in our White House before Trump, but since Personality Disorder is the least known mental illness, and since narcissism has a common lay meaning, it is mistakenly equated to clinical narcissism, even malignant narcissism, with its sadistic traits. We, like 1930s Germany, have fallen under the control of a malignant narcissist whose level of pathology goes unrecognized, or even rationalized, by those being gaslighted by the abuser.
A simple example of gaslighting is the Qatari gift of a new and improved Air Force One. American presidents are forbidden to accept gifts from foreign entities, so Trump told us that it was a gift to America, not him personally, and that he would keep it for his presidential library. He assured us that it would not cost the American taxpayer a dime. But the plane has such security deficits that it will cost more than the original cost of the plane to retrofit it to meet the security capabilities of the current Air Force One. The bill for the upgrade will be paid by the American taxpayer. This is a trivial example of his pathological lying (a key feature of this Personality Disorder pathology).
A more serious example of gaslighting is the Iran war. Last summer Donald Trump told us that the Iranian nuclear weapons program had been “obliterated.” Then, after a flawless military operation in Venezuela to decapitate their leadership, Trump realized the untapped potential of the American military – deliberately untapped (which is why it was named the department of defense not war). Trump, in conjunction, with Benjamin Netanyahu, decided to escalate the war with Iran, promising Iranians an opportunity to seize the reins of power — all gaslighting. The program that had been obliterated had suddenly resurrected even though our own director of national intelligence said they had no such capabilities. Trump told us the war was over, then it wasn’t; then it was not a war, but a skirmish, etc. The abuser, confusing his victims, and like every domestic violence household, no one is allowed to question the abuser.
The man who has bankrupted almost everything he has ever touched, who raised our national debt by $7.8 trillion in his first term, was now spending $2 billion a day to keep Iran from having what they never had the capability for in the first place. In the meantime, North Korea, who has nuclear weapons and has threatened to use them on the United States, is no concern to our president. In fact, he told us that he “fell in love” with their supreme leader and that he is very talented. This is gaslighting to the extreme – again, like 1930’s Germany, the national will surrendering to one individual will. And Congress abdicated its power to declare war.
He has gaslighted the American people on the most important events in modern American history. Russian cyberwarfare against the United States, confirmed by the DOJ, House and Senate investigations, prompting a 517-5 vote by Congress to impose economic sanctions on Russia as punishment, and signed into law by Trump himself on August 2, 2017, is called a hoax and a witch hunt. This is unacceptable gaslighting. Six of the president’s closest advisers were found guilty of obstructing the Russian investigation (Manafort, Cohen, Papadopoulos, Gates, Stone, Flynn) — he pardoned all but the one who turned state’s-evidence.
On January 6th, 2021, there was a violent insurrection to stop the certification of an election. The president ordered his vice president not to count the legitimate vote of the American people. He had already given the DOJ an illegal order to say they found election fraud. That was treason. But he gaslighted the American people, and continues to gaslight the American people, insisting, ad nauseam, that the 2020 election was stolen. Three cabinet members (Barr, Chou, DeVos) resigned rather than be associated with a coup — that’s American history. Trump then bullied and brainwashed his party and his followers into believing a “Stop the Steal” conspiracy theory — gaslighting of historical proportions.
When America is subjected to a chainsaw-wielding trillionaire telling us he is here to cut out fraud, waste and abuse in government, appointed by a 34-count convicted felon for fraud, we are being gaslighted. When the trillionaire is the number one contributor to the president’s election and the quid pro quo is a sudden creation of a branch of government called DOGE, we, again, are being gaslight/abused.
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The most serious gaslighting is twofold: the Epstein and Russian collusion. Collusion means to coordinate with the intent to deceive. Because of the wealth and power of the men involved, and the money laundering involved, Trump has done everything in his power to kill these two investigations. The president instructed the DOJ not to release Epstein files they are legally required to turn over to Congress. He instructed his DOJ to orchestrate the movement of a convicted sex trafficker to a less restrictive prison. We the people, under the new regime, are not entitled to know why — this is bullying, this is gaslighting. But the most important gaslighting, the one he can never afford for us to discover the depth of his collusion, is the betrayal of Ukraine and the favoring of the Russian agenda; the withholding of weapons from an ally at war with an enemy. In Trump’s first impeachment, he was caught bribing President Zelensky to do his bidding or else he wouldn’t receive needed weapons in his war with Russia. In his second term he has successfully withheld weapons to Ukraine, while rolling out red carpets for Putin and putting up an autograph photo of himself and Putin in our White House. This is the equivalent of FDR putting up an autographed picture of Hitler and telling Churchill he can’t have American weapons. On May 6, 2019, over a thousand federal prosecutors, who served under Democrat and Republican administrations, issued a joint statement maintaining that if Trump weren’t President of the United States, he would have been indicted on multiple charges of obstruction of justice in the Russian investigation. We are now seven years later and GOP leadership is still not asking the only relevant question: “Why is an American president favoring an enemy at war with an ally?”
The only good thing about personality disorder/character disorder, is that their lack of conscience robs them of the filter to hide their true intentions. Trump called Putin a genius for illegal seizure of a sovereign nation’s territory, and called President Zelensky a dictator and told him he does not “have the cards” necessary to win the war. The abuser, of course, holds the cards, and sadistically enjoys his position of power and control over the less powerful. We, like every family living with an abuser, are being manipulated by the president, who both imposes and lifts economic sanctions on Russia during a time of war. And Trump lobbied twice for Russian re-entry into the G-8 while Russia engaged in extensive cyberwarfare against the United States. The lack of logic and reasoning confuses family members living with a perpetrator; eventually they just surrender to the insistence on the alternate reality. “Alternative facts” is how it was first sold to us in Trump’s first term.
We can’t hang onto this Republic unless Congress and/or the Pentagon realizes that they are dealing with a level of mental pathology that disqualifies anyone from the lowest rank in the United States military, let alone Commander in Chief. I am convinced, after six years of lobbying Congress, that politicians, and most people, believe that they recognize mental illness when they see it. But ignorance of this little known pathology is contributing to national suicide. Talking to two separate Pennsylvania congressmen, I have been told, “It’s just politics, Steve.” They know that Trump is a convicted felon and an adjudicated sex offender, which should be enough, but they have accepted a trade-off of morality for political expediency. They know that they would never let Trump babysit their children, take their scouts into the woods, or let their daughters drink with him at a frat party, but they are enabling him every step of the way. And they also verbalize that they understand how their colleagues do not want to be “primaried” by a more MAGA candidate if they dare oppose Trump. They are oblivious to their admission of cowardice, blind to the fact that they are talking to someone who witnessed young Americans lose life and limb in Afghanistan. They are confessing to the lesson of Nurenberg: obedience replaced conscience.
Trump meets all the criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and almost all the criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder, the two most severe mental pathologies. It’s not necessary to know this to live up to your oath of office. John McCain, Jeff Flake, Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger all understood that he was unfit for command when he defended Putin against our own intelligence community, and when he unleashed violence against our Capitol Police, members of Congress, and even his own vice president. But those who voted for him are unlikely to reject him unless GOP leadership and our Joint Chiefs of Staff recognize the inconvenient truth that pathological lying, creating alternative realities, falling in love with enemies and attacking our strongest allies, is not some unusual but effective political strategy; it is the product of a sick mind, the result of mental unfitness, a malignant narcissism that destroyed Germany, and will slowly destroy America unless we heed Abraham Lincoln’s challenge: “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.”
