Trump keeps telling us he ended seven wars, but he has essentially declared war on the United States. He said repeatedly that the real enemy is not Russia or China, but an “enemy within.” He has described that enemy as radical left lunatics who are out to destroy this country. He conjures up antiquated laws that give him emergency war powers. He uses those powers because they are legal during a national emergency – so he falsely proclaims that crime rates are an emergency that needs military intervention. He targets Blue states or Blue cities, ignoring or downplaying crime rates in Red states or Red cities. He creates his own statistics or fires anyone as incompetent if they announce statistics that contradict him. He recently declared that there was zero crime in Wahington DC since his intervention – reminiscent of when I was in the Soviet Union and I was told that there was zero rape in Alma Ata, the capitol of Kazakhstan, one of the Soviet Republics. The women I met said something very different.
With people with personality disorder like Trump, there is a consistency to their methods, their deviancy and their cruelty. The only good thing about character pathology is that all of their illegality feels syntonic (feels normal) to them, so they confess to their criminal thinking out loud – Trump can talk about shooting protestors in the legs, say that a dictatorship showed strength when they put down free speech (Tiananmen Square massacre), call a day of extreme violence (where 140 police officers were wounded and one died the next day), “a day of love.” And, borrowing from Phillipine strongman Rodrigo Duterte’s playbook of murdering drug dealers without due process, he just executed eleven so-called drug dealers from Venezuela and showed us the film of their extermination as a type of proof of his strong-man, zero-tolerance image.
The problem is, because this is mental pathology, not politics, he has zero tolerance for anything he perceives is against him; anything he perceives in opposition to his agenda – someone who burns the flag needs mandatory prison, a woman getting an abortion should be criminally prosecuted, children can be deported without their parents, foreigners who served alongside Americans in the military in combat can be deported to certain torture and most likely murder. He is even deporting veterans and their families.
It is impossible to understand all of these actions without understanding antisocial and narcissistic character pathology because all of this comes from the lack of ability to feel sympathy and empathy. Not only does he give our military permission to violate the Geneva Conventions, which he believes ties our hands, but it puts illegal immigrants in physical danger, and even everyday Americans who he perceives as the enemy. Even seemingly trivial things are evidence of this most serious of all mental illness – so that not only does he fall in love with mass murderers, and not only does he verbally attack members of Congress and the Supreme Court and other judges when they disagree with anything he decrees, but he attacks actors and TV personalities and rock stars, people long established as icons, like Tom Hanks, Stephen Colbert and Bruce Springsteen. His pathology impels him to repeat ludicrous slurs as he describes them as no talent has-beens, or woke enemies of America.
This is all straight out of Nazi propaganda playboook, where you keep repeating the same lie over and over; and Goebbels counterintuitive declaration, that the bigger the lie the more it is believed. It cost the Jews six million lives, and it is costing immigrants dearly in the United States. None of this is an exaggeration. The problem is that others, especially GOP leadership, are treating every single piece of evidence of severe pathology, as if it is just some personal quirk or political genius. When he says, in front of millions that Haitians are eating dogs and cats, or he wears a baseball cap that says TRUMP WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERYTHING, they treat it as just Donald being Donald, rather than ask themselves have they ever seen anything remotely like this before. Some of his actions are so bizarre that it is tempting to mock them humorously: his speeches, his flights of fancy, his word salads, his talk about whales and windmills and sharks and batteries and Hanibal Lecter. And lately it has become public sport to fantasize that his mindless ramblings are a form of dementia rather than profound clinical evidence: he seriously believes that everything that comes from his lips is entertaining or shared wisdom from a “very stable genius.” The fact that matters for American history is that almost all of his former generals and cabinet members have reported that he is profoundly ignorant on practically every subject. Rex Tillerson said he was a “moron,” John Bolton said that every single decision he makes goes through the filter of how does this help Donald; and Jim Mattis said that not only is he the first president to divide the American people but that he has no interest in even the appearance of unity. And the nation is so hypnotized by his antics that they have already forgotten that there has never been a president who did not consider himself the leader of 50 United States.
Of course, he proved his true intentions by repeating over and over that the other political party is the real enemy. And project 2025 is the manifesto to bring in the dictatorship of Trumpism under the guise of eliminating any anti-Trump agenda which he has labeled as wokeism. The profound danger, and the most serious proof of his mental unfitness for command, is his becoming an ally of Russia and betraying the Constitution – his inability to obey the only oath of office, and the malignant narcissism that allows a man to believe that his personal vision is superior to the corporate knowledge and the tens of thousands of employees who have worked for the State Department, the FBI, the CIA, and the military, since WWII.
He talks of a new world order where he and Putin and Xi will dominate their own part of the globe and where NATO is obsolete, our allies are to be treated as enemies, or at the very least, as if they are ripping us off. He has created, in his own mind, a world based on good relations with the world’s leading human rights violators; and a cooling of our relationship with the world’s democracies. The fact that human rights violations are no impediment to friendship is completely diagnostic (proof, again, of the lack of ability to feel sympathy or empathy). It also destroys the very definition of enemy, and the only reason to have a military in the first place, because he is erasing the differences between freedom and subjugation.
In fact, we have already seen, in this second term, a series of human rights violations — so numerous as to be overwhelming, and so bold as to refuse to obey the authority of the other two co-equal branches of government. This is his reach for dictatorship. He told us brazenly that he fell in love with the North Korean human rights monster, and that Putin was a genius for invading Ukraine with peacekeepers. He calls Putin “Vladimir” and President Zelensky by his surname, He called Zelensky, not Putin, a dictator; and recently mocked Zelensky for wanting to reclaim his own territory – saying that Zelensky had authority “to go in and kill everybody.” He talks lovingly of these dictators and has admitted publicly that he admires the control they exert over their countries and how popular they are with their own people, even quoting the popular vote statistics in their elections. This isn’t “odd” behavior for an American President, it is unprecedented and deviant — because we have never had a previous president who was mentally unfit for command.
READ: National Security Under the ‘Mad King’ Donald Trump
The two events that proved that we had the first provably mentally ill president in American history were Helsinki and January 6th, 2021. His base has believed the most treasonous lies in the history of our country (the Deep State and Stop the Steal). But it was the abdication of their oath of office on the part of Congress that has put this Republic in mortal danger starting in Helsinki – where Trump told the world that he didn’t see any reason why election interference would be Russia. Never mind Congress voted 517-5 to impose sanctions on Russia, Trump himself signed into law economic sanctions on Russian as punishment for the interference that he continues to call a hoax and a witch hunt. This is treasonous but allowed by, and explained by, this specific mental illness. Antisocial and Narcissistic Personality Disorder are the two most dangerous mental illnesses because they can pass as normal until they break the law, and they always have victims (the reason this diagnosis dominates the field of domestic violence and sexual assault).
Congress acquitted him of guilt for inciting an insurrection that trashed our Capitol, causing injury and death. And once again, Congress failed to see these events as the most extreme mental pathology causing the first president in American history refusing to accept the peaceful transfer of power. Despite 3 cabinet members resigning in protest, they, and the Republican leadership made a pact with a devil, or rationalized in their own minds, how to accept the unacceptable. With the exception of Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and Mitt Romney, Republican members of Congress failed to live up to their oath of office, to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.
This essay would become a novel if I were to try to list the reams of evidence of this disqualifying diagnosis but three examples of critical importance were the nominations of Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and RFK Jr. – all three so obscenely unqualified for their positions that, not only was their lack of experience unprecedented, but their confirmations immediately threatened national security and national health. What can get lost in these scandalous appointments is the deviant thinking of the man who would deliberately choose personal loyalty over both national defense and the health of the American people.
I don’t see this nightmare ending without a realization on the part of the Senate and the House, that they are dealing with something they have never seen before – a provable level of antisocial and narcissistic character pathology that makes one mentally unfit for command. You would think that Congress would not need clinical proof after witnessing him orchestrate a violent insurrection to overthrow the government of the United States. And witnessing his disqualification from holding any federal office (according to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution) the day he pardoned those convicted of seditious conspiracy against the United States.
We must hope and pray that the mounting evidence of his involvement in two illegal cover-ups (the Jeffrey Epstein Sex Trafficking scandal and aiding and abetting an enemy state in the person of Vladimir Putin against our ally, Vladimir Zelensky) will finally shake the foundation of freedom and decency enough to remove him from office. Whether this will take the form of a 3rd impeachment, a military coup, a civil war, a second revolution, or the popular vote, remains to be seen.
