QUO VADIS, DONALD TRUMP?

A Review of The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assessment of Trump

1. Donald Trump’s behavior is often unpredictable and erratic, as well as seemingly self defeating.
2. Trump displays many of the behaviors associated with a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder, including “condescension, gross exaggeration (lying), bullying, jealousy, fragile self-esteem, lack of compassion, and viewing the world through an ‘us vs. them’ lens”
3. Trump has a total indifference to the truth. He states what he wants to be true. If his statement is proven false, he is unfazed, and confidently predicts that the facts will catch up with his belief.
4. Trump aberrant behavior suggests sociopathy, antisocial personality disorder and paranoia which when combined result in a leader who feels omnipotent, omniscient, and entitled to total power, and who rages at being persecuted by imaginary enemies.
5. Trump’s apparent delusions (e.g., adamantly maintaining it didn’t rain during his inaugural address, although thousands of people got wet); his belief that attending a military high school left him knowing more about military matters than all the generals; his admiration for brutal dictators like Bashar al-Assad, Saddam Hussein, Rodrigo Duterte, and Vladimir Putin; his lack of grace, dignity, and decorum ; his willingness to outright lie or embrace “alternative facts” when they serve his ends; and his pathological need to destroy or undo every positive thing President Obama or President Biden may have or did accomplish.
6. Authors do not mince their words in describing Trump for example, James Gilligan describes Trump as “impulsive, arrogant, ignorant, disorganized, chaotic, nihilistic, self-contradictory, self-important and self-serving”. William Doherty writes that Trump’s presidency is “antitherapeutic—a lionizing of the unexamined life where personal insecurities are boldly projected onto the world, and where self-serving beliefs become public facts” . Doherty sadly notes that with Trump’s ascendency, “the arc of the moral universe no longer seems to bend inevitably toward justice.  Fisher believes we should be alarmed over Trump’s increasingly narrow network of advisors. The impulsive, ill-considered, narcissistic, reckless, and apparently intentional lies, threats, and bravado not only damage the country but may leave the president even more isolated. That President Trump might ever occupy the loneliness of deciding about a potentially catastrophic course of action is rightly our most urgent and greatest fear.